NY Assembly Subcommittee on Election Day Operations and Voter Disenfranchisement

The public meeting took place in New York City on December 9, 2013 in the Assembly Hearing Room 1923, 19th floor, 250 Broadway, New York.

In preparing for the meeting, I collected Election Laws that were passed in 2013 by the State Assembly but most died in the Senate.

Greater Voter Participation institutes early voting by establishing a 15-day period for general elections and eight days for primaries and specials.  Under the bill, each local Board of Elections (BOE) must designate at least four polling places for voters to cast an early ballot, in addition to a site at the local BOE, for a total of at least five polling places.  During the early voting time frame, polls would be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each week day and at 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday.  Ballots cast during the early voting period will be counted at the close of the polls on Election Day and included in the election night tally.  (A.689-A; Passed Assembly)

2013 Fair Elections Act establishes an optional public financing system for election campaigns for statewide offices, state legislative offices, and constitutional convention delegates.  The legislation would create the position of an independent enforcement counsel, appointed by a five-member Fair Elections Board, who would be charged with enforcing all campaign finance laws, rules and regulations.  The bill also would require expanded disclosure of political campaign expenditures and communications.  (A.4980-C; Passed Assembly / S.4705; Elections)

Absentee Ballot Deadlines requires the Board of Elections to accept applications for absentee ballots up to the day before an election.  (A.1880; Passed Assembly)

Pre-registration allows 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote and allows 17-year olds to vote in a primary election if they will be 18 years of age on the day of the general election.  (A.2042-A; Passed Assembly / S.1992-A; Elections)

National Popular Vote enacts the agreement among the states to elect the president of the United States by national popular vote.  (A.4422; Passed Assembly / S.3149; Passed June 7, 2013)

Candidates as Poll Watchers prohibits a candidate from serving as a poll watcher in an election district in which they appear on the ballot.  (A.5075; Passed Assembly)

Absentee Ballots for Blind or Visually Impaired requires absentee ballots be printed in Braille and large-print.  (A.6195-A; Passed Assembly / S.4135-A; Elections)

Notice Requirement for Village Elections simplifies the notice requirements for party nominating caucuses in village elections while ensuring sufficient notice to village residents.  (A.412; Passed Assembly / S.4671; Elections)

Absentee Ballots in Village Elections requires absentee ballot applications for village elections to conform to the absentee ballot requirements of the state Board of Elections.  (A.5065; Passed Assembly / S.3553; Elections)

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The public meeting official notice:

SUBJECT:
To examine solutions to make voting, in person and absentee, more accessible for all voters, and examine moving the state primary to June, beginning in 2014.

PURPOSE:
To examine ways to improve elections in New York State that will enhance accessibility (physical and logistical) to the polls.  The committee will also hear testimony on moving the state primary to June, beginning in 2014.

The Committee took testimony relating to the range of issues associated with enhancing accessibility to the polls as well as increasing fairness to voters and the effects of such proposals on the state budget.  The hearing also looked for ways to ensure that New York State's election law is consistent with the Federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) act.

The meeting was chaired by:

Michael J. Cusick
Member of Assembly
Chairman, Committee on Election Law

Thomas Abinanti
Member of Assembly
Chairman, Subcommittee on Election Day Operations and Voter Disenfranchisement

Witness List

1. Robert Brehm, Co-Executive Director, NYS Board of Elections

2. Michael Ryan, Executive Director, NYC Board of Elections and Dawn Sandow, Deputy Executive Director, NYC Board of Elections

3. Joseph Welch, Chairman, NYS Election Commissioners Association

4. Susan Lerner, Executive Director, Common Cause and Sally Robinson, State President, League of Women Voters and B. Kate Doran, Election Specialist, League of Women Voters and Ken Cohen, Regional Director, NYS-NAACP and Alex Camarda, Director of Public
Policy and Advocacy, Citizens Union and Rachel Fauss, Citizens Union

5. Lorraine Deller, Executive Director, Nassau-Suffolk School Board Association and Robert Lincoln, Jr., Commissioner, Great Neck Park District and Ralph Kreitzman, Mayor
Village of Great Neck and Mike Blau, Village Administrator, Westchester Municipal Officials Association

6. Monica Bartley, Voting Rights Coordinator, Center for Independence of the Disabled and Susan Cohen, Director, Voting Access Solutions and Larry Greenstein, Disability Advocate, Port Washington School Board and Kevin Greenstein, Disability Advocate, Port Washington School Board

7. Jarret Berg, NY Democratic Lawyers Council

The meeting lasted 6 hrs.

Some of the issues were:

1. The cost for early voting and what technology will be required to avoid multiple voting.

2. The cost for Instant Run-Off Voting for Primary Elections.  The current State Assembly and New York City Council approved a selection of up to three candidates.

3. The cost and logistics of having to use optical scanners in local nonpartisan elections like school boards when there will be over 1,000 voters.

4. Ballot standardization in the state.

5. Moving state primaries to June.

6. New technologies like electronic poll books and ballot printing on-demand.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC BOE Needs to Change How it Counts Votes

"The Board of Elections will be commanded Thursday to defend the indefensible, plus the incomprehensible, the inexplicable and the incompetent. The forum will be a hearing of the state Assembly Election Committee, where lawmakers will grill board representatives about their loony, hours-long process for tallying unofficial results. No other election authority in the nation adds up numbers using the method employed by the board."

