CQ WEEKLY
– COVER STORY
June 7, 2008 – 5:10 p.m.
Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
By Seth Stern, CQ Staff
CLEVELAND — Five months before Election Day, Jane Platten already has 448 items on her to-do list at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections — and the number is likely to double before November.
There’s been plenty to fix since last summer, when Platten became staff director of what she considered the “broken agency” that conducts the elections in Cleveland and its closest suburbs. Both the 2004 presidential balloting and the 2006 primary were marred by lines of voters four hours long in parts of the city, a rash of technological problems and the indictment of two election workers for allegedly cheating in their post-election audits. That prompted Ohio’s newly elected secretary of State to remove the country’s elections board and name new members, who then hired Platten.
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A year later, she says she’s optimistic her list-making and exacting standards will help ensure an honest and well-run election this fall in the largest county in one of the nation’s largest swing states. But many experts in election procedures say they’re not nearly so confident that either Ohio or the rest of the country will conduct elections that yield accurate and timely results — and thereby boost public confidence in the process.
“If it’s a very close election, we’re in real trouble,” says Peg Rosenfield, who for the past 40 years has watched elections in Ohio for the League of Women Voters, one of the nation’s pre-eminent civic advocacy groups.
And attention to the way the world’s largest democracy conducts its own elections is sure to grow now that the matchup for a historic 2008 presidential contest is set. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois last week secured the Democratic convention delegates necessary to lay claim to becoming the first African-American nominee of a major political party and the general-election opponent of Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Hundreds of millions of federal and state dollars have been spent during the past eight years on efforts to improve the nation’s voting logistics. But there’s no guarantee whatsoever that this year’s presidential election will be any less chaotic or more trustworthy than the previous two. In 2000, the outcome of an extraordinarily close contest was cast into doubt by several procedural and mechanical problems in Florida; in 2004, another close nationwide contest magnified the importance of similar problems in Ohio — its 20 electoral votes proving decisive to the re-election of George W. Bush .
That is not to say the voting system hasn’t been improved. In many parts of the country, new procedures and equipment have smoothed out nettlesome problems. But all the scrutiny that started after the contested 2000 election continues to bring problems to light. And some of the intended solutions introduced in this decade have created new and unexpected challenges. The situation in Ohio this year reflects apprehensions about elections nationwide — with concerns about the actions of state officials, the performance of county boards, the ability of poll workers and confusion about the rules of balloting.
Distrust in the system by both political parties has only hardened since the Supreme Court decided the race between Bush and Al Gore. Republicans and Democrats alike assume the worst about the motives of whatever partisan officials from the other side are overseeing the voting. And liberal activists are still seething with the conviction that the Republicans in charge in Ohio four years ago stole the state for Bush.
For their part, election officials have continued to adjust, reconsider and revamp voting technologies and procedures, often making alterations until so close to when the polls open that there’s essentially no time to perfect the final version of the system before it’s put into effect. That’s particularly true in Cuyahoga County and elsewhere in Ohio.
And given this year’s record primary turnout, the throngs at the polls Nov. 4 could overwhelm the legion of low-paid and sometimes minimally trained poll workers, who already find themselves overburdened by increasingly complicated voting rules and technology.
Ohio is particularly worthy of attention now because the nation’s seventh-most-populous state is potentially pivotal to the outcome of the contest between Obama and McCain. Registration in the state was split precisely as the presidential race began, with 47 percent of voters signed up with each party. Moreover, the state, with its 11.5 million people, looks very much like the nation’s mixture of cities, suburbs and farmland that straddle North and South. In both Ohio and the nation, for example, one in eight people is older than 64, one in four is younger than 18, about one in eight is African-American and about three in five are white-collar workers.
Those shared demographics help explain why no presidential candidate has lost Ohio and still captured the White House since 1960, when Richard Nixon carried the state and John F. Kennedy won the presidency. In 2004, Bush carried the state with 50.8 percent of the popular vote — and took 50.7 percent of the vote nationwide.
Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
Statewide: The Elusive Level Field
No one in Ohio has more riding on a smooth election this year than Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.
Like 38 other states, Ohio entrusts the administration of elections to that office. In almost every case, the secretary of State is a partisan and elective office — but the people who hold it are expected to put their party loyalties on the shelf when it comes to running elections. Brunner, a Democrat, won the job two years ago on a pledge to be much more neutral in administering elections than her Republican predecessor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who faced widespread criticism that he behaved in a much more partisan way than appropriate during the 2004 campaign.
