Confused about electoral v. popular vote?
11/4/08
Common Craft has a simple but wonderful (simply wonderful? wonderfully simple? all of the above) called "Electing a U.S. President in Plain English."
Showing posts with label voting rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label voting rights. Show all posts
NE Ohio Cubicle Dwellers: 3 ways to track what's happening at the polls from your desk
1. Your browser. Keep a browser tab open to WKYC.com's election blog. Refresh the page periodically. (If you know of a LOCAL news site that is updating more frequently, please let us know!) For national news: ProPublica's Vote Watch, Video the Vote, the Election Protection Coalition's Our Vote Live
2. twitter:
- First, sign up for twitter and download a desktop twitter client (many are listed here. My favorite right now is twhirl: it's small, light & works on Win & Mac OS).
- Second, once you're twittering, follow one or all of these twitter feeds for real-time voting news:
- cdotcompolitics
- 866OURVOTE
- VideoTheVote
- votesuppression
- nprpolitics
(You can also visit these sites via browser).
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Good video: Broward County, FL Poll Computer Down
At the opening of the polls at the Artserve library in Fort Lauderdale, FL, the voter registration database computer went down. It caused a delay in the voting process and by some accounts, caused a dozen people to be discouraged from voting and leaving the poll.
Video the vote
In brief: Your Voting Rights in Ohio
11/1/08
Your Voting Rights in Ohio from the AFL-CIO
• Voter ID. BRING ID. You must provide ID before you will be allowed to vote. Acceptable forms include an Ohio driver’s license, military photo ID, utility bill, bank statement, paycheck or other government document that contains your name and address. ID cannot be expired.
• Change of residence. If you are a registered voter who recently moved and you have not updated your registration, you can do so at the polling place in the precinct in which you currently reside on Elect
• Clothing, buttons, caps and other accessories. Do not wear campaign materials. To avoid unnecessary delay, make sure you can easily cover or remove any clothing, button, sticker, etc., that supports a candidate or political party. You may not be allowed to vote until such materials are removed or covered.
• No-electioneering perimeter. No electioneering is allowed within 100 feet of the polling place.
Don't live in Ohio? Get a brief list of your state's voting rights here.
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12 Ways To Safeguard Your Vote In Under 10 minutes
10/29/08
I'm posting the beginning of this EXCELLENT post from the blog Jack & Jill Politics. I can't think of any way to improve upon it. (If you can post a comment here or at Jack & Jill Politics.
12 Ways To Safeguard Your Vote In Under 10 minutes 23 Oct 2008 Author: Jack Turner
We’re not going to lose this election this year. We cannot. It’s that simple. Ensuring victory means being diligent in every aspect of your vote: make sure you vote the right way! and make sure that your vote is counted. YES! magazine has put together this 12 step guide to safeguarding your vote. Please complete it, and report back in the comments. I’m serious. (also bookmark the voter suppression wiki)
It took me 9 minutes to complete and read their steps, and I was moving slowly. 10 minutes is a minor investment to ensure your vote will be counted.
BEFORE ELECTION DAY
Read more at Jack & Jill Politics: additional steps you can take to safeguard your vote.
- Check your registration. Even if you think you’re registered, you may not be. Check online at www.CanIVote.org.
- Vote now. Check if early voting is possible in your state. If you’re voting by mail, check carefully where you need to sign, how to seal the envelope, and how to mark the ballot. And note: Some ballots require extra postage.
- Practice your vote. Electronic voting machines can be difficult to use. Verifiedvoting.org is preparing links to video demos of how to vote on the machine you will find at your polling station. If you’ll be using a paper ballot, check out the sample included in your voter pamphlet.
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Voter suppression tactics: Know what you could be up against
10/26/08
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast of Steal Back Your Vote have written a succinct account of the voter suppression methods to look out for. The short article in Rolling Stone magazine is called "Block the Vote: Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?"Read it online, or download a pdf version to give to your friends. If your friends aren't readers, tell them to watch Palast's behind the scenes video at Rolling Stone or this excellent video made by independent news organization truthout:
Or watch Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s 30-second public service announcement on YouTube:
Finally, Here's a page from the investigative comic book Kennedy refers to in the PSA: Palast's Steal Back Your Vote.
