For Los Angeles County election chief Dean Logan, Tuesday, March 3, 2020 was, to quote a famous children’s book, “a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” It was Super Tuesday, a critical point in the 2020 election timeline. News reports chronicled long lines at polling places, equipment failures and mad-as-hell voters. Much of the blame, it seemed, landed on the debut of a $300 million dollar, custom-designed system of electronic voting machines, many of which appeared to have malfunctioned or failed completely. But other factors appeared to play a role, as well: The rollout of an early-voting option; and the first-time use of a vote-center configuration, which reduced the previous 4,000 neighborhood polling places to 900 geographically dispersed centers.

But those first impressions, like many heat-of-the-moment media stories, were only the first draft. The real story emerged later. In the days that followed, LA County launched an investigation into what had gone wrong. The resulting 135-page report showed up on the LA County website at the end of April, without a public announcement, and it doesn’t take an advanced degree in logic to understand the zero-publicity approach: The embarrassing problems revealed during the investigation are not flattering to Logan and his operation.

The report highlights system failures that might have been prevented with better planning and testing and they offer a cautionary tale for other jurisdictions as the critical November 2020 presidential election approaches. Key findings in the report’s executive summary include the following facts, followed by my annotations:

• 20 percent of voters surveyed after the election reported a negative voting experience.
• 15 percent of voters reported waiting more than two hours to vote.

In the world of election management, those are terrible numbers.

• Vote Centers were open for ten days before election day. 27% of voters cast ballots in the first 10 days. 73% voted on election day.

Election officials had projected a much higher early voting percentage. They staffed and set up vote centers thinking that a much smaller percentage of people would vote on election day. Some election-management experts speculate that the early voting option—in play for the first time—was not as accepted by voters as had been hoped for, because voters, typically, are wary of any change in procedures.

• Long wait times primarily resulted from technical issues with the electronic pollbooks (Poll Pads) that are used to check in voters as they arrive at Vote Centers. Even though ample network bandwidth was available, the Poll Pads had issues synchronizing date with the voter database, and the voter search function was too limited for the size of the county’s electorate. This resulted in delays as voters checked in. Also, some Vote Center had fewer Poll Pads than needed to handle voter turnout on Election Day.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but LA County’s report pins a big chunk of it on the company—Missouri-based Knowink—that programs and maintains the electronic pollbook system.

• While there was a perception among voters and the media that [the new ballot-marking machines] were not operable and contributed to wait times, generally this was not the case.

Having spent 10 years and $300 million dollars designing a custom-made voting system, LA County’s election administration has a big stake in reassuring the public that they made the right decision. To their credit, in the report, they acknowledge that they made many mistakes, understaffing help desks and some Vote Centers, and not adequately addressing a previously identified problem with the gears in some ballot printers, which caused jamming that further slowed the flow of voters. But “problems” with the new ballot-marking system, they contend, were less about the machines not working and more about not deploying enough of them.

A chart in the executive summary lists the problems and offers potential solutions, The chart illuminates the scope of failings on Super Tuesday in America’s largest voting jurisdiction: Excessive wait times. Short-staffing at Vote Centers. Inadequate poll worker training; Late delivery of 17,000 vote-by-mail ballots to voters. Discrepancies between official publications of Vote Center locations and actual locations. Malfunctioning voter hotline. Problems with Vote Center set-up and deployment of resources.

Between now and November 2020, LA County election officials have a lot to do to make sure none of these problems happen again. To that end, the report includes a to-do list whose succinct bullet points only hint at the amount of additional behind-the-scenes planning, meetings, logistical changes and staff overtime it will take to improve the outcome in November—the kind of grunt work that is invisible to voters, but crucial to the integrity of elections.

They’ll try, because no election administrator wants to be the lead story on CNN on election night, and the vast majority of people in this line of work want to get it right. But there are no guarantees. Election day, no matter where you vote, is a crap shoot for election managers, and things happen that cannot be anticipated or even, sometimes, imagined. Good luck, Mr. Logan.

The post Behind the scenes at LA County’s Super Tuesday election meltdown appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In the 2008 Minnesota election for US Senate, Al Franken beat Norm Coleman by less than three hundred votes. In that race, almost four thousand absentee ballots were not counted because votes didn’t sign the envelope, as required. The problem was a flaw in the design of the envelope. Voters didn’t notice the signature line, an innocent mistake that ultimately disenfranchised them. That screw-up prompted the Minnesota secretary of state’s office to redesign the absentee mail-in envelope to include an outsized X to prominently indicate where voters needed to sign. In the 2010 election, the missing-signature total dropped to 837.

