2008 Season of Voting Meltdowns Begins
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted September 11, 2008.
Across the country, problems with voter rolls, voting machines and
partisan tactics point to trouble in November.
The chaos of the 2008 election has begun -- suggesting voting in
November will be messy in many ways, in many states.
Across the country in recent days, newspapers, broadcasters and blogs
have reported a dizzying array of potential problems that likely will
complicate voting, if not confound voters, in the upcoming
presidential election. The problems contain elements of the three
major categories of ills affecting U.S. elections: bad management, bad
technology and partisan treachery. Just how or if these issues are
resolved remains to be seen.
Consider the following examples:
In New Jersey, state officials told 300,000 people that they were not
registered to vote. However, new reports say an unknown number of
those contacted were properly registered voters.
The problem is not confined to New Jersey. Under federal election
reforms passed in 2002, every state is supposed to create statewide
databases of its registered voters. The problem is not just that these
new mega-lists contain errors but rather, as is the case in New Jersey
and a handful of other states, what election officials do with the
data.
In New Jersey, officials apparently compared the voter lists to other
state databases, such as motor vehicle records, to see if voters had
moved and therefore should be removed from voter rolls. That practice,
which also has been done in Louisiana, Michigan and Kansas in 2008, is
illegal, according to voting rights lawyers who say it does not follow
the federal rules laid out in the National Voter Registration Act for
purging voters.
What are the recipients of New Jersey's 300,000 letters to do? They
need to call their local election office to confirm or correct their
voter registration information before registration closes in that
state on Tuesday, Oct. 14.
In Florida, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Republican, this week
announced that he would resume enforcing a controversial state law
that voting rights lawyers say has disenfranchised 14,000 minority
voters since 2006. The state law penalizes voters through no fault of
their own. It requires that new voters put their driver's license
number or last digits of a Social security number on a voter
registration form. If those numbers do not match a state or federal
database, that person is not added to voter lists until the voter
offers more proof to election officials.
This standard disproportionately victimizes minority voters, civil
rights groups say, because unusual or foreign-sounding names are often
misspelled in government databases. Still, under Florida law, it is
the voter's responsibility, not the state's, to correct those
problems. Florida law also says all voter registration information has
to be correctly on file 29 days before an election, which means newly
registered voters who do not meet the state's name-matching standards
will have very little time, if any, to find out about this issue and
fix the problem. The only remedy is for voters to call local election
offices to verify or fix their voter registration information.
In Virginia, students who are registering to vote for the first time
are facing ambiguous new state rules about whether a campus address is
sufficient for voter registration purposes. Two weeks ago, in
Montgomery County, where Virginia Tech is located, the county election
director said students who register to vote in Virginia could no
longer be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax returns -- which
the Internal Revenue Service later said was incorrect -- and could
lose scholarships or coverage under their parents' car and health
insurance. Student voting advocates said those remarks were intended
to suppress student voting.
This week, the state Board of Election issued a new policy that barely
cleared up the matter. Under the new guidelines, local election boards
can still determine whether on-campus addresses or other student
housing can be considered a valid address for voter registration
purposes. The guidelines also allow local registrars to ask about a
student's financial independence, employment and parents' residence --
but say students do not have to answer those questions. That leeway
with approving residency and ability to intimidate students with
personal questions could discourage students from voting.
Students who want to vote should get help from the presidential
campaign they are supporting, or call the hotline for the Lawyers
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law during East Coast business hours
to talk to a lawyer or voting specialist. That number is
1-866-OUR-VOTE.
In Michigan, the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County,
one of three counties in the Detroit metro area, said he would
challenge the right of people to vote if they have been evicted from
foreclosed homes. Michigan is among a handful of states that allow
"election challengers" to observe at polling places and force voters
to show that their voter registration information is accurate. The
county GOP chair, James Carabelli, said the use of foreclosure lists
would determine if people were true residents at the address listed on
their voter registration information.
According to the Michigan Messenger, there were nearly 2,000
foreclosure filings in July in the county, putting it in the top 3
percent of counties with troubled home loans. Across the state, there
were 62,000 foreclosure filings as of July, the Web site reported.
Michigan's Republican secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land, said the
voter challenges could proceed "based on information obtained through
a reliable source or means."
People who have lost their homes due to foreclosure or have been
evicted must register to vote at their current address. The
registration deadline in Michigan is Monday, Oct. 6.
In Kansas, new problems with paperless electronic voting machines
surfaced. Last month, officials with Diebold -- the voting machine
manufacturer that recently changed its name to Premier Election
Solutions -- announced that its machines used to tabulate countywide
results in 34 states were dropping votes because its software could
not receive simultaneous transmissions of vote count data from more
than one precinct at a time.
This week, another Diebold problem came to light in Johnson County,
Kansas, where more than half a million people live. According to the
Kansas City Star, the software in the firm's paperless voting machines
will place the machines in a sleep or "time-out" mode if the screens
are not touched for 2ВЅ minutes. If the machine is not reactivated by a
voter's touch, the voter's electronic memory card is ejected and the
ballot is canceled. A spokesman for Premier said the firm is working
to make this feature optional, but because that solution would require
federal testing and certification, it will not be ready for a year or
more.
What can people do if their voting machine goes to sleep and ejects
their computer memory card? They can tell a poll worker and vote on a
paper ballot.
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at
AlterNet.org, where he reports
on elections from a voting rights perspective. His books include Count
My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting (AlterNet Books, 2008), What
Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004
Election (The New Press, 2006), and Making History in Vermont: The
Election of a Socialist to Congress (Hollowbrook Publishing, 1992). An
award-winning journalist, he has been a staff reporter at National
Public Radio, Monitor Radio,
TomPaine.com and at daily and weekly
newspapers in Vermont.