Also worth watching: Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s appearance on the Rachel Maddow show.
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Election 08: Ron Howard's Call to Action
(with Opie, Andy & the Fonz)
10/23/08
Ron Howard's earnest -- and most excellent -- message: "Vote with your heart your mind and with courage and vision.
Or watch in situ on YouTube.
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Board of Elections heads off most election snafus
3/8/08
Board of Elections heads off most election snafus
Lila Hanft, Cleveland Jewish News, 03/07/08
Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (CCBOE) director Jane Platten couldn’t command the weather, but she had nearly every other aspect of the March 4 primary election well in hand, judging from activity at the CCBOE’s warehouse on E. 40th St.
The warehouse was the hub of activity on primary day Tuesday because CCBOE offices were too small to accommodate the 16 ES&S M650 optical scanners required to count the paper ballots.
Before the primary, the warehouse was cleared out and reconfigured to ensure the security of the ballots and equipment and to optimize the workflow. Waist-high
barriers separated poll workers from areas assigned to media and official election observers.
A ceiling-high chain-link fence, as well as security officers, protected the area where absentee ballots scanned ahead of time and the servers used to tabulate votes were stored. To protect the chain-of-custody for ballots and equipment, access to the tabulation area was restricted. Every person, regardless of rank, signed in when he or she entered and signed out on leaving.
Dennis Anderson, CCBOE community outreach specialist, confirmed that “an extensive amount of planning, from ballots to layout to the flow of operations,” preceded the primary. “All the checks and balances are in place, and work is proceeding in lockstep.”
Many people, including Platten, were amazed by how smoothly voting went. All but one polling place opened on time, “a huge benchmark for us.” Since the CCBOE was given only 62 days to implement the new paper balloting system, things “are going better than I thought,” Platten said.
With two possible exceptions, problems at polling places were minor. There were reports of pollworkers directing voters to fold their ballots before putting them into the ballot box and of voters who did not realize they had to turn the ballot over. There was also confusion about a tab on ballots marked “Do not remove.” Some voters said they were instructed by poll workers to remove the tag and feared it would invalidate their ballots. Platten announced mid-morning that removal of the tab would not invalidate ballots and that “every vote will count.”
In an effort to reduce the amount of scanning that had to be done after the polls closed, the CCBOE instituted midday pickup of ballots. Ballots from 63 precincts began arriving at the warehouse around 2:30. At midday, the Ohio Republican party issued a press release alleging that in one Cuyahoga County polling place, ballots were being picked up, transported and delivered exclusively by Democrats. Platten said they were looking into the allegations, but confirmed that Republicans were present at the polling place in question.The biggest problem came at the end of the day: A reported shortage of Democratic ballots at some Cleveland locations spurred Barack Obama’s campaign to file a federal lawsuit asking for a voting extension. U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver ordered 21 precincts in 14 locations to stay open until 9 p.m. because he believed they ran out of paper ballots. But because the order arrived after the polls had already closed, election officials were only able to reopen 10 polling stations, according to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. In the extended 90-minute period, only five additional votes were cast, Brunner said.
At press time Wednesday, both Brunner and Platten said that while ballots supplies ran low at some precincts, they were continually replenished. They said they had no evidence that any precincts ran out of ballots.
The 90-minute extension and increasingly icy road conditions delayed the delivery of some ballots until after 1 a.m. But by 5:30 Wednesday morning, the scanning and tabulation was done, blogger John Horton reported.
Overall, observers say the count went smoothly -- especially compared with recent elections in the county. “We put respect back into the election process in Cuyahoga County today,” said Platten. Read more...
Primary: Pictures from the CCBOE
3/6/08
I spent most of Tues. Mar 4 at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections warehouse on E. 40th St. I wrote about the experience in the Cleveland Jewish News. I took a lot of photos, most of which won't fit into the paper, so I thought I'd post some here.
As soon as ballots arrived from polling places, pollworkers at the CCBOE warehouse visually inspected the paper ballots for physical damage which could prevent them from scanning properly.
Scanning ballots after the midday ballot pickup. The CCBOE had 16 ES&S M650 scanners.