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Blackwell went beyond accepting the honorary title of co-chairman of Bush’s re-election campaign, like other GOP officeholders; he actively campaigned for the president as well as for an anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative that was put on the ballot in part to draw more Bush voters to the polls. Democrats viewed virtually every one of Blackwell’s pre-election decisions — including requiring that voter registration applications be on a particular weight of paper stock — as intended to help the GOP.
“Blackwell did a lot of things that left people thinking he was trying to make the playing field not particularly even, that he was trying to put his thumb on the scale,” said Lawrence Norden, an election law attorney at New York University’s Brennan Center.
Bush carried the state by 119,000 votes out of 5.6 million cast, a big enough margin that Democratic challenger John Kerry decided not to challenge the results. Yet in the years since, the conviction among liberal activists that Republicans rigged the outcome has only grown.
Those suspicions have been fueled by a 2005 report by John Conyers Jr. , the Michigan Democrat who now chairs the House Judiciary Committee, that found “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio,” along with a 2006 article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone and several recent books with titles such as “What Happened in Ohio?” All argue that a series of decisions by Blackwell and local Republican officials, such as the allocation of too few voting machines to heavily Democratic precincts and secretive procedures for resolving election-night disputes, improperly tipped the state, and thereby the election, to Bush.
Blackwell could not be reached for comment and has not said much about those specifics in the past four years. But at the time he said, “We have the most scrutinized election system in the United States, and we have met every test.”
Brunner, an election lawyer and trial court judge, won the secretary of State job with 55 percent in 2006, during the same election in which Blackwell was trounced as the GOP gubernatorial nominee.
She promised that she wouldn’t “be an umpire and wear the jersey of one of the teams.” But almost from the start, Republicans said she was acting in a partisan manner by removing more GOP local election officials than Democrats and making decisions designed to ease the filing of legal challenges by Democrats come Election Day.
And her signature proposal — legislation to replace all the electronic voting machines in the state with paper ballots — died in the General Assembly. Leading the opposition to that bill was state House Speaker Jon Husted, the likely Republican candidate for secretary of State in 2010.
Not all of the criticism directed at Brunner is based on partisanship. She has taken heat from all sides for appearing to single out local officials who disagree with her decisions. And many local officials in both parties viewed her proposal to replace all electronic voting machines as an overreaction to the problems that occurred in 2006.
Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
But Republicans see partisan motivation in the most widely accepted change: Brunner’s decision to replace all four members of the troubled Board of Elections in Cuyahoga County. Top Republicans view that action as nothing more than retribution against one of the members: Bob Bennett, the longtime state GOP chairman.
Much of what appears to be driving the Republican criticism of Brunner has nothing to do with her administration of elections. The secretary of State is one of three elected officials on the board that will redraw the state legislative districts after the 2010 census. And the other two, Republican state Auditor Mary Taylor and Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland , appear heavy favorites for re-election in two years. So if the GOP can oust Brunner in 2010, the party stands to control the redistricting process that follows. “It certainly is a primary seat for that reason,” says Kevin DeWine, a state legislator and deputy chairman of the state GOP.
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Similar, partisanship-infused situations exist in states from coast to coast, although a few have adopted other models. In Wisconsin, for example, a government accountability board composed of nonpartisan retired judges oversees elections. After Florida’s 2000 debacle — which turned largely on the actions of Katherine Harris, then the secretary of State and also the state’s Bush campaign co-chair — the Legislature moved partway to insulate the job from partisanship by having it filled by gubernatorial appointment instead of statewide election.
Still, there has hardly been a groundswell for nonpartisan election administration. Ohio voters rejected a 2005 ballot initiative that would have created a board of election supervisors with members picked by all three branches of the state government. The proposal, caught up in a broader package of proposals on reapportionment, got just 30 percent of the vote.
Voters prefer electing their chief election officers as a way to hold them accountable for their performance, says Doug Chapin of Electionline.org. At the same time, they want officials to act in nonpartisan ways once picked.
Experience in Ohio suggests that might not be possible, says Dan Tokaji, an election law professor at Ohio State University. “As long as you have a partisan official in charge of elections, you will have the perception if not the reality of unfairness,” he said.
In the County: Don’t Trust, but Verify
It takes both a Republican and a Democrat to gain access to the most sensitive sections of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections warehouse, in an industrial neighborhood called Midtown just beyond downtown Cleveland. Each party knows only half the combination to the safe and vault, and a lock belonging to each party is attached to the fence surrounding the ballots, computer servers and electronic memory cards.
