Another Bill in Tennessee to Discourage Voting

On March 15, 2010, in Elections, State Politics, by Mary Mancini

Long Lines to VoteI am so confused about what makes one a patriotic American. I always thought it was things like participating in the democratic process by voting and encouraging other voting-like activities.

So if that’s the case then the opposite of being a patriotic American would be not voting or discouraging other not-voting-like activities in others, right?

HB1770, a bill sponsored by Rep. Curry Todd that comes before the House Elections Subcommittee tomorrow afternoon proposes to make “various revisions to the election laws including allowing a person to email a transfer of voter registration with a scanned signature and increasing maximum size of precincts from 5,000 voters to 7,500 voters.”

Basically, Todd’s bill is Step 1 in a 2-step process that could – if we don’t monitor county election commission meetings very closely – artificially manufacture long lines on election day.

Step 1, let’s load precinct with 2,500 more voters than we allow now. Step 2, let’s allocate fewer voting machines in each of these precincts with the 2,500 more voters. Mix together and then, Viola!, long lines!

And longs lines = discouraged voters who don’t have time to wait. We saw these longs and discouraging lines during the 2004 and 2006 elections and the hope was that we would never see them again.

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Very Sneaky:Two Voter Suppression Bills in One

On February 9, 2010, in Elections, State Politics, by Mary Mancini

Vote Baby VoteA bill that would require a birth certificate to vote is back and this time it’s packing a requirement for a photo ID to vote as well.

Today the House Elections Subcommittee will hear HB0270 (by Rep. Eric Watson, R-Cleveland, the vice-chair of the committee), the bill that would require one of the following to register to vote if you have recently moved to Tennessee or if you move from one county to another:

(1) Driver license, driver certificate, or other ID issued by the department of safety or equivalent governmental agency of another state if proof of United States citizenship is evident;
(2) A legible photocopy your birth certificate;
(3) A legible photocopy of a United States passport;
(4) Naturalization documents
(5) Other documents or methods of proof that are established pursuant to the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; or
(6) The applicant’s federal Bureau of Indian Affairs card number, tribal treaty card number, or tribal enrollment number.

Nothing new, we saw the same bill last year and discussed the barriers to participation in the democratic process this would put in place on the elderly and working poor.

What is new, interestingly, is the last line of the summary of this bill:

“This bill requires voters to present one form of identification that bears the name, address and photograph of the voter to the registrar in order to vote.”

I wonder if legislators know that they will actually be voting on two voter suppression bills in one? Both of which would, as Senator Thelma Harper stated last year, put “an awful lot of stumbling blocks in folks way in order for them to register to vote, change their voter registration, just to move from other states and cities here to register to vote.”

The Elections Subcommittee will hear HB270 today immediately following the State and Local Government Committee which meets at noon.

More on HB270 from WPLN’s Capitol Hill correspondent Joe White.

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A Memphis Flyer Editorial Calls for the Implementation of Paper Ballot Law

On December 18, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

From the Memphis Flyer staff:

Addressing the lingering but increasingly moot question of the 2008 Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, Tennessee secretary of state Tre Hargett last week insisted in Memphis that “we’re going to be prepared to implement that law, no matter what” and went on to float two options. One was to lease optical-scan voting machines with 2002-vintage specificatons; another was to buy newer ones, scheduled to be marketed next spring.

Either set of machines would do what the TVCA — passed with virtual bipartisan unanimity by the 2008 General Assembly — required for the 2010 election cycle statewide: namely, count paper ballots so as to provide both an immediate electronic total and the reliability of a “paper trail” to ensure accuracy.

Hargett and state election coordinator Mark Goins had for almost a year been basing much of their opposition to implementing the TVCA on the premise that no machines were available that met specificatons of the U.S. Election Assistance Commisson. Nashville chancellor Russell Perkins effectively removed that objection in a recent ruling that extant machines meeting the commission’s 2002 guidelines would be adequate for the task.

Unfortunately, Perkins declined to grant plaintiffs’ request for an injunction directing state officials to proceed forthwith in implementing the TVCA — evidently trusting Hargett and Goins to proceed on their own in good faith.

We have noted editorially — and skeptically — once before that such good faith seemed to be lacking and that the question of implementing the act had manifestly become a partisan one, with state Democrats calling for strict compliance in time for next year’s elections and Republican officials doing their best to resist.

We predicted the next step, and, lo and behold, there it was last week in Hargett’s assertion — a fallback one, as it were — that “this has always been about the cost to the various counties” and that “the real question is if there are other costs required of the counties. We can purchase the machines, but that’s all we can do.” This was followed by this ominous declaration by Hargett: “I understand that the Senate is going to go back in January and take the necessary steps to protect the taxpayers throughout the state.”