Midday ballots were scanned, but not tabulated until after the polls closed. Once scanned, they were locked inside the "tabulation area," which was separated from the scanners by a ceiling-high chain link fence. To protect the chain-of-custody, everyone, regardless or rank, had to sign in when entering and sign out when leaving the tabulation area.
Paper ballots: Cure or catastrophe?
2/8/08
by Lila Hanft, CJN, 02/08/08
It was only 6 a.m. when attorney Karla Wallach noted the first problem at the polls at Cleveland Heights’s Canterbury School, where she was a Democratic observer for the 2006 primary.
The technician assigned to set up the new Diebold touch-screen voting machines (DREs) couldn’t proceed without the Republican poll worker, who hadn’t shown up.
When the technician called in to see what could be done in the absence of bipartisan supervision, Wallach discovered problem #2: The help line of Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (CCBOE) didn’t open until 6:30 - by which time the polls were already supposed to be up and running.
Problem #3 arose as soon as the DREs were operational: Poll workers found that none of the voter access cards could be encoded. A surprised Wallach then discovered problem #4: “There wasn’t a single line in the poll workers manual” covering the possibility that the DREs wouldn’t work. “The assumption was that the machines would operate perfectly, always,” says Wallach. “Hello? Has no one’s computer ever crashed?”
Wallach’s experience was hardly unique. That March election day, reports streamed in of polls that opened late, machines that couldn’t be set up, long lines, voters who had to leave without voting, and poll workers who gave inaccurate information about provisional ballots.
Democratic party observer Deborah Coleman, an attorney and CJN board member, was struck by how “many poll workers were older adults” who “were completely bewildered by the new rules and procedures … or intimidated by the voting machines.” Voting would not have gone as well as it did, she believes, “if it were not for the fact that each precinct has assigned to it a high school or college-age volunteer to assist in dealing with the electronic voting machines.”
Bad attitudes, bad decisions
When the dust had settled on the 2006 primary election, studies ordered by the county commissioners and the CCBOE uncovered a multitude of problems, including inadequately-trained poll workers, Diebold-written manuals with inaccurate, misleading and contradictory instructions; security breaches at the polls and at the CCBOE; malfunctioning hardware and faulty software.
But in a larger sense, says voter activist Adele Eisner, the failure of the 2006 elections grew out of the previous CCBOE’s sense of superiority and penchant for secrecy. The old CCBOE was a “huge political patronage system” with little sense of public accountability, Eisner said in an interview with Meet the Bloggers last April.
Eisner is not alone in locating the root of Cuyahoga County’s election woes in the attitude of the former CCBOE. There were frequent reports that the board, particularly chair Bob Bennett, spoke disparagingly to citizens who attended CCBOE’s public meetings.
Cleveland State University law professor Candice Hoke is an expert on election administration and compliance with state and federal election law. She is also director of the Center for Election Integrity, which serves as public election monitor to the current CCBOE. Last March, Hoke testified before the House Subcommittee on Elections that the old CCBOE had its share of election officials “who enjoy(ed) the historically unchecked, broad discretionary authority they exercise(d) over election performance and reported electoral results.”
Such officials “tend to disfavor public accountability,” says Hoke. Eisner says that was evident in 2005, when Bob Bennett, former head of the CCBOE and Michael Vu, former director of the CCBOE, pushed through the $21 million purchase of Diebold election systems without benefit of competing bids, serious public debate, or factoring in all the ancillary costs.
Purchase in haste, repent in leisure
The purchase of Diebold voting equipment cost far more than estimated, The 2006 elections ran $7 million over budget, due in large part to the cost of contracts for Diebold’s ongoing technical support and services, says Eisner.
“We should not ever again rush into a voting technology without looking carefully at product, vendor, costs, and contractual protections,” says Hoke, who prepared a memo for the CCBOE and county commissioners on what factors to consider when transitioning to a new voting system and vendor.
Yet a dismayed CCBOE is seeing history repeat itself since Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner mandated that the county switch from DREs to paper ballots and central scanning. The CCBOE has been forced into a mad scramble to procure a new equipment and new contracts with voting system vendor Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the manufacturer of the only optical scanning equipment Brunner has approved, in time for the March primary election. (See sidebar 1.)