All of Ohio’s 88 county election boards are similarly set up to encourage each party to look over the other’s shoulder. Each board has two Democratic and two Republican members, most of whom are top officials in their county party organizations. Relying on naked partisanship to guarantee a clean process is exactly the point, say local election officials — one of whom calls the arrangement “the fox guarding the fox.”
The system works best when each party is equally vigilant. But it can also breed a bipartisan coziness that can turn the boards into mutually beneficial patronage mills, says Rosenfield of the League of Women Voters. That’s what happened in Cleveland, where, for years, competence came second to family and political connections as an elections board job qualification.
“It was the dumping grounds,” said Ronald B. Adrine, a Cleveland Municipal Court judge who served on an independent panel charged with reviewing Cuyahoga County’s elections in 2006.
Patronage is one reason the county has a history of voting irregularities dating to at least 1972, when a federal judge ordered polls held open an extra 5.5 hours in what the Los Angeles Times labeled “one of the most dramatic collapses of voting procedures in modern American history.” Twenty years later, the Cleveland Civic League warned that “the partisanship which pervades every aspect of the operations of the Board of Elections must be eliminated, and performance and merit must become the new standard, or no real progress will occur.”
Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
But things may never have been worse than when the county introduced touch-screen voting for the May 2006 primary. One in five polling places opened late, equipment malfunctioned and dozens of the electronic memory cards that held the results went missing after the polls closed. At a polling station serving the Garden Valley public housing project, in a community center lunchroom with bars on the windows, several poll workers failed to show up, and those who did couldn’t get the machines up and running. By the time voting began at 1:30 p.m., surrogates for rival candidates were fighting outside. “It was extremely chaotic,” recalls Tinah Mischer, the community center director.
Such problems are what prompted Brunner to seize control of the board and force out its members, whose replacements then promoted the 40-year-old Platten to be the fifth county elections director since 2000. (The others had all left under a cloud of scandal or mismanagement.)
“This is an agency that has gone through a lot of trauma and a lot of transitions,” says Platten. “I do know my standard is different than what’s been the case in the past.”
So far, Platten is being credited with running the Cuyahoga elections staff more smoothly and less secretively. “It’s a whole different attitude toward dealing with the public,” said Ron Olson of Ohio’s Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections. And the March4 presidential and congressional primaries in the county — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York won the state’s Democratic contest, but Obama carried Cuyahoga with 53 percent — leaves Stanley Miller, executive director of the Cleveland NAACP, “very optimistic” about the general election.
Technology: Paper’s Comeback
The biggest challenge facing Platten and her board is that they still don’t know how the county’s votes will be counted the night of Nov. 4. They’re scrambling to arrange for the machinery required to count the county’s new paper ballots — the third method of balloting to be used in Cleveland in as many federal election cycles.
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Voters in Cuyahoga County and most of the rest of Ohio were given punch card ballots for years — including 2004, even though the balky reliability of that system, brought to life by the thousands of indecipherable “hanging chads” and “dimpled chads” in Florida in 2000, brought national ridicule to that methodology. It took until 2006 for the county to switch to touch-screen electronic voting machines, purchased for $21 million under the auspices of a 2002 law — written with the 2000 contest plainly in mind — that set the first nationwide standards for conducting elections and gave the states money to meet those standards.
But a wave of skepticism about the reliability of electronic voting, even on machines that provide a paper record, has swung the pendulum back toward paper only. The trend was hastened when the second-closest congressional race of 2006, once again in Florida, was contested for months while the loser pressed her case that the electronic machines undercounted her support. (In March the House upheld the election of Republican Vern Buchanan .) California, Florida and New Mexico have all switched back to paper-based systems for 2008 — creating in each of those states a new set of complexities similar to those in Ohio.
In December, Brunner proposed that the 53 counties with electronic equipment switch to paper. The proposal would win her a “Profile in Courage” award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, but legislators balked at providing the $64 million required, and she succeeded only in requiring all counties to offer a paper ballot as an alternative.
But, having taken over the Cuyahoga system, she was able to force a switch to paper there for the March primary. Voters marked paper ballots resembling multiple-choice standardized tests, which were then transported from 576 polling stations to the elections warehouse and tabulated by 16 optical scanners, each about the size of a backyard gas grill.
Brunner insisted on centralized counting of ballots, though many election experts say tabulating the paper sheets in real time at each polling place is preferable because voters can then be informed when a ballot is completed incorrectly. Republicans also criticized the minimal security applied to transporting the ballots to the warehouse: They were piled into cardboard boxes and not always sealed tight.
