If you know you’re breaking the law, you’ve committed a crime.

Without that knowledge, it’s only a civil violation.

For certain provisions of our election law, I was reminded today, you can be found guilty of a criminal or civil violation, depending upon your state of mind.

My tutorial arose in an email exchange about the Voter’s Rights Protection Act.

My bill would add a new provision to the law, making it a crime to use a foreclosure list to challenge people’s right to vote because there has been a foreclosure at the address on their registration card.

That’s already illegal, I was informed the day before my bill hearing, because the only grounds on which to challenge a potential voter on Election Day is that person’s identity, not his or her address.

That makes using the foreclosure list a violation of the prohibition on influencing or attempting to influence “a voter’s decision whether to go to the polls to cast a vote” through the use of fraud. (My voting rights legislation in 2005 made that a crime – if done “willfully and knowingly,” but only a civil violation otherwise.)

While reviewing these provisions, I came across the language making it a felony to “vote or attempt to vote during the time that the person is rendered ineligible to vote” while on parole or probation after being convicted of a felony.

Informing people when they can register after they’ve been released from jail is the purpose of my House Bill 483.

“Why shouldn’t there be a civil alternative for those who are unaware of this prohibition?” I emailed.

“Do we treat dirty tricksters more leniently than we do ex-cons?” I later said to myself.