Installment 2 of Election Protection Hearing in Miami on 3 Feb 2005

[eomer]

Here's the second installment of the Election Protection hearing in Miami on 2 Feb 2005.

Note that the last witness in this installment is Susan Pynchon, who, along with Bev Harris, obtained evidence out of the trash in Volusia County. (I think I'm getting the hang of this "be the media" thing - how's that for a teaser?)

In case you missed the first installment, here's the link:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x319233

Second installment:

Moderator: Jorge Mursuli, People for the American Way
Panelists:
Courtnay Strickland, ACLU-Florida
Ana Cela Harris, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under the Law
Andy Rivera, the Advancement Project
Jill Hanson, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
Adora Obi Nweze, National Board of Directors, NAACP
Edeline Clermont, SEIU
Reggie Mitchell, Florida Legal Director, Election Protection

<Continuing with testimony of witnesses>

Witness Cheryl Grenning: Thank you for inviting me to talk about the absentee ballot on behalf of my son, Hans Grenning, who is a freshman at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

My first part of the voting odyssey began on April 2nd when we had an open house at college and there was a table about voting. When we looked at the options we decided that his best option might be to register in Broward County where we live and request an absentee ballot from Broward County. He went to college on the 18th of August and as soon as he was able to get his cell phone he had the number to call Broward County. In August, September and October he was very frugal with his daytime minutes – it took about 40 minutes to get through to the office and <inaudible> because he never got his ballot.

By mid-October I had received a publication from Broward County. In it was a website address so he tried that, went through the process and registered on the internet around the 15th of October.

About a week later the ballot still had not arrived and it was within three weeks of the election when we begin to panic and I decided if I had to go up and get him and return that’s sixteen hours of drive – four hours each way, two hundred twenty-five miles, it wasn’t going to work. But my second son said, well we can buy him a car, so he drove from Daytona Beach to Tampa, bought him a beater car, brought it back to Daytona, registered it and said, all you have to do, Ma, is the paperwork. So he sent me the paperwork and on the 27th of October I went to get the auto tag and, much to my dismay, the west Broward County Courthouse was also the early voter registration site and there was no place to park in the parking lot, the lines were way out the door and I decided there was no way I could possibly get my auto tag before, you know, I had to go to work that day.

In any case, I called the voter protection after that, Senator Nelson’s office. On Friday the 27th I got a call back from Senator Nelson’s office in Orlando assuring me that it had been Fedexed out that day. He stayed at the community association all afternoon in hopes he could get it so he could send it right back - it never came.

I wrote a letter on the 29th of November to Dr. Brenda Snipes <Broward County Supervisor of Elections>, which she has yet to answer.

One other very quick thing – I worked with the National Opinion Research Center on the Florida Ballot Study after the 2000 election… personally led a team that visited eight counties including Miami-Dade, Broward and Duval, which were some of the largest. Because it’s a research project I can’t really speak in confidentiality about it but Ford Fessenden of the New York Times and Dan Keating of the Washington Post did a wonderful job in consortium with his papers, and if you don’t have access to this wonderful study, which was not so much to determine whether Bush or Gore won the first election but the whole election process and, the chads, what it was out of all these issues were its grounds of research. And I thank you. Well, I guess that one good thing is, my son is still enjoying his beater car I got for him. Thank you.

Panelist Rivera: Did he ever get to vote?

Witness Grenning: No.

Panelist Rivera: And has he been able to determine whether or not he can get an absentee for an upcoming election yet or is that still…

Witness Grenning: I would be happy to leave you with a letter that I wrote to Dr. Snipes to which I have no answer.

Moderator Mursuli: Does someone from… you may not have it, I don’t want to put you on the spot if you don’t have the information… does someone from Senator Nelson’s office… do you have a comment at all about that? Do you have any information, or… no? okay, I just wanted to give you an opportunity in case you did.

Witness Randall Marshall: I am the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida.

It’s easy… at first I’d like to thank the Election Protection coalition not only for what you’re doing tonight but for the many, many months of advance preparation, the many, many hours that every organization and thousands of volunteers put in trying to make for a fair and free election.

I’m here to follow up on what Ms. Grenning just talked about because this was not unique. This is one of the things that happens with elections in Florida, is that protecting the right to vote is often a moving target because what happened in 2000 doesn’t mean that it will re-happen in 2004 and yet there is always some kind of new problem that arises.