Too much to do
In Hoke’s experience, the federal primary in an even year (2006, 2008) is “the single most complex election to administer” and a terrible time to try out a brand-new voting system. The primary requires separate ballots for each party, plus a third ballot of issues for voters with no party affiliations. And there can be a lot of names on primary ballots, since anyone who can qualify through petitions can request a place on the ballot.
In addition, each precinct’s ballot is different because some local party precinct elections take place at this time. There is also a version of all ballots for 17-year-olds, who can vote on certain items in the primary if they will turn 18 before the general election. The CCBOE must also prepare and mail out absentee ballots. And they’re not off the hook for electronic voting; Brunner has said that there must be at least one DRE per polling place to accommodate users with disabilities that prevent them from using paper ballots.
In addition to the sheer number and complexity of the ballots, says Hoke, the board of elections must make sure each ballot is properly set-up with all the technical conditions the optical scanners need to read it.
Open-minded humility
With the primary four weeks away, CCBOE director Jane Platten was not available to answer the CJN’s questions, despite repeated promises by CCBOE communications staff members that she would return calls and e-mail. Platten has already warned the board that the new central optical scanning system will likely delay the final vote count.
One thing Platten has going for her, observers agree, is what Candice Hoke calls “open-minded humility”: the willingness to admit she may not have all the answers. Platten’s predecessor, Michael Vu, was criticized for ignoring crucial input from his own staff during the transition to DREs in 2006.
In Hoke’s field of regulatory law, the term “unintended consequences” refers to the unexpected effects that occur when complex systems are changed. By switching to paper ballots and central scanning, Brunner has solved one problem (with DREs) but has created others, says Hoke. Using central scanning instead of precinct scanning sacrifices the opportunity for “second-chance voting.” Most election law experts and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believe that is a big step backwards in terms of protecting minority voting rights.
On January 17, the ACLU sued the state and county to stop the switch to paper ballots
On Feb. 5, U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen O'Malley denied the ACLU's request for a preliminary injunction which could have forced Cuyahoga County to go back to DREs or postpone the election. ACLU of Ohio executive director Christine Link told The Columbus Dispatch that the judge ruled that the ACLU request for a preliminary injunction came too late and would be too disruptive for the primary, which is less than a month away.
Safety and chain-of-custody concerns
The plan to transport paper ballots to a central location before they are counted also presents security problems, says Hoke. The CCBOE will have to establish security procedures for storing and transporting the ballots and chain-of-custody protocol to ensure that ballot gets from the precinct to the optical scanner without being tampered with, torn, folded, spindled, mutilated, soiled or lost.
Hoke is also concerned that a sudden change in voting technology takes the focus off other longstanding problems in Cuyahoga County elections, on which “our board of elections was making steady progress.” In the last election, voter registration rolls still suffered from software glitches and data input errors, and poll workers still gave voters the wrong information about provisional ballots and voter ID.
For right now, Hoke predicts, “it’s all hands on deck for the storm” at the CCBOE.
See also:
•Sidebar 2: County voting woes, by the numbers (02/08/08)
•Sidebar 3: Voter ID laws affect nursing home residents (02/08/08)
•Previously: Paper ballots before March: Cure or cause for more grief? (01/25/08)
ES&S v. Diebold: The devil you know, or the devil you don't know
Sidebar 1, Paper ballots: cure or catastrophe?
One thing the CCBOE won’t do before the March primary is comparative shopping among voting system vendors for the best optical scanners to meet Cuyahoga County’s needs. Partly that’s because there’s no time, and partly it’s because ES&S scanners are the only ones Brunner has approved for use in Ohio.
Many question Brunner’s endorsement of ES&S’s equipment. County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones told The Plain Dealer that, in his opinion, “all the options are remote n none of them desirable. It’s a difference between the bad, the ugly and the ugliest.”
In fact, just as the CCBOE was contracting to lease optical scanners from ES&S for the March primary, the city of San Francisco was negotiating a $3.5 million settlement from the company in response to an election the city attorney termed “an absolute travesty.” The city filed suit against ES&S on Nov. 7, 2007, one day after a city election in which the final results were delayed for weeks due to concerns about the reliability and accuracy of the machines.
