| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
How America Votes in 2004: the View from a "Red State" and a "Blue State"Linda Lamone, Administrator, Maryland State Board of Elections; Jean Jensen, Secretary, Virginia Board of Elections Foreign Press Center Briefing Washington, DC October 21, 2004
MR. BRAZIER: Good afternoon. Today we welcome Linda Lamone, Administrator of Elections for the State of Maryland, and Jean Jensen, Secretary of the Board of Elections for the Commonwealth of Virginia, who will speak to us about how voting takes place in their states. Four years ago, the attention of America and the world was drawn, not just to the results of our election, but to the process or processes by which we conducted it as well: who votes, how they vote, and how the votes are counted.
As the highest ranking election officials in their respective states, Linda and Jean are well-positioned to speak to us today about obstacles met and innovations employed as American states seek to ensure that the voices of its citizens are heard on election day.
After their opening remarks, we welcome your questions. As is tradition, we will start with New York if they have a question. And as always, please be sure to state your name and affiliation before asking your questions.
We'll start with Linda Lamone. Linda, thank you.
MS. LAMONE: Thank you very much. I think the premise that I would like to leave you all with is, as you all know, after the 2000 Presidential Election, Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act in 2002. And that act is written very broadly so that the states are given fairly wide discretion on how to implement some of its mandates.
An example is the provisional ballot. A provisional ballot is mandated by the Help America Vote Act, but how to implement it is left to the states. And as we're finding out now, by leaving it to the states we're having a lot of litigation. The provisional ballot is a ballot that is intended to be available in the polling place if someone shows up and is not on the books, not listed as a registered voter. And if that's the case, we must give them a provisional ballot and then determine later whether or not they're entitled to vote.
But the main point I want to make is that the Help America Vote Act, in being drafted that way, will make it very, very difficult for you guys to compare states. You'll be comparing apples to oranges, in many cases, not only between states, as we'll discuss here today, but also, as in Virginia, between counties or local governments because they're implementing some of the provisions differently.
So that's sort of my basic message and will be the tenor of most of the things that we're talking about here today.
Jean.
MS. JENSEN: I think probably you are all aware that across the country, voter registration applications just went through the roof [this year], and the struggle that we had at the local level, in just dealing with the absolute volume; in Virginia, about 500,000 more voters than we had in the presidential election in 2000. The amazing statistic is that although voter registration closed at 5 o'clock on [Monday,] October 4th, in Friday, Saturday and Monday's mail, there were 66,000 applications. Just the workload that that put on our local offices was unbelievable. They ended up working until 11 o'clock at night, coming in at 5 o'clock in the morning, working Saturdays and Sundays to get it all done.
It did get all done. Now, the biggest job they had was to enter all of those applications that were approved and registered into the Virginia voter registration database. That had to be done by a certain time, 5 o'clock on Sunday. Any applications that they were not able to get into that database are then handwritten because we had to go to print to get the poll books done.
So if a voter applied to register to vote in a timely manner and it was processed and it was shown that he or she was qualified to register to vote, those applications were all processed. If they didn't get entered in the database, they're going to be handwritten. Didn't want to leave any voter off the roll books.
So voter registration has certainly been one of the challenges. That's behind us. The next challenge was to get out the voter cards to all those new voters, and that's a card that they receive in the mail that shows their polling place and tells them where to go, the name and the address of their polling place. That was a big job because those had to all be mailed for those new voters; and then just dealing with the volume of absentee ballots.
Just a word about absentee ballots. In 2000, approximately 150,000 people voted absentee in Virginia, and in Virginia you must have a reason to vote absentee. We have nine reasons: you're going to be out of town on business or vacation; you're going to be out of your polling place for 11 of the 13 hours the polling places are open; you have primary responsibility as caregiver to someone who is physically or mentally ill and confined to the home -- a number of ways to be able to vote absentee. But I want to compare the statistics between 2000 and 2004 to continue to let you know about the volume we're dealing with. As I said, in 2000, a total of 150,000 people voted absentee. This year, we have already had 156,000 apply to vote by absentee ballot, and they can continue to make those requests through Thursday, October the 28th. So I think those numbers are really going to grow also.
If we want to start talking about comparisons of the states, we might talk about the voting equipment. In Virginia, thanks to the Help America Vote Act -- and what a godsend it's been to election officials -- we've always wanted to make improvements in the process but we never got any -- we got the legislative mandates, but we never got the money to do it, and now Congress has given us this money to help us reform elections. And one of the things we are now working to do in Virginia is to replace punch-card and lever machines. In Virginia, each locality decides what kind of voting equipment they need. Linda can talk about how different that is in Maryland. But in Virginia, in November, we will have localities using a wide range of voting equipment: paper ballots, punch card, lever machine, optical scan, and direct recording electronic (DRE) or touch screen.