This “protection,” of course, will take the form of postponing, amending, or revoking the TVCA.

Such obstructionism would be rash and unnecessary, and the argument behind it is disingenuous. The fact is, as Hargett concedes, that the federal government has already allocated enough funding — $25 million worth — to cover all purchase and retrofitting expenses in the 93 counties without optical-scan voting capability. Two counties already use the technology and have demonstrably saved money in the process.

For whatever reason, the state’s Republican hierarchy seems to have decided, after acquiring a legislative majority in the 2008 elections and gaining control of the state’e electoral machinery, that implementing the TVCA, with its strict controls over vote fraud, would menace their interests. We’re not sure why. What we are sure of is that we can do without the “protection” scheme heralded by Hargett.

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Help America Vote Act Advisory Panel Meets Tomorrow

On December 16, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Notice was given by the Tennessee State Election Coordinator’s office that the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) Advisory Panel will meet tomorrow, Thursday, December 17 at 10:00 am in the Montgomery Room of the William Snodgrass – Tennessee Tower, 3rd floor.

I called to confirm that the advisory panel previously met in May 5, 2003; May 12, 2003; May 19, 2003; and June 4, 2003 but has not met since then.

HAVA mandated changes in many state election procedures (voting machines, registration processes, poll worker training), but specific implementations were left up to each state.

There have been so many changes and so much new info, it really is encouraging to see that the group has been activated again.

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What Unites Tennesseans: The Bi-Partisan, Fiscally Responsible, Paper Ballot Edition.

On December 10, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

All Tennesseans believe we deserve fair and accurate elections. This belief unites us as Tennesseans like no other. Heck, I’d even go as far as to say it united us as Americans.

So when I read yesterday that Secretary of State Tre Hargett was going to move forward with purchasing the optical scan machines needed to count the paper ballots that the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA) of 2008 mandates we use in November 2010, I was overcome with comfort and joy.

You see, those of use who have been urging implementation of the TVCA were elated when last month the protracted battle over implementation of the TVCA was put to rest and the Act, which was overwhelmingly supported by the people of Tennessee through their legislature, was now also fully validated by the courts.

It seemed, we believed, that Tennesseans were finally going to get the fair and accurate elections we deserve.

But then I read Jackson Baker’s Memphis Flyer article a little more closely and I realized, uh-oh, what we’re actually going to get is some post-holiday coal in our little red bootie stockings thingies.

FAIR AND ACCURATE. “I think we’ve got a 2005-quality machine,” Secretary of State Hargett said in a meeting in Memphis earlier this week, inferring that an optical scan machine made in any other year would be inadequate.

I’d like to clear up a few inaccuracies that Mr. Hargett’s chock-full one sentence statement infers.

First, the TVCA was passed to give us paper ballots, not voting machines. The paper ballots would not only record the voter’s intent but would also become the ballot of record in the case of a close election. In other words, the strength of the bill is in the paper ballot and not the machine that count the ballots. I mean, be good for goodness sake!, we could hand count the paper ballots in case of emergency and skip the machine counting process completely. Paper ballots are to optical scan machines as portable hard drives are to your computer.

To put it more simply, paper ballots give Tennesseans control over the results of our elections by giving us the ability to oversee, recount, and audit. In other words, trust but verify.

Mr. Baker followed up Mr. Hargett’s statement with an editorial comment, rife with inaccuracies: “‘I think we’ve got a 2005-quality machine,’ Hargett said in Memphis Tuesday night. Meaning that an optical-scan voting apparatus with paper-trail capability would soon be available in enough quantity to conduct statewide elections in 2010.”

The paper ballot – and the voters intent – gets counted by the optical scan machine. Or counted by hand if necessary. The optical scan machine does not produce a paper trail nor does it give the voter a receipt.

Again, the TVCA puts the emphasis on the paper ballot – not on the machines that count them – because Tennesseans prefer paper ballots that produce something tangible that they can oversee, recount, and audit. This is a much better system than the paperless electronic touch-screen voting machines we currently use that count votes using software that no one is allowed to see or monitor.

BI-PARTISAN. Accurate elections are the responsibility of the people of Tennessee, and the people of Tennessee want paper ballots. That’s why the TVCA was passed almost unanimously (when the hell does that ever happen?) in the General Assembly in 2008 – that means that 56 out of a possible 60 Republicans and 68 out of a possible 68 Democrats voted for the TVCA.

It truly was a bi-partisan effort.

The bill to delay the TVCA that Mr. Hargett mentions in the article is a divisive issue to be sure, and will most likely be brought to the Senate floor for a vote by Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey by January of 2010. This bill not only delays until 2012 the date the Act must be implemented, but also guts the mandatory audit procedures.