Last month, Colorado’s secretary of state released the findings from a court-ordered retesting of electronic voting equipment. Both ES&S optical scan devices -- the M100 and M650, which Cuyahoga County will use -- failed the test because programming errors prevented the machines from completing the testing threshold of 10,000 ballots. The voter turnout for Cuyahoga County’s March primary is expected to be 300,000.
In other previous elections, ES&S scanners performed badly: memory cards crashed and overvotes went through undetected, among other things.
According to Candice Hoke at the Center for Election Integrity, none of the available voting systems are real winners. But significant improvements are in the works.
Hoke hopes Cuyahoga County can wait for the new technology, but she’s concerned that if the CCBOE has to spend a lot of its resources now to meet Brunner’s demands, “the funds won’t be there” when the new technology becomes available.
ee also:
•Main story: Paper ballots: cure or catastrophe?
•Sidebar 2: County voting woes, by the numbers (02/08/08)
•Previously: Paper ballots before March: Cure or cause for more grief? (01/26/08)
County voting woes, by the numbers
Sidebar 2, Paper ballots: Cure or catastrophe?
$1.5 million -- Cost of Cuyahoga County’s recently signed lease for 15 optical scanners for 2008 primary.
$21 million -- Cost of the discarded Diebold electronic voting system Cuyahoga County purchased in 2006.
15,000 -- Number of absentee ballots which had to be counted by hand in the 2006 primary due to problems with optical scanning.
5 -- Number of days hand-scanning of absentee ballots delayed the county’s primary results
20 -- Percentage of all polling places that opened late on day of 2006 primary
16 -- Number of polling places court-ordered to stay open until 9 p.m. due to late openings and long lines in the 2006 general election.
1,400 -- Number of voters CCBOE erroneously de-registered for Nov. 2006 election due to problems with voter registration software.
12,000 -- Number of voters who cast ballots without properly verifying their eligibility in 2006 general election.
533 -- Number of precincts (out of 570) in which voters cast ballots without verifying eligibility.
5,000 - number of different absentee ballots the CCBOE must have ready to mail out on Feb. 8
300,000 -- Number of Cuyahoga County voters expected to turn out to vote on Mar. 4, 2008.
Sources: The Cuyahoga Election Review Panel report; the Election Science Institute report; the Public Monitor of Cuyahoga Election Reform report; The Plain Dealer; AP reports; Election Law@ Moritz.
See also:
•Main story: Paper ballots: cure or catastrophe?
•
Voter ID laws affect nursing home residents
Sidebar 3, Paper ballots: cure or catastrophe?
Menorah Park residents almost didn’t get to vote in 2006 and 2007, thanks to Ohio’s Voter ID laws.
“Most Menorah Park residents do not have drivers’ licenses or any of the other forms of ID” like gas or other utility bills required for voting, explains Shawn Fink, of Menorah Park’s activities department.
According to the League of Women Voters, 18% of people over 65 don’t have photo IDs. That’s about six million Americans.
In 2006, as residents waited by the polls conveniently located in Menorah Park itself, staff was able to come to a resolution with precinct judges, who accepted the census kept by Menorah Park’s social work department.
The next year, things didn’t go as smoothly. The judges did not want to accept the social work census, and the home had to make several calls to the CCBOE before the issue was resolved.
The day I spoke with him, Fink had been on the phone with the CCBOE trying in advance of the primary to get a letter to show precinct judges. He said several people, including CCBOE workers, have suggested that Menorah Park residents vote absentee, as residents at Montefiore do. Poll workers come to Montefiore to help residents fill out absentee ballots, according to Molly Spencer, activities director.
Fink wants Menorah Park residents to have the chance to vote in person. "There are so many things residents can't do because of restrictions placed on them by health, age, and mobility,"says Fink. "Voting is something they can do and want to do," which is "why we have the precinct polls at Menorah Park in the first place," he explains. "Residents (who) are naturalized citizens particularly cherish their right to vote."
-- L. H.
See also:
•Main story: Paper ballots: cure or catastrophe?