We have 23 localities that are going to be using the touch screen equipment for the first time in an election, but we have 23 other localities that have been using touch screen for years. We've had some form of electronic voting equipment in Virginia since about 1988.
We've also had a provisional ballot since 1975. We called it a conditional ballot. So that was another thing that Virginia voters and Virginia election officials didn't have to make too much of an adjustment on because we've had the conditional ballot for all those years. The second class of voters that will be covered by a provisional ballot are those whom we call first-time HAVA voters. If they have registered to vote by mail and they are voting for the first time in a federal election and they don't have identification with them, they may cast a provisional ballot because on the front of the provisional ballot is, in essence, an oath that they are swearing that they are who they are.
I think that's kind of a big overview of a number of things we're dealing with in Virginia.
MR. BRAZIER: Do you have anything you want to add, Linda, before we go to questions?
MS. LAMONE: Maryland is entirely different, in the sense of, for example, the voting equipment. In 1991, the Maryland General Assembly passed a law mandating that there be a uniform single voting system for polling places in the state of Maryland by 2006. For this election, we are now using the Diebold touch screen voting equipment in 23 of the 24 counties. Baltimore city is the 24th jurisdiction, and they are using an older version of the touch screen voting system. So that's the kind of difference that you will see as we get into the discussion.
MR. BRAZIER: How about the absentee voting? Is there any difference in the provisional or the absentee voting between Maryland and Virginia?
MS. LAMONE: The provisional are pretty much the same. We use them for the same reasons, although we are not required to send them to the correct voting precinct-- we try to send them to the correct precinct, but some people just won't go; they insist, "I'm here. I'm going to vote." So the issue then is, if they vote in the wrong precinct, what part of the provisional ballots will we count, and that's what being litigated all over the nation now. Do you count none of it? Do you count only the races for federal office or do you count the races that are common to the correct precinct and the wrong precinct?
MR. BRAZIER: We will ask New York if they have a question. New York, do you have anyone there?
Oh, I see a hand. Yes. Hi, welcome.
QUESTION: Yeah, hi, we have a question. My name is Robert Poredosh. I work for Slovenian Press Agency and I have a question.
We all remember Florida in 2000, right? And I was just wondering if you have any, if you had any kind of major cases of voter fraud in your two states, and if you did, what are you doing to prevent it? MS. LAMONE: In Maryland, no, we have not. We've been very fortunate in that regard, but then we have a number of safeguards in place to prevent it. And let me give you an example. We have a lot of nursing homes and assisted living centers in Maryland where people who are too old to take care of themselves go to stay.
In the past, we found that there were allegations that the parties and the candidates were going into these facilities and helping people register to vote in a particular party or helping them cast their absentee ballots. And so when I came into office in 1997, we initiated a policy that only two sworn poll workers of opposite parties or two people from the election office itself could go in to assist these folks and -- both with voter registration and with their absentee ballot.
And that has gotten a long way, number one, to get them to continue to participate and, two, to take out any of the possibility of someone trying to manipulate this very vulnerable population. So that's one of the things we did.
Another thing we did in Maryland -- and I think Jean has something similar, albeit a little different -- is, historically in the United States, if you moved within a state from one county to another, your voter registration in your original county was canceled and you had to fill out a new form and re-register in the new jurisdiction. Well, I say, "Well, that's silly. I mean, it's causing us a headache to keep track of these voters because they go through the drivers licensing and they change their address there and they think, 'Well, it changes my voter registration as well.'" Well, it didn't.
And they'd get to the polls -- and we found this in 2000 -- thinking that their registration had been moved and it wasn't, and in fact, they had been canceled in the old county, had been sent a new voter registration application, but had concluded, "Well, I don't have to fill that out, I already did it," when they did the drivers license. So we changed the policy in the law of the state of Maryland that says, as long as you notify the proper government agencies that you have moved from county A to county B, we will move your voter registration for you.
And it really has helped keep the voter registration list a lot cleaner, which is where your fraud comes from, when people are registered to vote in two different localities and in fact could vote in two different localities. Although we have such a hard time in the United States getting people to vote as it is, it's amazing to me that people would do that. But anyway, that's a couple of the things that we do in Maryland.
MS. JENSEN: Right. We had a bill introduced in last year's General Assembly session [in Virginia] to address the possible abuse in nursing home or assisted living facilities. And we have been researching. That bill rolled over into a study committee, which means the legislature didn't know what to do with it, so they put it into a study committee and let us do all of the background work to try to find out the best answer. And we have asked Maryland to share their plan with us, and some other states. And we're working on that.