After the primary, the state legislature prohibited countywide tabulating and refused Cuyahoga’s request for an exception this November. The county sought to delay buying the necessary equipment for use at polling places until the federal government certified as acceptable the type of machine the county wanted, which creates images of each paper ballot and stores its tabulations on memory cards. So, the elections board is now considering its options — ranging from a one-time $1.9 million lease to a $15 million deal to lease antiquated equipment for this fall and buy the new machines when they’re blessed by the federal Election Assistance Commission.
Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
With Election Day just 21 weeks away, the decision needs to be made soon. The paper ballot cannot be designed until the machinery that will read it is chosen — and only then can the training of poll workers begin. “We’re getting very close to election time, and we still don’t have certainty,” says Rob Frost, one of the two new Republicans on the county board.
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Keith Cunningham, the director of elections in rural Allen County, Ohio, southwest of Toledo, says a smooth election requires having everything in place well in advance. “When the presidential election cycle begins in January, the election system is what it is,” he said. “To change at that point just presents too much risk.”
Ballots: Too Provisional?
That’s a common refrain among local election administrators: Too much change being adopted by those above them too close to the voting leaves them too little time to guarantee a problem-free election.
“People who have never worked a poll in their life or run an election in their life are making laws and directives that are a big challenge on Election Day to a successful election,” said Denny White, the director of the Board of Elections in Franklin County, which takes in Columbus, Ohio’s capital.
“We drive the train and they’re still laying down the track, and it makes it extremely challenging,” White said of the Ohio secretary of State, who works out of an office tower just a couple blocks down East Broad Street from the Franklin County board’s squat headquarters.
White and other local officials also have complaints about the 2002 federal election process law. The law requires states to establish statewide voter registration databases and set minimum identification requirements for voters, and it required that provisional ballots be given to voters whose registration status is in doubt. Such ballots aren’t counted unless the voter’s eligibility is confirmed, and the processes used for that task, which were left to each state to devise for itself, have created confusion and allegations of inconsistency.
Voters in Ohio are more likely to receive provisional ballots than voters nationally. In the 2004 presidential election, 160,000 Ohioans who went to the polls, or 2.8 percent of the turnout, ended up with a provisional ballot, while the national figure was 2.6 percent. In the 2006 midterm, the provisional ballot rate in Ohio grew a bit to 3.1 percent, even as the national figure declined to 1.2 percent. In fact, Ohio and California alone accounted for 52 percent of all provisional ballots cast nationally in 2006.
There are also big differences across the state. One in 20 people who showed up at the polls in urban Franklin County was given a provisional ballot two years ago, but that was true for only one out of every 250 in rural Harrison County. How many of these ballots end up being rejected also varies greatly, from one in eight in Franklin County to one in three in Lucas County, which includes Toledo. Candice Hoke, a Cleveland State University law professor, found wide variation among the rejection rates in the different precincts of Cuyahoga County, too.
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Such differences explain why provisional ballots are “most likely to offer a candidate a fruitful” avenue for challenging a narrow election defeat, a study last year by Ohio State University concluded. But voting experts still aren’t entirely sure what explains all the variation.
The transience of an area’s population is one obvious reason. Counties with college campuses — such as Franklin, the home of Ohio State — or industries that are attracting workers from other places generally have higher provisional rates. Poor people also tend to move more frequently in search of a solution to their financial problems, which helps explain why more provisional votes are cast in Cleveland than in Cuyahoga’s wealthier suburbs.
Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
In addition, state rules governing provisional votes aren’t always clear, and different counties interpret them differently. Some that apply strict interpretations reject ballots that don’t include a legible date of birth on the envelope. Cuyahoga counts provisional ballots from people who vote in the wrong precinct, but other counties don’t.
And many poll workers don’t appear to understand the degree of individual judgment they’re allowed to apply on Election Day, and as a result tend to issue provisional ballots more frequently than required. That was the experience cited by 70-year-old Paul O’Neil, a poll worker in South Euclid, a Cleveland suburb of 24,000. “If you weren’t certain,” he said about Election Day 2006, “you just made it a provisional ballot.”
The complexity of the regulations also frustrates the people paid to think about election law every day. “The various legislatures, state and federal, have legislated this to the point of inoperability,” said Cunningham of Allen County.
Nonetheless, Democratic Rep. Rush D. Holt of New Jersey, who is pushing legislation to promote more widespread use of paper ballots and electronic machines that generate paper receipts, has little sympathy for local officials who complain about being put upon. “As long as there are such problems and millions of Americans don’t trust the process, then we should be involved,” he said. “And if it’s a little inconvenient for the local poll workers, they’re just going to have to meet standards that are good enough for everyone.”