•
Paper ballots before March: Cure or cause for more grief?
1/31/08
by Lila Hanft, CJN 1/25/08
Between 2004 and 2006, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (CCBOE) earned an unenviable reputation not just for mismanaging its elections, but for doing so with a conspicuous degree of arrogance, secrecy and partisan politics.
Stories of our county’s mishandled elections cropped up in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, Salon.com, NPR, and in particular, on the HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy.” Ohio was so riddled with reports of voter suppression that many people believed the 2004 election had been “stolen” by the Republicans.
But in 2007, new Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner cleaned house at the CCBOE, appointing new members who chose Jane Platten as director.
As a result, some of the CCBOE’s toughest local critics are now singing its praises.
“The new board and director Jane Platten are phenomenal,” says University Heights resident Adele Eisner, a certified election observer who was a key witness to the CCBOE’s illegal recount in November 2004. Compared with the previous board and director, the new officials are better organized and have much greater “willingness to serve the public,” she says.
“Most people on the whole are very pleased with the current board on both partisan sides,” says Norman Robbins, an emeritus professor of medicine at Case and research director of the non-partisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition. “They have proved themselves to be very hardworking and sincere.”
At first, Brunner, an attorney specializing in election law who replaced the controversial Kenneth Blackwell as secretary of state, seemed to lead Ohio elections in the direction of much-needed reform, says Eisner. She founded the Voting Rights Institute (VRI) Advisory Council, to which both Eisner and Robbins were appointed; the VRI serves as a clearinghouse to address voter concerns and to solicit input from concerned communities and organizations.
Over the past year, the VRI Advisory Council’s subcommittees have studied and made recommendations on most aspects of Ohio elections, including increasing voter registration, recruiting better poll workers, certifying and educating election officials, reaching out to voters and to youth, and improving voting technology.
Hacks and glitches
In another positive move, Brunner ordered the EVEREST (Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing) report, a $1.9 million federally funded study. In the study, two teams of scientists, corporate and academic, conducted parallel assessments of the security of Ohio’s three voting systems.
The findings were not good.
“To put it in everyday terms,” Brunner has said, “the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and personal digital assistant.”
Released last November, the EVEREST results were accompanied by Brunner’s own recommendations for election reform. There, critics say, the honeymoon between activists and the secretary of state ended. “I’ve become somewhat disenchanted with the secretary of state’s office,” says Eisner.
The most important of Brunner’s recommendations, particularly for Cuyahoga County, is her rejection of Direct Recording Electronic machines (DREs) like the Diebold touchscreen voting machines which Cuyahoga County bought for more than $20 million in 2006. Like many voter activists, Brunner believes that paper ballots are better than DREs because they can be more accurately recounted.
DREs have been subject to much criticism in the last two years. In his article “Can You Count on Voting Machines?” published in The New York Times magazine earlier this month, Clive Thompson wrote that computer voting is vulnerable to a host of mechanical, procedural and computational glitches.
“One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections,” he writes. Or as Princeton University computer scientist Ed Felten told Thompson, “Computers crash, and we don’t know why. That’s just a routine part of computers.”
The CCBOE found that out the hard way on election night, Nov. 6, 2007, when the server tallying votes at CCBOE headquarters suddenly froze. No one, including the Diebold technician, could figure out why. Eventually, “like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again,” Thompson reports. It worked but crashed again a second time; both times, there was no way of knowing whether any information had been lost.
What about second-chance voting?
Voting rights activists have applauded Brunner and the EVEREST report for exposing the security flaws in every form of voting technology in use in Ohio. Most share Brunner’s preference for paper ballots over DREs. Beyond that, however, Brunner’s recommendations for Ohio elections have baffled activists.
“The groups that I work with -- election reform people across the state -- universally have some very strong concerns about Brunner’s recommendations,” says Robbins.
“Her recommendations don’t follow from the EVEREST report,” explains Eisner. “In many ways, it’s going backward. We’ve got the paper ballots, but it’s no panacea because of the way she’s handling the paper ballots.”