Absentee ballots was, in our belief, a systemic problem in Miami-Dade County, in Broward County and Palm Beach County. There wasn’t something unique about one or two people – it was thousands of people. In fact, of the voting-related complaints that the ACLU of Florida got, independent of the Election Protection coalition, 40% of our complaints dealt with absentee ballots. For the Election Protection coalition information – about 12% of the complaints in Miami-Dade were absentee ballot problems. 17 ½ % in Broward County were absentee ballot problems and nearly 16% in Palm Beach County.

In fact, I think we’re all aware that in Broward County over 13,000 ballots were sent to voters very late, 9,000 on the Saturday prior to election, and on election day we were getting calls from people who were frantic – they had called their Senator’s office, they had called the Supervisor of Elections, they had called the Governor’s office and no one could do anything to help them because they had either received their ballot too late to get it back by 7 pm election night or hadn’t received it at all.

The ACLU, along with Florida Legal Services, did unsuccessfully file a lawsuit trying to extend the time, received additional help <inaudible> from many of the election coalition partners. This is an area that needs to be taken up and looked at and dealt with for the future.

One last comment I do have to make is, because I think it involves the good work that the Election Protection coalition has done, is there is going to be an attempt to change the fifty foot rule to a one hundred foot rule and that’s going to severely hamper the amount of work that can be done on the ground and I would encourage the Election Protection coalition to do whatever it can to oppose this type of change in the legislation. Thank you.

Panelist Hanson: Randall, with regard to the absentee ballot issue, I know, I worked in a polling place on election day and a lot of people came in said, I did not get my absentee ballot, can I vote? And the person that was running the polling place where I was was, at least for a time, inclined not to let these people vote even by provisional ballot. Is there any suggestion that you would make with regard to that particular issue?

Witness Marshall: Well, number one, and I think this again underscores part of the problem that we have on election day, it is absolutely incorrect as a matter of law that a person who had been sent an absentee ballot cannot vote on election day. It is incumbent upon the Supervisor of Elections office to ascertain whether that ballot has been received or voted and the individual is absolutely entitled to show up at the polls and vote.

Panelist Mitchell: One of the proposals by the state Supervisor of Elections is to require a deadline, a date certain, for requests for absentee ballots. I think it’s the Friday – the cutoff the Friday before election day – and to also track, the Secretary of State’s office is talking about tracking absentee ballots to make sure where they are in the mail process. And the last proposal was to require that all absentee ballots be sent directly to the Supervisor of Elections office and not through any third party. What are your thoughts on those, and I hate to put you on the spot, what are your thoughts on those?

Witness Marshall: Well, I… certainly there needs to be a uniform standard that ensures that applications received are timely responded to. Part of the disappointment in the court testimony was listening to Broward County’s Supervisor of Elections testify that, well, after all there is no requirement in state statute or in regulations that says when we have to send an absentee ballot when it’s requested. It was a cavalier attitude that, well, when and if we get around to it we’ll get it to you. There ought to be a mechanism that ensures there is a methodology to track and keep track of those ballots and so I think that would be a very useful thing to do. Also, in terms of a cutoff date, again, it did no good to send 9,000 ballots on Saturday. It’s been said that they were sent by overnight delivery… this woman’s son didn’t get hers… I don’t know anybody who did get theirs by overnight delivery and I think that is seriously a problem.

Moderator Mursuli: Thank you Mr. Marshall.

Cathy Gilbert: I did not have particular problems personally with casting my vote but I was told that this would be also the place to for sharing my concerns and my <inaudible> support toward reforms. I think that even though I didn’t have problems casting my vote, I did… my right to participate in a fair and democratic election was compromised both because other people did have problems casting their vote and also because I think the infrastructure, the structure of this election itself is not as fair as it should be. What I’d like to do is just kind of give a laundry list, so it will just be pretty quick.

