electionline Weekly - September 14, 2006
http://www.electionline.org/

I. In Focus This Week

Voters with Disabilities Use New Machines in New York Primary
Accessible touch screens, borough-wide vote centers attract others as well

By Kat Zambon
electionline.org

New York City's Tuesday primary marked a quiet but significant first - voters with disabilities for the first time had machines that allowed them to vote secretly and independently, provided they could find one of five locations in the metropolis with an available machine.

Nearly 600 did, though it was unclear at the end of the day just how many voters with disabilities used the machines and how many others could have voted on lever machines at their local precinct rather than the vote centers at city boards of elections.

Barbara Lewers was one such voter.

When she saw that she could vote at the board, a few blocks away from her home, she walked over. "I don't think the communication was totally clear . I just feel kind of stupid that I'm here," Lewers said. "So abled and disabled can vote here?"

She was not the only one confused. While 578 voters in New York's five boroughs used the city's new voting systems in Tuesday's primary according to The New York Sun, many of them were actually curious voters who could have cast independent and secret ballots at their regular precincts.

In Brooklyn, Mary Mulligan came to the board office instead of her usual polling place in Prospect Heights and planned on returning during the general election. "It was really easy. Everyone was extremely helpful . This was easier to get to and quicker to get through" than her poll site.

Convenient though it was, voters such as Mulligan and Lewers were not the reason the city purchased the machines, nor the impetus behind setting up five vote centers, one for each borough.

The Avante touch-screen machines, with both audio output devices and sip/puff tubes, were deployed at the five offices to meet the mandates of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). While the Act required one accessible machine per polling place, the city - which like the rest of New York has been woefully behind in meeting HAVA's mandates - had five polling sites for voters with disabilities as part of a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice.

On Tuesday morning at the Manhattan Board of Elections office, about 16 voters had used the machines by 8:30 a.m., two and a half hours after polls opened. "Vote Here" signs in four languages greeted voters as they arrived while interpreters and borough leaders stood by, ready to help.

Signs labeled desks with the different steps of the voting process. Voters checked in at one desk, received their smart cards at another, voted on one of five machines, and then deposited their ballot in a ballot box.

Having a few poll worker experiences under her belt, inspector Tonya Hinton shared her excitement about the new voting system.

"I love it," she said. "There's something in the air. I love learning something new."

West Village resident Sigalit Turkenitze made a mistake on her ballot and had to cancel it and start over. She called the machines "accurate and reliable . it looks pretty simple and straightforward" and said she wondered whether there were other places in the city where anyone can vote.

There were, however, a number of people with disabilities who took advantage of the accessible machines in addition to the curious.

Upon arriving at the Brooklyn Board of Elections, a voter with a service dog and a wheelchair sat in the waiting room with other voters. Door clerk Gertrude Jackson handed each voter a ticket as they came in to keep track of how many people used the poll site. By 3 p.m., she counted 60 voters. "It's been a mixture [of people with and without visual or motor disabilities]," Jackson said. "I haven't heard any complaints coming out."

Avante engineer Kevin Dulin was on hand in Brooklyn to answer questions and handle technical problems. Dulin explained that the company held voter outreach sessions in each of the five boroughs with about 120-150 total attendees and gave participants the opportunity to try out the machine.

After a voter experienced difficulties using the sip-puff function, Dulin explained that "the sip-puff process is unfortunately a very confusing process," particularly for first-timers. Since voters can get "lost in the technicalities," according to Dulin, he recommends that those using the sip-puff use audio and visual prompts as well. Despite some difficulties, he said it has "been a great experience . today in particular there have been a couple of very excited people."

During a lull, Jackson voted with one of the ballot markers. However, she accidentally cast her ballot before she finished voting and had to void her first ballot. "It was easy . if I followed the directions."

Nearly 150 residents voted at the Queens Board of Elections by 7 p.m., where the Democratic and Republican leaders were easily identified by their red aprons. When asked how people felt about the new ballot markers, Barbara Conacchio, chief clerk said, "I don't think we've had one complaint. Everyone who came thought voting was easy." In fact, immediately after Conacchio paused, a voter leaving the polls said, "It was a beautiful system."

Though the Queens Board was surprised by the high turnout, deputy chief clerk Katherine James explained that the location was a contributing factor as the borough hall, president's office, and courts are all nearby. Conacchio added, "We're happy for it [high turnout] because we worked really, really hard."

