NY Adjusts Absentee Vote Deadline After Sandy

New York, one of the states hit hardest by Sandy, has extended the deadline for absentee ballots and applications not delivered or requested in person, the State Board of Elections said.

New York City's election preparation efforts have also been hampered by flooding, power outages, and transportation shutdowns. The city's election board said their offices in Manhattan and Staten Island were closed and phone hotline was not operating correctly, but that additional staff had been assigned to handle absentee ballots and election preparations.

The state's original deadline to request an absentee ballot by mail or phone was Tuesday, when the storm was battering parts of the state, but the elections board said the deadline has been extended through Friday. While absentee ballots returned by mail can not be postmarked after Monday, the elections board extended by nearly a week the window for those ballots to be received. The deadline for voters to submit an absentee ballot in person has not changed from Monday, the board said.

In person voting could hit hurdles, too, as a survey on Wednesday of Long Island's Nassau County showed nine in ten polling stations were without power and nearly seven in ten were in flood plains.

If voters have to use polling places out of their districts, it will take even longer to verify and count, as they could either be provisional ballots or filled in optical ballots that would have to be sent to board offices with power to be read by optical scanners programmed correctly for the different district's ballot formats.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC BOE Still using Pencil and Paper to Count Votes

If they closed the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo. The keepers could serve the city by having the primates take up residence at the Board of Elections, thereby lifting the panel’s IQ.

The 10 members returned last week for the, oh, millionth time to the question of how the board might find a way to report Election Night results before, oh, the coming of the dawn. They talked themselves hilariously into oblivion.

Everyone expected that vote-scanning machines, introduced in 2010, would allow for fast electronic computations of who won and who lost. Instead, the board prints paper tapes out of thousands of machines and then has workers cut the tapes into scraps by election district, write numbers district by district on tally sheets, add up the numbers, write down the totals on tally sheets and give them to police for entry into station house computers for dissemination to The Associated Press.

The spectacle has made the board an object of ridicule as the members have gone around in circles, considering and dropping solutions as simple as uploading vote data electronically.

As a monitor of polling sites' optical scanners for the New York Independence Party, they also post a copy of the tapes near each machine so the party monitor can take their parties counts for verification under state laws. So any change will also have to accommodate the major and minor party poll watcher's job.

Use the above link to read the entire article in the New York Daily News.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC Needs a Complete Vote Count

The two candidates for a, Special Election on March 20th, for a Brooklyn State Senate seat, came through election night separated by a razor-thin margin in votes cast on electronic scanning machines, forcing a count of absentee ballots filed on paper. Republican David Storobin and Democrat Lew Fidler should insist that the New York City Board of Elections tally every vote, using a single method.

Contrary to all fairness and equality, not to mention common sense, the New York City board’s standard operating procedure uses differing approaches for determining whether a vote is validly cast. When a voter fills in an oval beside a candidate’s name, the vote will be counted either by a scanner, assuming the machine works correctly, or by the board as workers inspect absentee ballots. When a voter leaves an oval blank, but, say, circles a candidate’s name, the vote won’t be counted by a scanner, but will be counted if the board finds such a marking on an absentee ballot.

This probably happened in the Storobin-Fidler battle. The scanner tally lists 42 ballots on which voters filled in no choice, unlikely, as those people were dedicated enough to go to the polls to make a choice in the only race on the ballot. Odds are they made a selection without filling in an oval. Their votes are, for now, lost, while similarly cast absentee ballots will be included. In such a super tight race, 42 ballots could be decisive.

The board will inspect all the paper ballots only if the margin ends up below .5%. With a total tally of about 21,000, that comes out to roughly anything more than 105 votes. Now, the preliminary margin is 118 votes. At that level, there would be no visual ballot inspection without a court order.

The bumblers at the New York City Board of Elections are not to be trusted to make such fine distinctions. On election night, they came up with tentative results by adding up votes for each candidate by hand after cutting the paper receipts from the scanners into little piles of scraps. They came in 82 votes over for Storobin and 80 votes over for Fidler compared with a later computer tally.

Storobin and Fidler can safeguard the accuracy of the count and set an invaluable precedent for New York by demanding to see, under the state Freedom of Information Law, photographs of ballots that the scanners record with each vote.

The Daily News used the law recently to review ballots cast at a Bronx polling place whose returns defied possibility. The inspection found a haywire scanner had miscounted hundreds of votes.

Storobin and Fidler should file the request now to search out the missing votes even as the board labors though the absentee ballots.

Doug Kellner, co-chairman of the New York State Board of Elections, wants such images posted on the Internet for every election. It’s a great idea, and it should get a boost from this race. The campaigns have nothing to lose and perhaps a seat to win.