There's never been any documented fraud of any major nature that anybody in my office -- and I have one person who's been there 32 years -- can remember. I think that one of the issues that has come up recently was the sort of mass purging of felons, convicted felons, from the voter registration list. We have a system in Virginia that seems to be working very effectively. And I think it must be working because the governor's office in that state [Florida] called our office and said, "How do you do it? We'd like to have some ideas." Basically, the courts provide the state police with a list of convicted felons. They then post it with us electronically. Our registrars then go to a secure website, and on a weekly basis they delete anybody whose name appears on that list as having been convicted of a felony. They're deleted from the list, but they are immediately notified by mail: "I have been advised that you have been convicted of a felony, thereby I'm deleting you from the registered voter list. If this is not correct information, here is the procedure you are to follow."
In the two-and-a-half years I've been there, I've known of [only] two mistakes. One of them was an attorney (laughter), and he handled it very well, but it was one of those freak things where he had the same first name, middle initial and last name of a convicted felon. There was a two-digit switch in the social security number. In Virginia, we can use social security numbers for matches. It was just one of those freak things, but our rolls are kept very clean through processes, very thorough, I think, thoughtful processes such as that.
MR. BRAZIER: Here in Washington. Yes, Michael.
QUESTION: Michael Backfisch, Germany's Business Daily Handelsblatt.
You both have touch-screen machines. The big question is paper trails, yes or no? Could you explain us a little bit, do you have paper trails? If so, how does it work? Who gets a receipt? And if you don't have paper trails, what happens, for example, in case the computer breaks down, and what loopholes do you have for fraud and irregularities? And are these machines 100 percent sure, secure against hackers?
MS. LAMONE: I'll answer your last question first, and it's absolutely, yes.
QUESTION: How come?
MS. LAMONE: The Maryland voting system has probably undergone more testing and more analysis than any other voting system in the country. We've had two outside, independent security analyses done of the voting system. Both of those reports came back and said it counts 100 percent accurately. Both of them did identify some vulnerabilities; the state of Maryland has taken all reasonable steps to address those.
Some of the recommendations that were made by these outside security experts were evaluated by my team and the state's team, and some of them were deemed to be too risky to take because you have to do a risk-benefit analysis whenever you're looking at this stuff. We have had litigation in Maryland where the voting system was challenged. There were three days, basically, of expert witness testimony on it. And Maryland's highest court has affirmed a lower court decision that said that the voting system is secure and accurate.
We have subjected the voting system ourselves to numerous levels of testing. Every level of testing that we do, with the exception of the last one that's just been completed, is followed by what we call IV&V, Independent Verification and Validation team, that's a separate contractor that goes behind the other testers to make sure that what they're testing is what we have in escrow and that they did do the test correctly and that there were no issues.
What we are just finishing up this week is what we call, "parallel testing" on the voting equipment. We are taking randomly selected voting units in a number of counties in this instance, at this level. We're running through 50 scripted votes with talliers, a tally team, a reader team and then a team at the voting unit itself, and then comparing the results from the voting unit to what the people that are tallying up the votes that were pre-voted by the audience say.
I attended a test this morning. The only errors were made by humans, the people that couldn't write down the numbers correctly, and that's what you get when you have paper and human people counting paper. We will also be doing the parallel testing with randomly selected voting units on election day, all to demonstrate that the voting system is performing as it is supposed to, with no, nothing, no hanky-panky going on with the system.
It's not connected to the Internet in any way. All the data is encrypted. Everything is password protected. We change the password before every election. The administrative access to the voting system password is only known by two people in the state of Maryland in my office and they're both security credentialed people.
Paper trail. Maryland law says any voting system has to meet federal standards, and that includes any part of any voting system. There are no federal standards for printers. It would [therefore] be a violation of law for me to add them. There are some very practical problems with adding, and we're talking about, not receipts to the voters, you're talking about a printed ballot. We don't give receipts to voters showing how they voted because it leads to vote buying and other fraudulent activities.
The problem with the printers is that the way that most of the systems work as I've seen them and have they been explained to me, when the voter gets finished voting each of the various races, they get to what we call a "review screen" or a "review page" and it lists -- it'll have "President," and then it'll list their choice for president; "U.S. Senate," and it will list the person they've chosen for U.S. Senate, and so forth, on down the ballot.
So it's an opportunity for the voter to look to see what selections they've made, and also to give them the opportunity to go back and make any changes if they wish to do so. Because once they press the "cast vote" button, the ballot is recorded and you can't change it. So you've got this review screen up on the voting unit in front of the voter, and you've got this little device over here printing this -- and I've got one with me if anybody would care to see it later -- a two-inch-wide piece of paper under glass, it says it under glass. And they're supposed to be making a comparison between the two.