The audit procedures that would alert us to any problem with the vote count.

Again, Tennesseans want and deserve fair and accurate elections, but how can we make sure our elections are fair and accurate unless we are able to randomly audit the results?

FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE “The real question is if there are other costs required of the counties. We can purchase the machines, but that’s all we can do,” Mr. Hargett said, admitting that the state has approximately $34 million federal dollars available that can only be used by the state to purchase election equipment.”

In these uncertain economic times, all Tennesseans are focused on fiscal responsibility. But if our concern is saving money, the best thing we can do is implement the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act.

For example, with the TVCA only one Optical Scan machines is needed per precinct instead of the multiple machines needed with the paperless electronic touch screen voting system we use now.

And because we eliminate up to 80% of existing equipment when we move to paper ballots counted by optical scan machines, counties will save the money they now spend to program, service, test, store and transport so many unnecessary paperless electronic touch-screen machines.

In fact, studies in Florida, Maryland, and North Carolina have confirmed that voting with paper ballots counted by optical scan machines is 30-40% cheaper than voting the way we do now because of the reduction in programming, software, maintenance, storage and transportation costs.

We’re all hyper-aware that local budgets are strained and that necessary services run the risk of being cut. But fair and accurate elections are the most necessary of all our public structures. They are what gives life to all the others.

Look at it this way, your vote is your voice. And if your vote doesn’t get counted for the candidate who will vote with you on the issue or issues most important to you, then your participation in our democracy is an illusion.

All Tennesseans believe we deserve fair and accurate elections. The Tennessee Voter Confidence, aptly named, gives them to us.

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GOP 1, Secure and Accurate Elections 0

On November 12, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

The Memphis Flyer gets it. When the judge “declined last week to issue the injunction sought by plaintiffs trying to force the hand of stonewalling state election authorities,” he potentially signed a death warrant for the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act – and secure and accurate elections for Tennesseans.

Without such an injunction, it seems clear that Secretary of State Tre Hargett and state Election Coordinator Mark Goins will attempt to run the clock out until January when the legislature convenes again. And the Republican majorities in both houses, fully alert now to how the game is being played, will pick up where they left off in the 2009 legislative session. That was when, on the eve of the General Assembly’s adjournment, they tried to vote a postponement of the act’s provisions until after the 2010 election cycle but narrowly failed to do so, essentially because a handful of key GOP members happened to be elsewhere on the day of the vote.

That oversight will be corrected in January, when party discipline will rule the day. The reality is that Democrats want the TVCA in effect for the 2010 election cycle and the Republicans don’t. The GOP will have the votes, and all that remains to be seen is whether the act is merely postponed or amended or quashed altogether.

Tennesseans deserve to secure and accurate elections – the kind that we can’t get now because the voting machines we use simply do not work.

The TVCA will replace the broken system we have now – where a machine votes for us under cover of a secret black box – with one in which we have a piece of paper that actually records the intent of each voter correctly – and which we can rely on for recounts and audits.

Why are they still dragging their feet?

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Judgement Day: Tennessee Voter Confidence Can and Must Be Implemented

On November 9, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
Tre Hargett is lucky it was Perkins and not Judy.

Tre Hargett is lucky it was Judge Perkins and not Judge Judy.

All good news from a ruling last week that rejected a plea for the court to step in and “compel” Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins to implement the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, a.k.a. the paper ballot bill (which they have been fighting hard against, for some reason).

While the court denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, it did rule that, contrary to what Mr. Hargett has been saying, the Tennessee Voter Confidence ACT does NOT require 2005-only standards for machines.

In addition, the court said that the law must be implemented by November 2010 and that the Secretary of State is under a legal obligation to do so tout de suite.

Even more good news is all the attention this case – which is ultimately about secure and accurate elections for all Tennesseans – is receiving from the media.

Nationally, the preeminent election integrity activist and blogger, Brad Friedman – who, by the way, has been with Tennesseans fighting for secure and accurate elections from the beginning – wrote up a thorough synopsis:

The ruling appears to be a victory for the plaintiffs nonetheless, as Perkins ruled the state’s argument/delay tactic that there were no currently certified voting machines that meet the law’s mandate for systems that are federally certified to 2005 standards. Trouble is, the law contains no such mandate. The judge determined that the law does not require new systems meet 2005 standards — there are currently none certified to that standard — and that systems meeting the 2002 federal standards are perfectly legal.

The Voting News blog also covered the hearing.