This seat will be eliminated at the end of the year due to redistricting.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NY BOE Meeting Notes

This is from my notes of the New York State Board of Elections meeting:

1. During the April Presidential Primary, the operations may begin their move to a new location.

2. Begin to improve the process of the interface between DMV and BOE for new and changed voter registrations.

3. The changes to the Overvote process and changes to the Optical Scanner screens have been pre-cleared by Section 5 of the Justice Department.

4. Begin the process to determine why the scanner in the South Bronx failed counting votes at the last primary and general elections.

5. Develop a State-wide standard for when a candidate can ask for a manual count. Currently each county's election board determines the threshold. Also discussed was who should pay for the first pass, everyone agreed it should be the candidate and not the state or court.

6. Santorum Ballot Issue: When his New York Committee first filed their delegate list, 50% where rejected and they had five days to correct the problem. They refiled but one of the delegates wrote a letter to the board saying they were not supporting him and to remove their name. So he is short one name and since the deadline is March 1st, he may not get on the ballot. In New York, you must certify you support the candidate. On March 4th his partition was accepted.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NY Overvote Issue Update

In February of 2010 I viewed a archived video of the New York State Board of Elections' meeting. During that meeting I was shocked to find out the board had programmed the new optical scanner voting equipment to not notify the voter of overvotes, ballots on which voters had filled in two ovals for the same race. Such multiple voting was impossible with the old mechanical voting machines. You could not pull the lever and record your vote if you had flicked two switches in a race.

Numerous voting watchdog groups urged the state board to program scanners so they would spit back a ballot with any type of overvote, clearly alerting a voter of the need to make a fix. This was rejected. Instead, the board set the scanners to display a confusing message informing voters they had overvoted and actually enticed people to submit the invalid ballots without telling them those ballots would not be counted.

The Brennan Center at NYU Law School sued, with support of local community organizations and minor parties, before the election to prevent mass disenfranchisement. The board forged ahead nonetheless. Now, the suit has begun to reveal how often voters cast invalid ballots. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers who went to the polls in 2010 were disenfranchised thanks to the the State Board of Elections.

Partial results have discovered 50,000 votes that were invalidated, with more to come. Even getting the data was difficult because half the local boards across the state didn’t have the information. As for the New York City board, thy lost the overvote data for 56% of the election districts in Brooklyn and Queens.

Clarity in the voting booth is critical to credible elections. So, too, a full count of votes. New York’s Board of Elections is delivering neither, and it’s offering only an inadequate fix, such as modifying the confusing message on the scanners to at least say the ballot won’t count. But they’re not sure they can even put that minimal change into place by the 2012 election, now a year away.

The BOE has now said they will fix it. But with all the budget cuts and attrition, at a later meeting admitted it might not get any changes tested and verified by an outside testing center in time for 2012 elections.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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New Optical Scanner Voting Machines in NY Leads to Increase in Write-in Votes

Two candidates who weren't even on the ballot are apparent winners of two seats in NY's Chemung County Town of Baldwin.

Several Steuben County races could also be decided by write-in votes. And one Schuyler County race was won by a write-in candidate.

This sudden increase in successful write-in candidates isn't a fluke, election officials say.

New optical scan voting machines that were put into use in recent years make it easier for residents to write in a name, rather than just automatically pull the lever for someone whose name appears on the ballot in front of them.

"This is the first time in my life I've ever seen write-ins win," said Mary O'Dell, Chemung County deputy election commissioner. "It's so much easier to do write-ins with these new ballots. It's right there in front of you. There will start being more write-ins."

The change was apparent in the Town of Baldwin, where there was only one candidate on the ballot for two available Town Board seats. And that candidate, Gerald Tillotson, didn't even win. Tillotson captured 67 votes, but 280 write-in votes were cast. As soon as election officials saw the large number of write-ins, they decided to count them Tuesday night, O'Dell said. The result: Patrick Collins collected 149 write-in votes and Herschel Rohde had 141. That made them the apparent winners of the two seats. The same thing happened in the Baldwin town supervisor race, where Russell Purvis was running apparently unopposed. But Purvis grabbed only 70 votes, while write-in candidate Keith Rosekrans collected 124.

Write-in votes could play a role in several unsettled Steuben County races as well, according to Election Commissioner Veronica Olin. "We got some with the Jasper highway department. It's an issue there. There were 133 votes for the top vote-getter in Jasper, but there were 155 write-ins," Olin said. "There's a position on the Cameron Town Board that came close. We had 95 votes and 87 write-ins. We don't know if they are all for the same person or not. It's the same for the superintendent of highways in Cameron. If the write-ins are all for same person, the write-in would take the superintendent race in Cameron. "It looks like we definitely had more write-ins on the ballot than we normally do," she said. "The new ballot definitely leaves it open, because it's right there in black and white to do it. On the lever machines, people didn't understand how to do a write-in." Steuben County won't count all the write-in votes until Nov. 21, when it will also count absentee and military ballots, Olin said.