While James said that they will need additional poll workers to run the election in November, Conacchio sounded confident. "It's going to be just as easy."


Vote Suppression Begins Long Before Election Day
Brennan Center highlights five key areas where vote is suppressed

By M. Mindy Moretti
electionline.org

With less than two months to go until November's mid-term elections, both political parties and voting rights advocates are gearing up to send teams of lawyers and poll watchers to many of the key battleground states presumably to make sure everyone has an opportunity to vote and that every vote counts.

But according to a recent briefing by the Brennan Center for Justice, methods used to keep some from casting ballots are in place well before the time voters to go the polls.

"Most of the voter suppression happens not in November, but long before Election Day," said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center.

In their briefing, the Center outlined five key areas where the vote is suppressed: purges of voter rolls; voter ID and proof of citizenship; restricting voter registration; barriers to getting on the voter rolls, and voting machine vulnerabilities.

Restricting voter registration drives has been in the news of late with the Brennan Center successfully fighting laws in Ohio and Florida that would have severely restrict third-party registration drives. In 2004, 10 million Americans registered to vote via third-party registrations. That represented more than 20 percent of total new registrations.

"These are not merely bad policies in our view," Waldman said. "They are illegal."

While statewide voter registration databases have the potential to improve the registration process, they also threaten to disenfranchise millions of voters by keeping them off the rolls.

"It's not the databases that are the problem," Waldman said. "It's the way states are handling these databases that is the problem."

Many states rely on the database to "match" voter registration information to other information on file before approving a registration and according to the Brennan Center, this has serious potential flaws. The matching process can be fraught with error because the databases themselves contain mistakes such as typos or transposed fields or even nontraditional last names.

Another area with a large potential to suppress voters is when states use their newly centralized databases to purge the voting rolls. According to the Brennan Center, voter list purges based on matching are unreliable and can be discriminatory. Waldman was also concerned about when and how often these purges are conducted.

"We know that purges are going on, but it is often difficult to find out where and when," Waldman said. "We believe they are happening all the time."

Requiring voters to show state- or federally-issued photo identification also suppresses the vote Waldman said, by threatening to exclude millions of eligible voters who lack the requisite documentation. According to the Brennan Center as many as 10 percent of eligible voters do not have, and will not get, the documents required by strict voter ID laws.

"There is a great deal of concern over electoral fraud," Waldman said. "But the evidence just isn't there to support large numbers and to warrant many of these voter ID laws."

Several of the voter suppression areas outlined by the Brennan Center are direct results of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Waldman and Wendy Weiser, deputy director of the Center's Democracy Program said while the passage of HAVA was a positive step, the confusion around its implementation and additional state laws that have been enacted as offshoots of the federal legislation have created an atmosphere ripe for voter suppression.

"HAVA was a step forward for the country, but the way it is being implemented by many states, combined with new underhanded efforts to crack down on voter registration and participation, could move the country backward," Waldman said. "We see a real problem coming up in November in the elections."

II. Election Reform News This Week

• "It was Florida. It was Mexico. It was your worst nightmare." Primary voting in Montgomery County, Md. bordered on disastrous as more than 200 polling places in the heavily populated suburban jurisdiction did not receive cards to activate electronic voting machines in time for polls to open on Tuesday morning, The Washington Post reported. In the aftermath, the paper also reported results could likely face legal challenges from candidates.

• Paper ballots were the stop-gap solution in the early hours of the vote, The Baltimore Sun reported, as poll workers throughout Maryland gave voters thousands of provisional ballots as they waited to receive their activator cards for electronic voting machines and because some poll workers failed to show up for their assigned duties. Counting the paper could add significant delays to tallying votes, and as of Wednesday, no one knew exactly how many ballots had been cast.

• Vermont, in contrast, had a quiet Tuesday except for the occasional buzzing of phone lines from the state's vote-by-phone system, the Burlington Free Press reported. The system, put in place to meet the needs of voters with disabilities, uses telephone lines connected to printers. Voters use audio prompts and telephone keypads to cast ballots. Only 54 voters used the system, however, though the number is expected to grow in the November general election.

• A Princeton University professor this week said he found new security breaches in Diebold TS voting systems, The Associated Press reported in an article published on Ohio.com. The professor, along with two grad students, "found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines." A company representative "blasted" the findings, saying they ignored new security programs and security measures.