The way your ballot looks influences how you vote. Anyone who paid attention to the 2000 presidential election will remember how “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County, Florida, confused thousands of voters, who may have voted for Patrick Buchanan rather than Al Gore, because the layout of the ballot was ambiguous. More recently, in the 2018 senate election in Florida, thousands of voters didn’t mark their ballots for that contest, because it appeared at the bottom of a long column of instructions—a column that many voters skipped. Election officials calculate that more than 30,000 votes may have been lost because of that design error. The winner of the Senate race, Rick Scott, won by less than 10,000 votes. No one will ever know if that margin of victory was attributable to the missing votes.

In 2020, as American politicians, election scholars and administrators try to figure out how conduct elections in a pandemic—and increasingly by mail—ballot design is going to be a critical factor in getting it right.

The Washington Post recently posted this very informative, four-minute video on this subject. Watch it here.

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In the final hour of the 2020 legislative session, the Missouri Senate passed SB631, which would allow Missourians to vote absentee by mail in 2020 in the upcoming August and November elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However—and this is a big one—unless you expect to be confined, ill or in a specified high-risk category for COVID-19, the absentee mail-in ballot still must be notarized. The provisions will go into effect once the bill is signed by the Governor. It will expire on December 31, 2020 so this provision will not continue beyond that date. At that point, the rules will revert to the confusing state of being that existed before SB631. So just when you’ve figured out what to do in 2020, the rules will change back again in 2021–adding a further level of consternation to a situation that could easily be remedied by simply allowing no-excuse absentee voting–as is allowed in 29 states and Washington, D.C. (in addition to Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii and Washington, where all voting is conducted by mail.)

The Missouri Voter Protection Coalition has created this chart in an effort to clarify the changes. The chart is a worthy effort to explain the overly complicated rules. No doubt, the new “system” will generate many calls to election hotlines across the state.

The post New rules for absentee voting in Missouri: More complicated than ever appeared first on Occasional Planet.

For those who don’t vote in the US because they think it’s too time-consuming, too complicated or too confusing, consider the voting process in the African nation of Burundi.

Burundi, for the Africa-map-challenged, like me, is landlocked country. It’s that little red dot on the map between Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and southeast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. Lake Tanganyika lies along its southwestern border. Its capital cities are Bjumbura ( the political capital) and Gitega (the economic capital). Burund’s population is about 11 million. The country’s literacy rate is 68 percent. It operates politically as a constitutional republic with a bi-cameral parliamentary structure. Currently, 24 different political parties hold seats or are vying for them.

And that’s where the complexity sets in. According to the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa [EISA], in parliamentary elections, each valid voter is given 24 ballots – each bearing the name and symbol of a different party – and two envelopes. In the polling booth, the voter puts her chosen ballot paper in the white envelope, and the rest into the black one. Exiting the booth, voters then put the white envelope with their chosen ballot paper into one box for votes cast, and the black envelope into another box, before having their thumbs marked with indelible ink so they can’t vote again. The number of black envelopes containing useless ballot papers (at any given polling station) have to match with the number of white envelopes to avoid cheating.

I have now read that description about a dozen times, and I think I’m beginning to understand it. But still, I’m glad I’m not a first-time voter in Burundi.

Burundi is slated to hold a presidential election on May 20. 2020. With six candidates vying for the job, voting will presumably be somewhat simpler than the complicated routine of parliamentary elections, and the current ruling party is expected, by knowledgeable observers, to win the day. Notably, other African nations have postponed their national elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, but as of this writing, Burundi is moving ahead.

The post How to vote in Burundi appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Oregon has conducted all of its statewide elections entirely by mail since 1998. A Huffington Post article explains how it works:

The process is simple. It’s secure. And it means residents don’t have to worry about leaving their houses and risk getting the coronavirus in order to vote. They don’t even have to worry about putting a stamp on their ballots; Gov. Kate Brown (D) signed a law last year that requires the state to pay for ballot postage.

…There are so many benefits to Oregon’s vote-by-mail system that it’s a wonder why other states haven’t already made mail-in voting an option for every voter, never mind during a public health emergency. The system is simple: Ballots are mailed to all registered voters’ addresses three weeks before each election, along with a pamphlet of information on candidates and issues. Voters mark them, sign them and drop them in a mailbox. Election officials verify every signature ― clerks are trained in forensics and will contact you if your signature doesn’t match ― and tally the results, which are easy to reproduce for recounts. They’re also hard to manipulate, which reduces the risk of foreign interference in U.S. elections.

“You can’t hack paper,” said the governor. “You can replicate and verify the results.”

It’s also cost-effective. Brown said while her state still operates some polling stations, its vote-by-mail elections cost 20% to 30% less than in-person voting because of reduced costs from staffing polling stations and ballot counting systems. Beyond that, Oregon has one of the highest voter participation rates in the country.

Let’s all be more like Oregon.

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