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electionline Weekly - August 31, 2006
electionline.org

I. In Focus This Week

Voting Machines on the Move
Mobile polling places provide broader access to voters

By M. Mindy Moretti
electionline.org

From libraries to veterinary clinics to immunization labs to emergency preparedness command centers, counties across the country are taking more and more of their services to the streets in the form of mobile units. And now, a handful of counties have added mobile polling sites to their on-the-go repertoire.

Perhaps the most well known of the mobile voting units is Riverside County, Calif.'s ROVER. ROVER, which is an acronym for Registration Outreach, Voting and Education Resource, made a limited debut in support of the Nov. 8, 2005 election and has been in wide-scale use throughout the 2006 election season.

ROVER is a specially-fitted RV-type vehicle that the county can use for voter outreach and education as well as a mobile polling site. For the upcoming election cycle in Riverside County, the unit will travel to the county administrative center, the University of California, Riverside, several commuter rail stations, and a handful of community centers.

The unit is outfitted with four of the county's Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen machines equipped with a voter-verified paper audit trail as well as all the tools necessary to run a polling site. For security reasons, the machines are kept stored at the county's voting machine warehouse and are not loaded into the unit until the morning ROVER is scheduled to head out. Two county staff members man ROVER at all times usually with additional staff members following behind in a county vehicle.

"The voters really seem to like it," said Rebecca Martine, chief deputy registrar of voters. "We've had kind of a slow turnout with it at first because we weren't able to confirm the schedule of where it would be when until after sample ballots were produced, but for the upcoming election, we were able to solidify the schedule prior to the printing and so hopefully more people will come out and use ROVER."

The mobile unit was built by Universal Specialty Vehicles, Inc. which builds a variety of vehicles similar to ROVER but with different focuses such as police command units and medical and dental clinics. ROVER cost $174,800, with a grant from the Riverside County Indian Gaming Local Community Benefit Committee paying for $173,000 of that cost. The county estimates it will cost between $4,000 and $8,000 per year to run and maintain the unit.

"I think it's a great idea, but I just don't see all that many counties that would have the funds to do something like this once you lump this cost in with everything else they have to pay for," said John Gideon, executive director of VotersUnite.org.

Gideon pointed out that although mobile voting units may be cost prohibitive for many jurisdictions, they could be beneficial with counties' efforts to comply with the Help America Vote Act.

"Counties really need to go that extra distance to make sure that voting is accessible to all voters and I think these machines, especially where there is early voting, could go a long way making sure people could actually vote."

R. Michael Alvarez, professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology noted that while mobile voting efforts may be more costly than other methods of balloting in rural America (like voting-by-mail), they also might allow for a greater degree of certainty for voters that their ballots are received and counted, and they may alleviate some of the security concerns often raised about voting-by-mail.

"At this point, it is difficult to evaluate 'mobile voting' efforts; there have only been a few efforts, and as far as I am aware there are no studies that examine whether they do facilitate participation, and at what cost," Alvarez said. "But they are interesting innovations to watch in the near future, especially in very rural and thinly-populated places in the United States."

II. Election Reform News This Week

• A federal judge in Florida ruled earlier this week that the state's new voter registration law is unconstitutional, threatens free speech and gives an unfair advantage to political parties in voter registration drives. "This is a win for democracy and will send a signal to officials in Florida and other states that you cannot erect unreasonable barriers to voter registration," said Wendy Weiser, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the New York University law school's Brennan Center for Justice. State officials told the Associated Press that the ruling would be appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

• Late last week, the Maryland Court of Appeals sent election preparations into a tailspin when it ruled to halt early voting and to remove a candidate from the ballot. The court ruled to remove Montgomery County Councilman Thomas Perez (D) from the ballot because he had not been a member of the Maryland Bar for 10 years as required for the position of Attorney General. Thousands of paper absentee ballots with Perez's name on them already have been mailed. In addition, some electronic voting machines have been programmed, tested, and sealed, not to be opened again until the Sept. 12 primary. "We have a lot of work to do," Gilles W. Burger, chairman of the State Board of Elections told The Baltimore Sun. "We're not really sure what we're going to do. We're doing some research right now." Elections officials sent word to the court on Monday saying it would be impossible to remove Perez from the ballots as mandated and could they instead post prominent signs at polling places and include inserts with absentee ballots. In the other decision, the court ruled that the "General Assembly exceeded its Constitutional authority" when it approved and subsequently overrode a gubernatorial veto to pave the way for early voting in the Old Line State. Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich hailed the ruling as a victory against vote fraud and Democratic legislators vowed to bring forth new early voting legislation in the next session.

• California's Secretary of State Bruce McPherson denied certification to Vote-PAD, a non-electronic assistive device designed to help voters with disabilities mark and verify a paper ballot independently. In a letter explaining his decision, McPherson said, "On its face, the Vote-PAD presents a low cost, low maintenance, low-tech option. [However].it was very clear that some voters who are blind would be disenfranchised if this system were approved for use in California." In a uniquely-worded press release, Vote-PAD's Ellen Theisen called the non-certification a "rubberstamp[ing]" of McPherson's staff's "contorted testing and evaluation."

• A promised manual vote audit, scheduled to debut in the Sept. 12 primary election in Arizona, is likely on hold until at least the November general election according to Secretary of State Jan Brewer. In an article published in the Arizona Daily Star, Brewer said the state may not be able to submit its plans for the change in procedure to the U.S. Department of Justice until Sept. 5 because the seven-member panel crafting the specifics of the audit only met for the first time on Aug. 25.

• The city of Springfield, Mass. and the U.S. Department of Justice reached an agreement that the city will hire 57 bilingual poll workers, appoint a Hispanic voting coordinator, allow federal election monitors and make translators and other services available beginning with the Sept. 19 primary according to an article in The Republican. The agreement helps the city avoid a court battle with the Justice Department which had filed suit four weeks ago accusing the city of discriminating against Spanish-speaking voters.

• While lawsuits were putting a halt to early voting in Maryland, Mother Nature was the cause in Florida earlier this week. As Tropical Storm Ernesto bore down on the state, elections officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties decided to put a halt to early voting until the storm passed. "Your vote will be secure. My staff will go out and retrieve all the cartridges from the voting machines. Those cartridges will be replaced when early voting is resumed," Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson assured the public on Monday in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.