Poll Workers: An Army of One Day
Provisional ballot rules are just one way the burden has increased for the nation’s 1.4 million poll workers, most of whom are senior citizens. They’ve also had to adjust to constantly changing voting technology and learn new voter identification requirements adopted in many states.
Ohio’s law, enacted in 2006, requires voters to present identification that includes a current address — but driver’s licenses are accepted, even though the state motor vehicle bureau doesn’t mandate that drivers report changes of address. “It’s like finding your way through a maze,” says Tokaji.
Other states are likely to adopt more stringent identification requirements since the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in April to uphold Indiana’s strictest-in-the-nation voter ID statute. And the pressure on poll workers is likely to intensify further this November, when the Obama vs. McCain presidential race is expected to fuel a surge in turnout perhaps unseen in the last half-century.
Local officials say the nation doesn’t fully comprehend how complicated it is to train and deploy — for just one day — a workforce equivalent in size to the active-duty U.S. military.
In Cuyahoga County, Platten says her task of deploying 7,500 poll workers is comparable to opening 576 small businesses in the county’s libraries, church halls and school cafeterias. Most poll workers in the county will be paid $9 an hour — $171 for spending four hours in training and then working 15 hours on Election Day.
The long hours, high pressure and relatively low pay explain why recruiting poll workers has often proved difficult. Cuyahoga didn’t have the option in the past of being too choosy about picking those who are responsible for maintaining an atmosphere of order, organization and fairness at its polls. A 2006 report found “polling place personnel who had a poor work ethic being returned repeatedly to poll worker positions.” The county didn’t even begin trying to deny the job to felons, as required by state law, until 2006, and still relies on applicants to report their own criminal pasts rather than conducting background checks.
The poor quality of poll workers is particularly problematic in inner-city neighborhoods, says Rev. Tony Minor, pastor at Cleveland’s Community of Faith Assembly church. “Within black precincts, it just seems like the folks just don’t have a clue,” he said.
Research suggests that voters’ confidence that their ballots will be counted relates closely to how competent they perceive their poll workers to be. Distrust in Cleveland remains high. In the primary three months ago, many voters became upset when poll workers directed them to remove a perforated stub on the ballots labeled “do not remove.”
Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
Platten says she’s working to improve the quality of her workforce, as well as their training. Recruiting of high school and college students, government workers and employees of businesses that grant a paid day off on Election Day has helped reduce the average age of poll workers in the county to 55 from 72 since the last presidential election. Testing at the end of training has weeded out low performers. And revamped training for this fall will put more emphasis on provisional ballot rules.
But there are limits to how much election officials can increase demands on their one-day workforce. O’Neil didn’t work the polls in South Euclid during the primary and says the new rules and long hours have taken a toll. “It’s getting to be a little too much,” he said.
Platten has already stocked up for the election inside her windowless office, where dry-erase boards and county maps cover the pastel purple walls. There’s a coffee maker and a case of Diet Coke, all in preparation for what she calls her “election diet.” She predicts that she’ll be drinking four cups of coffee and seven sodas by Election Day and accepts certain other realities as equally unavoidable.
Things will go wrong, no matter how well she prepares, Platten says. And she accepts that “I walk into November knowing somebody is going to sue us.”
Litigation is all but certain, though whether it will determine the outcome of the presidential election — in Cleveland, Ohio or the nation — depends on the closeness of the margin separating McCain and Obama. If the initial statewide difference is fewer than 5,000 votes, Ohio State’s Tokaji says the ultimate returns are sure to be decided in court, but a margin above 50,000 means the results will probably be free of litigation.
That’s why, Rosenfield of the League of Women Voters says, the election officials’ prayer remains this: “Dear Lord, I don’t care who wins, but let it be a landslide, because no one cares if it’s a landslide.”
FOR FURTHER READING: Holt’s bill is
Comments
Thank you CQ for this thoughtful, comprehensive, and well-researched article on an important factor in our democracy that is little understood and too often taken for granted which is the counting of our votes. I'm glad that California, the state I reside in, as well as other states have gone back to paper ballots. I truly hope for the sake of our democracy that the votes are being and will be counted accurately. I believe that Florida has still not figured out why so many votes were missing from the 13th district of Florida in Sarasota County. Hopefully, that and other voting mysteries and mishaps will be solved and/or fixed so they don't continue to occur. Unfortunately I have my doubts that this will be the case. Thank you again for bringing attention to this issue and please continue to do so in the name of good journalism and in the name of democracy.
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