Hello, Jon. 

Great question.  From my legislative and related experience going back to the mid-80s, the "wholesale revisions" of Code titles (or parts thereof) get a lot of things fixed, but others can be overlooked.  It depends on who is working on it and what their interests are.  How experienced is the lead staff member in that subject area, and does he or she have the time the project requires?  Are other participants carefully reading everything, or just parts?  The bigger the project, the greater chance that things will be missed.  And these projects probably start with the text of the current law as the base, copying over, then rearranging and rewriting (only taking out parts they are certain are no longer needed).  

A few years ago, I was working in policy at the State Board of Elections.  After the close 2000 presidential election, I started carefully going through the entire VA election law and related parts of the VA Code to look for things that I thought needed to be cleaned up, modernized or made consistent, or that registrars had asked me to fix if I got the chance.  In the 2003 session, our agency's 23-page "clean up" bill passed without opposition (SB1107).  One of the changes was to a law requiring the appointment of PRECINCT registrars -- an office which had not existed in Virginia since adoption of the 1971 Constitution (and, relevant to the current discussion, an office which was key to enforcement of the disenfranchising provisions of the 1902 Constitution).  The reference was in Title 15.2, Local Government, recodified in 1997 when a top member of the SBE staff had worked on it.  But, the language was in a subject area that wasn't of interest to anyone then (or now) -- how a town becomes a city.  Since the annexation freeze, towns are not looking to incorporate though procedures remain on the books for if and when they may be needed.  For 32 years and through a recodification, no one noticed language requiring the appointment of precinct registrars who would be paid 4 cents per name (!) to transfer town voters' names onto the new city's voter rolls (while the 1971 Constitution requires appointment of general (locality-wide) registrars for each city and county).  

This is how things are missed.  I'll be surprised if the new commission doesn't find some leftover language to fix.  They don't have to go back to 1902, just the 1960s, to start.  

Rosanna Bencoach
(Charlottesville General Registrar, 2015-2019)

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Date:    Sun, 16 Jun 2019 12:00:04 -0400
From:    Jon Kukla <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Legislative Archeology - what am I missing ?

Reading Jeff Shapiro's column this morning* about Governor Northam's plans for a commission to unearth lingering remnants of Jim Crow in the Commonwealth's legal code, I'm wondering about the periodic revisals of Virginia's legal code that date back to the colonial era.
In short, my question is simple: Is it possible for archaic legislation to remain in force after the General Assembly does one of these wholesale revisions of the code?
Or, to put it another way, when the Assembly re-writes the code, does that terminate laws that are not reenacted?

-- 
Jon Kukla                            www.jonkukla.com

* https://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/government-politics/jeff-schapiro/
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