Well, the printers have to run from 7 in the morning until 8 o'clock at night in Maryland. They're going to run out of paper; they're going to jam. And when that happens, the voter is not going to be allowed to cast the ballot until the paper finishes. They're going to ask a technician to come over and fix that printer. And when that technician comes over, they're going to be looking at the voter's ballot, exactly who he or she picked. And people in the United States don't like that. They don't want people to see how they voted. And problems are simply going to happen. I've got 16,000 voting units in the state of Maryland. That would mean 16,000 printers that would have to be flawless for that entire time, and it's not going to happen, believe me. And that's one of the very basic issues with it. The other problem is, for the gubernatorial race, the governor's race, in 2002, we printed out a ballot for one individual, and that's what I have with me, and I'll show you all if you want to see it, and it's about five and a half feet long. That's a lot of paper for a voter to stand there and look at. And, you know, they're sort of crawling along through this little window and it's going to take time. Nevada is our guinea pig for November. Nevada is providing printers on some of the voting equipment in some of the counties. So we'll see how it works.
The other thing is is that, and I've been talking to a couple of companies, there is other technology that's coming out that's going to provide the voter with a much more valid and viable way of checking their vote to make sure their votes have been recorded as they intended.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, you all realize that this issue exists with a lot of other voting equipment as well, because we, in the United States, even with optical scan voting equipment, do not recount unless we're asked to. Or we may do a random recount. What you saw in Florida [in 2000] was not a recount of all the punch-card ballots. What it was was an examination of the residual ballots, the ones the sorters or the readers could not read. They did not recount all the ballots.
So the voter is never assured once that ballot is separated from him or her that it actually was recorded, and we use computers to tally votes on every type of voting system we use in the country. And no one has paid any attention to those other voting systems. The only one they focus on is mainly the Diebold touch-screen systems. And it's simply not -- fair is the word? -- but it's not equitable. And you all need to realize that there are other issues with other voting systems and that we certainly have done more to protect our voting system in the state of Maryland from any kind of problem than has been done with any of the other voting systems that are used in the country.
Sorry, a little long-winded answer, but you asked a number of questions.
QUESTION: A very short follow-up. What happens if the computer breaks down? And in case there is a recount, how do you repeat the results? How do you get the results of the way people finally voted?
MS. LAMONE: Well, the problem with -- the last question again first -- the problem is people think of recounts in the traditional sense; that is, that we're going to take a paper ballot and look at it. And that's what gives us our audit trail for that voting system. What the electronic voting system does is we have a completely different audit trail -- at least in Maryland -- what we do with the equipment -- from the time we get it, as I explained earlier, from the time we get it and start installing the software on it and having that installation verified by an IV&V firm, and all of the user acceptance tests, every step along the way is documented. So we create an audit trail from the time that stuff is delivered to Maryland until the election is concluded. We create, for example, a hash of the software, and we have the software escrowed and its also escrowed with the National Institute of Standards of Technology, but we have it with a private escrow firm. That stuff is hashed. The stuff that we're using in the election is hashed and those that both before and after the election and then the comparison, and then the comparison is made that there is nothing changed.
There are audit logs. We are able to tell exactly what's been going on inside that touch-screen unit, as well as the server through the audit logs. And again, it's not connected to anything. You have to have a human being have access to it. Everyone in Maryland that has access to the servers has gone through a criminal background check, for example.
The vote system in the polling places is not a computer. All it does is record a number, for example. I mean, it's not a processor. It's recording something on flash memory on a memory card in two separate things. If it crashes, all is not lost: The votes have already been recorded.
MR. BRAZIER: In three places?
MS. LAMONE: I have forgot what your other question was.
QUESTION: (Inaudible.)
MS. JENSEN: If I may just add, let me give you an example. When one county in Virginia used electronic voting -- direct recording electronic or DRE's -- for the very first time, they had a thousand machines. Of those thousand machines, 10 -- I don't want to say broke down -- because some of them were just rebooted – did not function flawlessly. But, you know, several people were saying, "The sky is falling. The sky is falling."
But when you get in and look at them, the machine stopped immediately when there was a problem. But it said the machine shut down at 10:16, 12 votes had been cast; then when the machine was rebooted, [it stated that] the machine restarted at 10:22, and then at the end of the evening, it counted how many votes -- and it's just a little miracle sitting there, and there is triple redundancy that's inside every machine that's certified in Virginia.
If I can go back to your question about the paper trails, we're in the same situation in Virginia as they are in Maryland. Although we don't have DRE statewide, we have a number of them. But we're sitting and waiting to see what's going to happen with the paper trail. I do think that there are certainly grave concerns and it will never happen that a voter will be handed a receipt that shows how they voted, because of the potential of fraud, absolutely.
But one of the things that our legislature insisted on is that every machine that we have certified in Virginia has that feature that Linda described where the voter sees a final screen. And I'm paraphrasing. But it basically says, "Here is how you voted. Are sure this is the way you wanted to vote? You can go back. You can change your vote, but it's your decision to hit that final vote button."
MR. BRAZIER: It's like adding to your shopping cart when you're shopping the Internet.