Basically, my concerns <inaudible> accountability, voter access and rights, and systems structure or systems <inaudible>. For accountability, I feel that we need to have a paper trail… actually, I’d rather have paper ballots, and if we had optical scanning or otherwise, but something very tangible, would like to have a paper ballot. If we are going to use the <inaudible> machines, I think that the software itself should be open source, which would be transparent because with transparency would be more trustworthy and more reliable, stable and less expensive, as used elsewhere, such as in Australia. We should not be purchasing proprietary software that cannot even be accredited.
<portion unavailable due to changing tape>
Proportional representation would allow for plurality representation. Fair redistricting by judges rather than by parties… to work on the gerrymandering that we have <inaudible>. And public campaign financing for <inaudible> elections. Thank you.

Panelist Clermont: Ms. Gilbert, you spoke about paper <inaudible>, when in election 2000 we had all those pregnant ballots… you talk about paper ballots again… <inaudible> problems that we had…the use of the pregnant, the chad wasn’t… what do you think - we should come back to that?

Witness Gilbert: Well, if you have… there are various systems that… I wish that I… I think with optical scanning for one that you can have good results. I’m not actually an expert on the paper ballot different systems but at least you have something tangible and I think you can have something with a paper ballot that is both tangible and has a high degree of reliability.

Moderator Mursuli: Thank you Ms. Gilbert. Thank you very much.

Witness Mary Peeler: Good evening. My name is Mary Peeler. I serve as the Voter Empowerment Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP.

With over 17 hundred developing youth groups across the United States, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots civil rights organization. The NAACP has worked to protect the rights of voters since 1909. Throughout our history the association has fought against <inaudible> and was instrumental in the development and enactment of the Voting Rights Act, the Help Americans Vote Act and many other key pieces of legislation and that ensure the rights of all Americans to vote and to have their votes counted.

The association received numerous complaints from voters prior to and on election day including but not limited to complaints involving non-uniform instructions on when to offer provisional ballots, long lines at the polls during early voting, inadequate number of early voting sites, the names of registered voters not on voting rolls, improper requests for identification particularly during early voting, provisional ballots not being counted and voters not receiving their requested absentee ballots on time.

The NAACP and many other organizations registered record numbers of voters in 2004. It appears that while voter registration increased, very few states and local boards of elections increased their staffing or revised their process or procedures to adequately handle the increased volume of voter registration. In addition, many election officers did not increase their capacity to encounter the significant increase in voter turnout during early voting and on Election Day. They also did not adequately increase staffing or revise their procedures to process the large volume of requests for absentee ballots in a timely manner.

The NAACP makes the following recommendations: to ensure that every eligible voter has an opportunity to vote, to have his or her vote counted; develop a uniform and equitable system for counting provisional ballots; revise the process for distribution of absentee ballots to ensure that local boards of elections can distribute absentee quickly, preferably by next-day mail; provide proper training for poll workers on the identification requirements and provisional ballots; recruit additional poll workers to ensure adequate staffing at all precincts; increase the number of early voting sites; and verification of votes.

The NAACP has endorsed the Voting Opportunity and Technology Enhancement Rights of 2005 that was recently introduced in Congress. This bill would mandate provisions to address many of the areas that the <inaudible> bill left to the states. The bill will also mandate that the election system commission develop a formula for the number of voting <inaudible> based on the number of registered voters.

The problems and voting irregularities that occurred in the 2004 election dishonor the legacy of the many men, women and children who shed blood, sweat and tears fighting for the right to vote. Their legacy and the citizens of this country deserve better.

Moderator Mursuli: Thank you Ms. Peeler. Any questions for the speaker? I think you were fairly clear… thank you very much.

Susan Pynchon: My name is Susan Pynchon. I’m here from Volusia County, which is up in the Deland area. Actually I’m vacationing, got off a sailboat to be here tonight, so that’s… dressed the way I am. I requested permission ahead of time to speak for five minutes – if you feel my thoughts aren’t relevant please just stop me after three.

I’m the Executive Director of Florida Fair Elections Coalition located in… we have an office in Deland, Florida. We’re newly organized following the 2004 election. I also personally have a lawsuit against the County of Volusia. My remarks tonight are going to be quite different from most of the other remarks that I think you will hear. I’ve been working with Bev Harris from Black Box Voting. I ended up going through the trash at the elections office in Deland to get much of the information that was the basis for my lawsuit. Along with, I will say, Ellen Brodsky, from Broward County, also went through the trash in Deland.

Moderator Mursuli: There’s a story for you Robert… in the trash… <apparently directing his remark to a reporter in the audience>.