In Schuyler County, Tyrone town supervisor candidate Alan Hurley grabbed 121 votes, but there are 256 write-in votes. In that case, it appeared to be an organized write-in campaign mounted by other candidates, said Deputy Election Commissioner Carolyn Elkins. There were signs for at least three different Tyrone write-in candidates posted prior to the election, Elkins said. Election commissioners are expected to open those ballots Thursday.

With the large number of NY independent voters, over 2 million, there is the opportunity for write-in campaigns.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYS to Reform Vote Counting Issue

Thanks to Ballot Access News and Nancy Hanks for this post.

Will watching the streaming of a New York State Board of Elections meeting I realized there was a problem with how the board was going to program their new optical scanning machines when counting votes. I made my Executive Committee members' of the New York City Independence Party Organizations aware of the problem. Some of the other minor parties started a court case and allowed the Independence Party to be part of the case.

On September 8, the New York State Board of Elections settled the lawsuit that had been brought by the Conservative Party, the Working Families Party, and the Taxpayers Party, on the subject of how to count votes when a voter erroneously casts two votes (one vote under each party label) for a single candidate. The parties had sued the Board last year, because the state was automatically giving that vote only to the party closer to the top of the ballot in upstate and on the left in New York City, due to ballot formats. In New York, the parties are listed on the ballot in order of how many votes they received for Governor, so the Democratic and Republican Parties are always closer to the top or the left of the ballot than all other parties. Therefore, the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, would get the vote, and the minor party would not.

In May 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff had refused the Board’s request to dismiss this case. That was a signal that the judge felt the case had significant merit, although he hadn’t yet made a final ruling. So, the state decided to stop defending the old policy, and agreed to a fairer system.

The Board of Elections will cause the optical scan voting machines to alert voters when they have double-voted. The machine will display a message that says, “You filled in more than one oval for a candidate in at least one contest. While your candidate preference is clear, it is not clear which party you prefer.” The machine will then show which office is affected, and ask the voter to vote again. The message will also tell the voter that if the voter doesn’t re-do the ballot, the vote will be counted for the party listed first. The voter then will have the choice to accept the vote or get a new ballot. Also, the polling places will have signs near each voting booth that say in big print, “DO NOT VOTE MORE THAN ONCE FOR THE SAME CANDIDATE.”.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC Mayor Bloomberg and New Paper Ballot

This entry comes from an article in The Daily News By Adam Lisberg.

Mayor Bloomberg continued his campaign against the Board of Elections on his radio show this morning, where he again blasted its process for picking voting machines that use paper ballots instead of an all-electronic version. “I happen to think the machines that they picked, after many years delay, 10 years, and they went back to the chad days,” Bloomberg said.

Well we do not have a chad problem as we are using new optical scanners with paper ballots that you use a pen to fill-in an oval to mark your selection. You also can use a touch screen to make your selections then the machine will create your marked ballot that you then have the optical scanner read to cast your vote.

The Mayor's spokesman Stu Loeser said yesterday the mayor "doesn't believe that literally this involves chads," though since the small-i independent Bloomberg can't vote in party primaries, he didn't get a chance to try the machine himself last month. Today Loeser said the mayor used chads as an example of the fallibility of interpreting markings on paper ballots as opposed to an all-electronic system.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, then, that the Board of Elections has a crew setting up a demonstration voting machine right outside City Hall this morning, where the mayor can try the new chad-free system himself if he likes.

Even with all the problems I have discussed in prior post about the printing of the ballot and how it has been programmed for over votes, it is still a good system. It will now have hard copy of the ballot to be used for recounts. It will also have mandatory audit counts of a percent of the scanners for each election.

NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Error on instructions of NYC Sample Ballot

The Board of Elections has come in for a lot of criticism from city politicians since the various screw-ups during the September primary.

Now the Brennan Center reveals another gaffe that harkens back to the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot fiasco of 2000.

A sample ballot given to the center by the board tells New Yorkers to vote for a candidate by filling in “the oval above or next to the name of the candidate.” According to the center, similar instructions will be posted in privacy booths. Actually, though, voters should fill in the box under the name of the candidate.

The instructions could leave a voter wanting to cast a ballot for Carl Paladino on the Taxpayers Party line actually voting for the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins.

Apparently absentee ballots have the correct instructions indicating the board actually does know up from down — but not how to proofread.