MS. JENSEN: Exactly. And so, what our legislature did in the last session was they put that into law, and so we cannot certify a touch-screen machine that does not present the voter with that final screen to allow them the choice to be able to go back and make corrections before they push that final vote button.
MR. BRAZIER: I think Turkey had a questioner.
QUESTION: Reha Atasagun with the Turkish Television.
Do you know how many different awarding systems and equipment totally you have in this country? Any idea?
MS. LAMONE: Do you mean the kinds or the numbers of each kind?
QUESTION: Yeah.
MS. LAMONE: No, I don't know the numbers of each kind.
QUESTION: Ma'am?
MS. JENSEN: I wouldn't know nationwide.
QUESTION: As far as types, in Virginia, you said you have how many types, five? You're using --
MS. JENSEN: We have paper, punch cards, lever, optical scan, direct recording electronic device (DRE). So we've got at least five, and we've got a couple of varieties of the DREs.
QUESTION: And that's just one state, so you've got everything.
(Laughter.)
MS. JENSEN: A little bit of everything.
MS. LAMONE: There are a couple of websites where you could get that information, electionline.org, it has a map on there and you can get your information there.
MR. BRAZIER: And here, please. Thank you.
QUESTION: Jyri Raivio, newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Finland.
You have five different types of voting system. Can the voter decide by himself or herself what kind of voting system he or she uses?
MS. JENSEN: No, the locality decides. We have 134 localities in Virginia. That's counties or cities. And the local governing body works with the local electoral board to make a decision of what type of voting equipment best suits the people who live in the area. Quite often what they will do if they are making a decision to changes systems, they will invite vendors in to demonstrate. They will put the machines out in grocery stores and libraries and shopping malls and ask voters to come in and play with them and test them and use them.
In Virginia, state law does not permit a locality to buy a piece of equipment unless it's been used in an election. Let's say that a locality would have on election day 27 pieces of voting equipment in various polling places. They may choose two precincts where they put in new equipment that they are considering buying. After people vote on it, then they're asked to fill out a questionnaire: “Did you like the system? Was it easy to use?” Then they decide that if the people who voted on the system don't like it, then they'll invite somebody else to come in and they'll demonstrate another piece of equipment.
QUESTION: Can I have another --
MR. BRAZIER: Sure.
QUESTION: -- housekeeping question. If the polls are open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m.?
MS. JENSEN: In Virginia, 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.
QUESTION: When can we expect to have some meaningful results on the vote? And a sort of sensitive political question to you, Mrs. Jensen, if you have half a million more pre-registered voters than the previous time, can this change the outcome on the -- of the election in your state?
MS. JENSEN: It might make it a little bit later. I think we're going to have a huge turnout. But in Virginia, every vote has to be in on the day of the election. In other words, if you vote absentee, by mail, we do not count postmarks. We have to receive your absentee ballot before 7 o'clock p.m. the night of the election. So that means the night of the election, we count absentee ballots and we have, that night, it may be 2 o'clock in the morning, but the night of the election, we will have unofficial results.
QUESTION: And do other states, they do allow postmarks instead of an absolute time?
MS. LAMONE: Some do, yeah. Maryland does.
MS. JENSEN: I know that Maryland has a little bit longer.
MS. LAMONE: We have two absentee ballot canvasses, one beginning the Thursday after the election and then the one the week of -- Friday, the second Friday after the election, and as long as it's postmarked by November the 1st it will be counted. So the states are very different. We have a longer leeway, especially for overseas ballots.
QUESTION: Do you announce results without these absentee ballots?
MS. LAMONE: I think we -- yes, we do. We start posting the unofficial results on our webpage as soon as we get them from the counties on election night. Now remember, they're unofficial because they haven't been verified and they do not contain the absentees or the counted provisional ballots.
It never ceases to amaze me, but you guys are calling the election before the polls even close -- (laughter) -- so I don't know why you're looking for results.
MR. BRAZIER: Are there any other questions here? Way in the back, please. Yeah.
QUESTION: Hi. I'm Ignasi Abad from Catalonia Radio, Spain.
When the provisional ballots are counted? And what is the percentage of the proportion of comparing to the total ballots counted on the electoral night? And have the provisional ballots changed the outcome of the elections some in, historically? And second question about the registration. How are your expectations of turnout this year counting on the registration, on the surge, (inaudible) on the registration, too?
MS. JENSEN: If I can take a lead from Linda and answer your last question first, I told someone the other day that if I could get that turban that Johnny Carson wore when he did "Carmac the Magician" and say, "I predict that the voter turnout is going to be…" I'd be one of the most famous, popular people in the country. I have no idea what the voter turnout's going to be.
I can only assume that with this tremendous surge of voter registration applications, which I think reflects a keen, keen interest in this election, we are going to have a huge voter turnout. And in Virginia, it's a lot of young people. I've never seen anything like it. Voter registration events on college campuses, you had websites devoted to just getting the young people activated -- Rock the Vote. I think we're going to get a huge turnout of young people in this election.