Getting rid of DREs solves some problems but creates others. The important advantage DREs have over other systems is notification or “second-chance voting,” which is the opportunity for voters to check over their ballot to make sure they haven’t made errors like overvoting (excess votes for a given race or issue) or undervoting (absent or insufficient votes).
“All the research both nationally and in Ohio says that you’re going to lose about 2% of presidential votes to voter error” if you don’t provide second chance voting, explains Robbins, who has researched this topic extensively. DREs offer that opportunity. So do paper ballots used with precinct-based optical scanners (PBOS), which allow voters to check their ballots at the polling place before finalizing them.
But Brunner doesn’t recommend precinct scanning. She recommends central scanning, in which the ballots are removed from the precincts to be tallied at a central location, where voters can’t review them. That’s where the ACLU has taken issue with Brunner’s office, arguing that central scanning is in essence a form of voter suppression.
“The lost votes are not spread equally across the population,” Robbins explains, “but are disproportionally high in low-income and minority wards.” In the 2004 election, says Robbins, up to 6.5% of voters in some Cleveland wards had their votes thrown out due to the type of errors that are often corrected in second-chance voting. The research on the topic is persuasive enough that in Stewart v. Blackwell, the 6th Circuit Court ruled that central scanning violates equal protection laws.
The loss of an average of 2% of the ballots may not seem like a significant number, but Robbins points out that John Kerry lost the 2004 Ohio election to Bush by a margin of 2%.
Brunner’s plan for Election Day Vote Centers, in which five to ten precincts would be combined in a single polling place, also troubles activists. Changing people’s polling places, Robbins says, results in a loss of about 3% of registered voters, and more among traditionally underrepresented populations. He says that research suggests that changing the polling place will disproportionately affect the poor, elderly and women -- populations less likely to have their driver’s licenses or their own transportation.
Eisner worries that Brunner is not concerned enough about the need to make elections more transparent to the public. She says Brunner hasn’t explored several obvious avenues for improving voters’ confidence in the fairness of the voting system, including establishing better procedures for recounts and allowing outside observers to witness how votes are counted and recounted.
Brunner “keeps implying that we’re moving away from electronic voting, but optical scan machines are still electronic voting,” Eisner points out. “It is made by the same companies (who make the DREs) and run by (proprietary) software that we can’t see.”
Cuyahoga County’s challenge
If Brunner has her way, all Ohio counties will use paper ballots and central optical scanning in the November election. But she’s put Cuyahoga County in the tough position of implementing the new -- and untried — system in time for the March primary.
Eisner doesn’t really think it’s possible. “The CCBOE has been pushed into a state of overwhelm,” she says. Director Platten, whom The Plain Dealer described as “swamped,” admits that she has “hundreds of tasks to check off” her 365-item to-do list. “And of course, I want it all done now,” she told The Plain Dealer.
Given the time frame, Robbins thinks it would be more realistic to phase out DREs slowly. “I’d rather have the risks of DREs” than risk using election practices “that will suppress low income and minority votes,” he says. Even with the DREs’ flaws, “there are all kinds of things you can do to reassure the public that the count was honest and accurate,” like routine independent audits of election results.
“I’m really sad for CCBOE,” says Eisner. “They are intelligent, hardworking, caring people … and have made such huge strides.” Any negative outcome of the sudden switch to paper ballots “needs to sit on the secretary of state’s shoulders, not on the CCBOE’s.”
__________________________________________
Important election dates
Mon., Feb. 4 - Last day for Voter registration and change-of-address forms must be received by the CCBOE by 9 p.m.
Sat., Mar. 1 - Applications for absentee-ballot must be received by noon.
Tues., March 4 - Primary Election Day. Polls open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Absentee ballots must be received by the CCBOE by 8:30 p.m.
__________________________________________
Make sure your vote is counted:
•Be registered in the precinct you live in. Check your voter registration.
•Go to the correct polling place. Check your polling location.
•Take ID to the polls. Acceptable forms include a current Ohio driver’s license; a military ID; current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck or government-issued document with current address. If you forget to bring ID, you can still vote by provisional ballot.
For more info:
•“Hacking Democracy”
•Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
•Ohio Secretary of State
•Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition
•Ohio 2004 as a Lesson in What Can Go Wrong
•The EVEREST Report
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