In brief, when voting is done, poll workers:

Order each of 3,859 computerized scanners at 1,358 poll sites to print out a paper strip that shows the votes cast for every candidate, broken down by election district. Cut up each machine’s strip by election district. Gather the scraps of paper into piles for each race and each one of 6,109 election districts.
Add the numbers up by hand and write the totals on sheets of paper that are taken to police stations to be entered into computers for dissemination by The Associated Press.

As a poll monitor it gets worse. A copy of the cut up strips are posted on a wall for the monitors to copy. I had 20 machines to monitor and I could have used skates or a skateboard to copy all the numbers before the stripes were taken down.

Doug Kellner, co-chairman of the state Board of Elections, says the city has “an unworkable, Rube Goldberg system” and that, like jurisdictions statewide, the city board should take removable flash drives out of the machines, bring the drives to a central location and have a computer spit out tallies in a matter of minutes.

The board tried to accomplish this simple feat as a test in Queens in November’s general election. With the goal of announcing results by the 11 p.m. news, poll workers were supposed to give flash drives to police for transport to board headquarters and processing. Here’s what happened:

Polls closed at 9 p.m. The first flash drive made it to headquarters at 10:50. The computations continued until 3:20 a.m. They did it faster with scissors and pencils.

Rightly embarrassed, the board pressed its staff at a meeting this week for a speedup plan. The staff responded with mumbo jumbo about legal requirements that no one else knows about.

So now, two key assemblymen, Staten Island’s Michael Cusick, chairman of the Election Law Committee, and Manhattan’s Brian Kavanagh, head of the subcommittee on Election Day operations, say they’ll end the insanity, with legislation, if need be.

UPDATE
Testimony from The League of Woman Voters of New York City:

Before the NYS Assembly Standing Committee on Election Law and the NYS Assembly Subcommittee on Election Day Operations and Voter Disenfranchisement
December 1, 2011
Assembly Hearing Room, 250 Broadway
Room 1923, 19th floor, New York City

NYC is singled out in New York State Election Law
My name is Kate Doran and I appreciate the opportunity to address this Committee because as you know the City of New York is specifically named and singled out in many sections of the Election law.

Monitoring the New York City Board of Elections
My portfolio on the board of the LWV of the City of New York includes observing the weekly meetings of the Commissioners of the NYC Board of Elections. I regularly hear and record the comments and recommendations of the Commissioners and others. In a public meeting of the Commissioners on September 20, 2011, Steven H. Richman, General Counsel to the Board said, “Article 9, Title I needs a total rewrite.” The League of Women Voters agrees.

Poll Site Experience in Kings County New York
I worked as an Election Inspector in 2004 and 2005 and since 2006 I have been a Coordinator, all at the same large site in Brooklyn, NY. In my role as a Poll Site Coordinator I have observed first-hand the implementation of the new voting system over the course of 4 election events. The September 2010 Primary in NYC was essentially their pilot project. Adjustments have been made since then, but the closing procedures continue to be a tremendous stress point.

The NYC Board insists that it is strictly following the law but the result is a procedure that is tortuous, time consuming, and an invitation to serious error. The problem is that the NYC board equates Election District with Poll Site and requires poll workers to report out unofficial results by Election District rather than by scanner. The board has essentially overlaid the old lever system Return of Canvass procedures onto to the new optical scan system. Tapes generated by scanners must be cut up into tiny pieces ED by ED. The tiny pieces of tape are then distributed to the corresponding ED tables, where poll workers must add, by hand, the votes from the multiple scanners. After adding the results from the tapes, the poll workers must transfer, again by hand, those sums onto a paper Return of Canvass. Anyone who has seen this process, heard about it, let alone participated in it, recognizes it as a breathtaking absurdity.

The role of the NYC Police Department is specifically described in Section 9-126.

The NYPD are important stakeholders in the closing procedures, and valued team players in safe guarding the chain of custody of the vote. They are not happy.

The Board of Elections of the City of New York is under legal obligation to release unofficial returns on election night. This obligation was not burdensome in the old lever machine world. Now however, it creates extra, unnecessary work for poll workers who have to transfer the results of an efficient calculator – the scanner – by hand, onto a drafting board size Return of Canvass. In the “Lever World” the police officers in NYC could expect to collect Returns of Canvass somewhere around 9:15PM, 9:30 at the latest. Now they have to wait, and wait, and wait. At my particular site it was after midnight in 2010, before the last workers were able to leave. The NYC Board insists on reporting out the Return of Canvass by hand because the police computers are still set up to receive results in the way they did in the “Lever World,” and, because the City Board’s General Counsel claims that the law says that reporting must be done by ED on Election night.

We believe that the electronic results from the scanners are more accurate. They are certainly easier and faster to produce. They are available as soon as the tapes print, or quicker still, on one of the PMDs aka, memory sticks inside the scanner.

We recommend to the Committee that it draft revisions to Section 9-126 that would unambiguously relieve the NYC BoE of the obligation to report a paper Return of Canvass tally by ED, on Election night. Revisions to Article 9, Title I, should be made so that procedures take into account the capabilities of the optical scanners and the fallibility of exhausted human beings. Revisions to Article 3, Title IV, which describes staffing for Election Districts, should also be considered. Significant cost savings and efficiencies are possible by analyzing the tasks now performed in an optical scan election. For example, the number of required inspectors per ED could be reduced from four to two.

Split Shifts for election inspectors

Permitting the employ of election inspectors for half-day shifts is a tremendous tool for improving election-day operations. It is now our task to convince the NYC Board of Elections to write appropriate rules and put the tool to use.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

I will monitor this issue and post when a new plan is announced.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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