But, you know, if November the 2nd is a cold, rainy, nasty day, sometimes people just stay at home. And when I talk to young people and I say, "If you think your vote doesn't count, we have a legislator in Virginia who was elected by one vote." And I said, you know, he's been in office for about 12 years. And I said, "You know, if you got up the morning of the election and you were going to vote for him, but you decided to stay home because you didn't feel well, he wouldn't be serving." So I'm expecting it's going to be huge.
MS. LAMONE: Well, you've had more experience with provisional ballots because you've had them longer. We will count the provisional ballots on the Monday following the election, which doesn't give the local boards of elections a lot of time to investigate them, but I can't speak to the impact on the election because we've only really used them in the primary this year.
MS. JENSEN: I look at provisional ballots as a failsafe. I don't think that provision ballots, conditional ballots, have ever swayed an election, one way or the other, in Virginia. To me, the most important thing you need to do is appropriately process a voter registration application, make sure the person knows they're registered to vote, get the information to them about where they're supposed to go vote the day of the election, make sure that they get to that right place, then you don't have a need for a provisional ballot.
I'm planning on spending some of this federal HAVA [Help America Vote Act] money to train poll workers, to train election officials and to educate the public, so we reduce the need for a provisional ballot. In Virginia, we're going to attempt to count them the next day. I don't know how many are going to be cast this year. It's probably going to take us more than one day. I would think in some of the big localities, like Fairfax County, it's going to take several days to count them.
But to me, a provisional ballot is there to protect the voter, to make sure that before they leave the poll without voting, that they're given every opportunity to cast a vote. That's the whole purpose of the provisional ballot, as described by HAVA. But I think it's symptomatic that we haven't done something right, or the voter hasn't taken responsibility for filling out an application the right way. You know, I want to fix what's going on back here that creates the need for a provisional ballot.
MS. LAMONE: Just to add to what Jean said. The Help America Vote Act requires all but a handful of states to have a different concept in their voter registration systems, and that is that it has to be centrally maintained, controlled by the state, and interactive. It's like six different adjectives in the actual bill that describes this [required] voter registration system, some of which we're not really sure of the definition of.
But what I think both of us can testify to is that once you start maintaining a statewide database, it really does reduce the amount of problems you have with your voter registration issues and your election day polling place issues because you're constantly checking for duplicates. You're making sure that people are in the right jurisdiction. You're making sure you're removing the people that have passed away. So you're really able to maintain a much cleaner voter registration list.
And by doing all of the voter education that we're required to do under HAVA, in Maryland we send every voter a specimen ballot that tells them, "Don't forget the elections on November the 2nd. Here's who's running. Here's how to use the voting system. And here's where your polling place is." [There is] just a whole lot of information that they will get about a week before the election, and hopefully that will keep a lot of them from going to the wrong polling places and therefore from generating a provisional ballot.
MR. BRAZIER: Okay. We'll go back again to Jyri, and then we'll come back.
QUESTION: How many people do you need to run this show? And are these people, are they unpaid volunteers, or do you pay something for them? And are you -- with this huge interest, are you concerned about long queues and delays?
MS. LAMONE: Well, we have about 16,000 to 18,000 poll workers in the state of Maryland and we have a registered voter population of about three million now, maybe a little bit more, in 24 jurisdictions. Historically, it's been a very senior population that runs the elections on election day. We have done a huge amount of work to try to reduce the average age of the poll workers. We've increased a number of them.
Are they underpaid? Immensely underpaid.
QUESTION: They are paid something?
MS. LAMONE: They are paid something but they work probably, oh, 15, 16, 17 hour days and some of them are getting less than $100 for that day. It's not a lot of money. It's people that are doing it because they're proud to be participating and helping out the democracy. The local election officials and their staff have traditionally been terribly underpaid in the United States, and for the most part, still are.
QUESTION: Can I follow up?
MR. BRAZIER: Yes.
QUESTION: For those, you know, people working for democracy helping you guys, do you ask for any kind of qualifications for that? I mean, anybody who would like, can go and help you?
MS. JENSEN: They go through training, and it's a pretty intensive training process to get them ready, but in terms of qualifications, they must be old enough to vote and they must be a registered Virginia voter. In Virginia, we recruit high school students to be pages in the polling place, but you must be a registered voter, old enough to be a registered voter to be able to be an officer of election.
MR. BRAZIER: How much training can I assume -- because you actually sent me a postcard asking me to work or whether I am interested -- and would you train on election day or do you train in advance?
MS. JENSEN: Oh, no, no, no. It's in advance and a lot of localities -- like in Fairfax County, which is the largest locality -- they have a series of training and they make it available, for example, on Thursday night from 5 to 7 pm, or you can come in on a Saturday and go through training. The persons who work inside a polling place in Virginia are called "officers of election." And for the chief officer, who is in charge of that polling place, and his/her assistant -- and they are always of opposite political parties -- usually the registrar and the electoral board will train the chief officials in each polling place in a separate session, and then they'll have a session where just the poll officers of election will come.