Witness Pynchon: It’s a great… yes, look at blackboxvoting.org website for some amazing election fraud information.

The first comment I’d like is that the law needs to be changed – there’s not enough time to contest an election. You have ten days following the end of an election in order to bring a contest. We still, in Volusia County, have not received the results of the election. You know, on a disk with all the voter names?

The Volusia County election was an absolute mess. We have op scan equipment up there – Diebold AccuVote op scan equipment – and that is where you fill in with ink on a ballot your and then put that ballot in a machine. It sounds great. However, we have no faith that those paper ballots themselves have not been tampered with and this leads to the second major point I would like to make that affects your counties as well.

There is no security. The securities for Election Day, as bad as they may be, were not even extended by the legislature to cover early voting. Now you all may be aware of that, but when they passed early voting in June 2004, none of the securities apply to early voting. In Volusia County, almost 20% of our residents voted by early voting. I called the state again today – I wanted to know the percent of people who voted early voting for the whole state of Florida. They told me you have to call the individual county to get those records. They’re not even giving out that information. But let’s just assume if it’s similar to Volusia County that at least 20%, approximately 20%, of Florida’s residents voted by early voting, and that number’s going to increase every year.

And just a quick example, in Volusia County, the ballots… we had four early voting sites. The paper ballots were brought back in manila envelopes to the election office to a place where the safe had access by numerous people, with no log as to who had access to that safe.

The second point I’d like to make is that all of us need to be looking at our election offices and the security procedures that are in place there. In Leon County, up in Tallahassee, there’s an elections official named Ion Sancho <Supervisor of Elections>. If you talk to anyone in his department, they use the words, openness and transparency, security. They have meetings constantly about how can they make things so secure, more secure.

In Volusia County we have memory cards that are like little time bombs. In the trash I found a memo from Diebold stating that Volusia County had more memory card failures than all its other Florida customers combined. We had 57 memory card failures. I only know that because I found a report in the trash. That was not publicized, it was not a part of the official conduct of elections report to the state.

These are things that we all need to be looking at. We have to be looking at the security procedures in place at each of our elections office.

Another point I’d like to make is that Diebold, and I don’t… do you have Diebold here… do you have ES&S for the… ES&S? Allright, so I’m more familiar with Diebold but they have security procedures in place. They disputed that fraud can exist because of ‘X’, you know, ‘A’ reason, ‘B’ reason, ‘C’ reason. The problem is the canvassing board doesn’t know they’re responsible for certifying the election. And they don’t realize that these security procedures are in place.

And I could go on and give you specific examples but… in Volusia County the canvassing board rubber stamps the numbers that are brought by a Supervisor of Elections – they don’t know about poll tapes, they don’t know to check the memory cards, there are not internal inventory numbers assigned to the memory cards to make sure that they can’t be misused. We had nine additional memory cards programmed that were never used that could of… with plenty of opportunity to use those fraudulently.

Allright, the last… I’ll just list, laundry list, the last points I’d like to make. The canvassing boards need to be better trained. There need to be implementation of the manufacturer’s guidelines to prevent fraud. There need to be protections in place for early voting passed by the legislature, the same as election day.

And the last item is the felons list. When Jeb Bush was disallowed his, I believe, 44,000 names this time he told each county that they needed to implement their own list. However, those names were already available in the central voter database. We each need to be checking our counties and the felons list that was actually used for this past election to make sure that those names, and I can’t verify this, but I’m just saying we need to check in our individual counties because I still haven’t been able to receive the felons list yet from Volusia County. So to make sure that that list wasn’t just divided up among the counties and that some of those same names were inaccurately included.

There’s more… but thank you very much.

Panelist Rivera: <barely audible, suggests that remainder of Ms. Pynchon’s material may be submitted in writing>.

Witness Pynchon: Okay, thank you. Thanks very much.

The first and second installments cover 7 out of 19 witnesses. A few of the remaining witnesses spoke in Hatian Creole so I won't provide a transcript of that part unless I find someone to translate. Other than that I'll follow up with the rest of the transcript during the coming week as my schedule permits.

[MelissaB]

1. Thank you, eomer!

:toast:

[Lydia Guerra]

2. Thank You, Thank You

for keeping us informed about Florida and ongoing hearings regarding election fraud.