I received a suggestion from CopyBlogger support for removing the HTML tags. It worked fine. They suggested adding the following filter to the functions.php file:
//* Remove comment form allowed tags
add_filter( ‘comment_form_defaults’, ‘sp_remove_comment_form_allowed_tags’ );
function sp_remove_comment_form_allowed_tags( $defaults ) {
$defaults[‘comment_notes_after’] = ”;
return $defaults;
}