Now, you've got to remember that many of these folks have been doing elections for years, so their needs, if they're seasoned officers of election -- and I know I was talking to the registrar in Richmond, Virginia, yesterday and she's having a session this Saturday for what she calls her seasoned officers of elections, the ones that have been doing it for a number of years, who are very experienced, senior in the polling place. But the important thing is that we have to make sure that they are aware of any changes in law or procedure.
MS. LAMONE: And we have the extra challenge in Maryland of having to reeducate them on a whole new voting system. So it's been a challenge.
MR. BRAZIER: Michael, do you have one? And then we'll go back to --
QUESTION: If I got the message correctly, everything is fine. On the other hand, the Democrats have 10,000 lawyers who are watching the elections all over the countries -- country. The Republicans want to check 30,000 precincts. Provided there is an avalanche of lawsuits starting November 3rd, what will they be about? MS. LAMONE: Well, I think, as I said earlier, I think a lot of them are going to be about how the states count their provisional ballots, what part of the ballot do they count, if someone is in the wrong precinct when they vote, it just could be huge. I think there is going to be some absentee ballot lawsuits. There always are. You know, the states have very different standards, as you've heard this afternoon, about when we count them, when we have to receive them, whether they have to have a postmark on them. Some states were very late in getting their absentee ballots out because of Mr. Nader, for example, trying to get on the ballot, succeeding, and then having to reprint everything, pursuant to court order. So there is going to be challenges about, "Well, did they get them out early enough," especially to the overseas and military voters. And then there is the whole civil rights areas about, I think you mentioned earlier, about some allegations of voter intimidation in Florida being already looked at. I think those are going to be the kind of issues, and it's all going to be compounded with the states' effort -- states being a plural -- to address any incidences, whether it be manmade or natural. So there is going to be a lot more police presence in a lot of the states, in and around the polling places. That, historically, has been not the case and not one that was welcomed in some jurisdictions. So I think that -- I actually made a list of what I thought some of the issues would be -- and for the litigation I think voter registration is going to be an issues because we've had these huge voter registration drives. There are already some press reports coming out of some incidences in some of the states where there are allegations of fraud in registration. So you're probably going to see some challenges based on that. It's going to be a lot of fun. (Laughter.) MR. BRAZIER: All right. Right here. QUESTION: Khalid Dawoud from Egypt, Al Ahram newspaper. And just to follow up on this voter registration issue, I mean, in many other countries, many people are proposing that maybe there shouldn't be really voter registration. People should vote with their ID, or, in this case, driving license. Maybe not all people have driving license. But do you think this would, you know, solve partly the problem, I mean, of -- if you just vote with your ID, one way or the other. And my second question, because I'm not fully aware of the machines and how they work, I just, again, would like to ask you the question of, if there is -- one of the candidates want a recount, how would this be done, I mean, one way or the other? MS. JENSEN: Yeah, there are a few states where I think you just go vote. You don't have to pre-register to vote. You just go vote. The challenge that we live with is that Linda and I might personally have grand ideas about how to open up the process and make it fair, more equitable, more open, but the challenge is our legislatures. And that's, you know, that's where the laws are made. And they determine the voter registration system. And let me just tell you about one challenge in Virginia. Historically, there has been a bill introduced every year to do away with your needing to have an excuse to vote absentee. Currently, you have to fit one of nine reasons in Virginia to vote absentee. Many states have what we call "no excuse absentee." If you make the decision that, for whatever reason, business or personal, that you can't go to the polls on the day of the election, all you have to do is request an absentee ballot. In Virginia, you have to fit one of those nine reasons. I recently talked to somebody who was a young, stay-at-home mother, didn't have access to childcare and she said, "What if one of my kids is sick on the morning of the election? I don't want to take a chance on missing the opportunity to vote.” But she didn't fit the criteria to vote absentee. So she's just taking her chances that on the day of the election both kids are well. And in Virginia, you can take your children into the booth with you. But that's just an example. I mean, we deal with the law. We have to follow the law. And what we would personally like to see or have a vision of what we would like elections to look like, don't always fit what the legislature has put into law. MS. LAMONE: And it's very political because by having voter registration requirements, it gives the candidates access to a list of the people who are likely to participate. You know, it provides them a way to have access to those voters and know who they are, because, obviously, not everyone registers to vote. Your second question about the recount, we do have processes in place for a recount on the touch-screen voter unit. And I just reviewed them the other day. We give the person seeking the recount a choice, I believe, of three -- four mechanisms. I'm getting the signal. And one of them, which was, in fact, used in 2002, we had a recount on the DRE equipment in Maryland in a very contested race that actually ousted the Speaker of the House