In a letter to the attorneys for the city and state, the center asked that “the City Board of Elections take immediate action to correct this mistake to ensure that voters are not confused and that ballots are counted as they were intended to be cast.”

Use the above link to read the letter.

The Board of Elections issued a statement on Thursday in response to questions about the erroneous ballot instructions. "On November 2, New York City voters will vote using a paper ballot and optical scanner. To vote for a candidate whose name appears on the paper ballot, voters need to fill in the oval that appears within the voting square for that candidate."

"To ensure that all voters are comfortable and confident using the new voting system, the Board of Elections in the City of New York is placing in every privacy booth at all poll sites, instructions that inform voters that they need to fill in the oval below the candidate name they wish to vote for. The Board is also reinforcing instructions on how to correctly fill out the paper ballot by highlighting this information in upcoming newspaper advertisements and by producing a detailed instructional voter palm card which includes a photo of a correctly marked oval. This palm card will be distributed at every poll site on Election Day and will also be available shortly on the Board’s website," the statement concluded.

The incorrect wording of the instructions is actually mandated by state law.

The provision of New York State Election Law § 7-106 which mandates how the instructions are to be printed on the ballot, reads:

"(2) To vote for a candidate whose name is printed on this ballot fill in the (insert oval or square, as applicable) above or next to the name of the candidate."

City election officials have previously said that almost every aspect of the ballot design is dictated by state law, preventing changes that would make ballots easier to use.

This is another sample of the dysfunction with our state government. They never thought to change the election laws after picking their new voting system.

NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NY Injunction for NY Voter Double Votes

Thanks to Ballot Access News for this post.

On October 15, U.S. District Court Judge Red Rakoff refused to issue an injunction in Conservative Party & Working Families Party v New York State Board of Elections, 10 Civ. 6923, eastern district. This is the case in which those two parties complained that when a voter votes for the same candidate twice, once on each party line, election officials will arbitrarily credit that as a vote for the party listed first on the ballot.

The basis for the denial is that the plaintiffs filed the case too late. The order says “Plaintiffs (the political parties) have set forth substantial arguments in favor of their underlying complaint” but they “have slept on their rights and cannot at this late date seek the kind of onerous and potentially confusing relief envisioned..plaintiffs waited until six weeks before the election to file their complaint…the Court will not invoke the extraordinary remedy of a preliminary injunction at this time.” The judge also refused at this time to order elections officials to post signs in each polling place, warning voters not to double vote. He said the plaintiffs have not yet even furnished a sample of what the signs should say.

Use the above link to read the judge’s 5-page order.

Remember, New York is a FUSION state, where all the votes for a candidate on all the party lines are added to the candidates total.

The interesting part of this issue is the wording of the complaint and the judges order. The complaint says: New York Election law 9-112(4) provides that the vote is counted towards the first party on the ballot line. But that is not how the optical scanner is programmed. The vote will go to the first filled in oval on the line. So if two minor party ovals are filled in, the first parties oval will be counted.

Ex. - Andrew Coumo is on the Democratic, Independence Party (IP), and the Working Family Party (WFP) lines for Governor. If the oval for the IP and WFP were filled in, IP would get the vote.

Why is this important? In New York, the Governor race determines if a party gets ballot status for the next four years by getting at least 50,000 votes. And the vote totals determine the parties position on the ballot.

NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYS General Election Ballot

Thanks to Ballot Access News for this post.

The New York State Board of Elections met and determined whether various petitions for independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, should be determined valid. In New York, the Board disqualifies such petitions even if no one challenges, if the petitions on their face lack any possibility of containing enough valid signatures.

These parties will be on the ballot for statewide office: the five qualified parties (Democratic, Republican, Independence, Conservative, Working Families), followed by these parties: Anti-Prohibition, Freedom, Green, Libertarian, Rent is 2 Damn High, Tea, and Taxpayers. Although the Taxpayers Party is on the ballot now, a lawsuit is pending on whether that petition is valid. The Taxpayers nominee for Governor is Carl Paladino, who is also the Republican nominee.

The Tea Party gubernatorial nominee is Steven Cohn, an attorney from Long Island. His petition had been challenged by allies of Carl Paladino, but the Tea Party petition survived. Cohn is supported by Bobby Kumar, who has been active in the Independence Party and who briefly held himself out last year as national chair of the Reform Party.

The Freedom Party gubernatorial nominee is Charles Barron, who is angry with the Democratic Party because all six of the Democratic Party’s statewide nominees this year are non-Hispanic whites.

We had our New York County Independence Party reorganization meeting yesterday and I was reelected to the Executive Committee. I also was elected for my 4th term as the representative from the 73 A.D. (Eastside of Manhattan) on the NY State Committee of the Independence Party. I was uncontested in the Primary.

NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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