of Delegates, and he requested that the ballot images be printed out. And so, that's what we've done for the counties that use the DRE system, now that it hit jurisdiction, crossed two counties, so the other one was an optical scan jurisdiction. And as we expected, the DRE unit totals did not change at all when the optical scan ballots were, in fact, reexamined, there were some significant changes in the vote totals, not enough to help him, but significant because of issues of voter intent that you always have with paper ballots. The other way is to just simply compare, print out a new vote total from the machine, which you can do, and compare to the one that was printed out when the polls were closed. I'm not sure if I remember the other two, but we certainly can go offline and talk about it later, or you can talk to my assistant over here, Nicky Trella, who actually drafted the recount guidelines for both the optical scan absentee ballot system and the polling place system. MR. BRAZIER: Just time for two more questions, if we could get the gentleman in the back, please. MS. LAMONE: But I want to reiterate, we think that our auditing and our testing and everything negates any need for the traditional recount. QUESTION: David Scheschkewitz, Deutsche Welle, Germany's International Broadcaster. What's your best guess? When will the world know who is going to be the next U.S. president, on November 3rd, a week later, or when the Electoral College meets on, I think, it's December 13th? (Laughter.) MS. JENSEN: I think we'll probably have some preliminary numbers three or four days, within three or four days. I think it just depends on whether -- you know, if it's close, then it's going to take a lot longer. MS. LAMONE: And it depends on how much litigation is brought in the states where the vote is close, you know, because that will delay the reporting of any final results. I think we'll all have a pretty good idea who we think is the next president of the United States fairly quickly, but please have pity on us. (Laughter.) I'd like to show them this, if I could. MS. JENSEN: Yeah, go ahead please. MS. LAMONE: You all asked me, and we were talking about a paper ballot. This is a single voter's ballot, the paper trail, excuse me, from the 2002 Gubernatorial election. And if we were have this for each voter in the state of Maryland and all 3 million voters showed up on election day and we had to recount this to determine the election, it would be months if not years before we knew the outcome because it would take at least a half hour to an hour to count each person's ballot. So everybody that's advocating the paper trail needs to realize there are a lot of really practical issues with them and if the voters really want to have verification of their vote, we need to find a better way to do it. QUESTION: One more question. But why does it have to be so late? MS. LAMONE: This represents a single person's vote from the 2002 Gubernatorial election and it has the -- QUESTION: There is more than one question. There is many -- MS. JENSEN: There are a lot of issues on the -- MS. LAMONE: There are a lot of valid questions, right. But it shows who the person voted for. For Circuit Court Clerk, for example, there were two candidates. There is a zero beside one and a number one beside the other. So that's what the voter would be looking at to verify their votes. But this really is a very difficult thing from both the voter's point of view and from an election administrator's point of view. QUESTION: So how many questions were on this one ballot? MS. LAMONE: There were three statewide questions and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine county questions. QUESTION: How many will there be -- MR. BRAZIER: Sorry, the microphone. MS. LAMONE: The question was: How many questions will there be on the ballot in Maryland this year? There are no statewide questions on our ballot this year. There are several counties that have local ballot questions, but we do not have a complicated ballot this November. MS. JENSEN: But we have the President, we have our Congressional candidates on the ballot, and we have two statewide referendums. We have some local referendums and some local special elections, like if the Clerk of the Court resigns mid-term, then they will be on the November ballot, but it will be, in essence, a special election. Virginia loves elections. We have lots of them. MS. LAMONE: They do. They have elections all the time. In Maryland, we only have them every two years. MR. BRAZIER: All right. Just one more question please, and the ladies will be available afterwards to answer some questions, one on one, I believe. MS. JENSEN: Sure. MR. BRAZIER: Who hasn't asked a question? Let's go back to Turkey then. QUESTION: Thank you. And I believe for the first time you will also have international observers. Have you been notified about this? And do you have to train your, you know, officers on this, you know, if they come and want to watch a local -- MS. JENSEN: I'll start. Yes, we have had a number of requests. They have all been in writing. We are going to be delighted to welcome neutral observers. Our law gives the authority to the local election officials to determine the manner in which they are accommodated inside the polling place. And some polling places are very, very small, and we've let our local election officials know that there have been a number of requests for some international observers and that we are going to graciously make accommodations to make sure that they can get inside. They may not be able to have access to every single polling place, just because the physical set up wouldn't permit it. But, yes, we definitely have laws that allow for neutral observers, but the decision on how many hours you can go in and what precincts, that's up to the local election officials. MR. BRAZIER: All right. I'd like to thank you all very much, and thank Linda Lamone and Jean Jensen, especially for their help. I have to admit, I've been voting in the United States for a long time and I learned an awful lot today. So, thank you both.
|
 | |||
|