WSMV-TN Channel 4 in Nashville taped the entire hearing and posted a story on its website and Jackson Baker wrote about it for the Memphis Flyer. Baker’s piece artfully acknowledges what those of us fighting for secure and accurate elections in Tennessee understand as the next threat – delaying implementation of the TVCA as Republican legislative priority (as stated by Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate, Ron Ramsey):

While Hargett’s statement would appear to be guardedly compliant with the Act and Thursday’s ruling, the references to “current law” and to the prospect that “this debate will continue in the next legislative session” would seem to validate the fears of TVCA supporters that Hargett and Goins mean to postpone any effort to implement the TVCA in the hope that the General Assembly, meeting in January, will amend the Act, negate it, or postpone the date of its implementation.

Tom Humphrey at the Knoxville News Sentinel has both the news and a follow up from a statement by Dick Williams of plaintiff Common Cause:

Optical scan voting systems are now the most widely used voting method in the nation, and are used by over 60% of the nation’s voters.

“Nothing is more important than having verifiable ballots,” said Dick Williams of Common Cause Tennessee. “There is no good reason for running the 2010 elections with systems that are vulnerable to error and don’t allow a recount or an audit,” Williams said.

…

Following the hearing, Attorney Gerard Stranch for the Plaintiffs said: “The ball is now in the defendants court, hopefully, they will have greater respect for the will of the Court than they did for the will of the legislature.”

Stranch is right, the ball is in the Secretary of State’s court. But don’t expect him to quietly follow along with the will of the people. Rather, he will drag his feet until January counting on Ramsey and the Republican-led legislature to repeal the act.

Last month Jeff Woods at the Scene nailed down the most obvious follow-up question to ask of Mr. Hargett and Mr. Goins, “Why else…would Republicans fight so hard to stop an obvious good-government election reform that only a year ago enjoyed broad bipartisan support?”

In light of recent events, and as they will undoubtedly continue to drag their feet, the answer is more important and relevant now than ever before.

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Enforce the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act

On November 5, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
Governor Bredesen signing the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act into law.

Governor Bredesen signing the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act into law.

Why? Because the touch-screen electronic voting machines we use now are broken. And how can Tennesseans get the secure and accurate elections they deserve while voting on broken voting machines?

In a more in depth response to an Memphi Flyer editorial written last week by Rich Holden, the chief administrator for the Shelby County Election Commission, Gerard Stranch, one of the lawyers set to present the case today to compel Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett to implement the law, and John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute, further explain why the law must – and can- be implemented:

Flyer readers saw this last week in the guest Viewpoint of Shelby County election administrator Rich Holden….

Holden uses inflated figures — estimating Shelby County’s paper ballot costs at $400,000 per election. But Hamilton County has been using paper ballots for years at a cost of less than 25 cents a ballot and uses estimates of likely voter turnout to determine the number of ballots to print. Using those parameters, the highest-turnout race in Shelby County’s election cycle would cost less than $100,000 and most elections far less. The estimate provided is inflated by well over a factor of four.

Holden also argues that federal dollars will only pay for one machine per precinct, so Shelby County will have to pony up for extra machines. But in counties where optiscan is used, you don’t need more than one machine per precinct.

Critics further complain of costs for storage and handling of the paper ballots. But the reality is that where counties switched from touch-screen to optiscan they’ve saved money, because there are far fewer machines to store and maintain, the machines themselves are cheaper and easier to maintain, and the machines need to be replaced less frequently.

Most incredibly, Holden complains that optiscan will be a slower process because of the need for “ballot on demand” machines to print out ballots. In fact, though, optiscan dramatically reduces wait time for voters.

Right now, a touchscreen voter toggling through screen after screen of a lengthy Shelby County ballot can take as long as 15 minutes to vote, while long lines of waiting voters stream out the door. You can only let from one to three voters vote at a time, depending on how many expensive touch-screen machines you can afford at a given polling location.

With optiscan, 15 voters at 15 privacy carrels can pencil in their choices at their leisure, causing no delay. When they’re done, they feed their ballots into the optical reader in literally less than a second. No wait.

Ultimately, it shouldn’t matter what election officials think: The law says they have to implement optiscan by November 2010.

But election officials have gotten clever, arguing that the law’s text allows only machines federally certified to 2005 standards, and no such machines exist.

This would be an effective argument if that’s what the law really said, but it’s not. Nowhere in the TVCA’s text does it say “2005 standards.” It uses the phrase “applicable voluntary voting system guidelines,” a technical term that both the federal certifying agency and the federal statute which created it make clear can refer either to the 2005 standards or to 2002 standards, for which plenty of certified machines exist.

State election officials have gone out of their way to interpret the TVCA to make it impossible to implement. This flies in the face of the basic principle of statutory construction that a law should be interpreted to resolve internal contradictions and make it enforceable.

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Today: Judge To Hear Arguments In Lawsuit to Compel Implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act

On November 5, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
With paper ballots you can have as much confidence in our elections as this man has in his ship.

With paper ballots you can have as much confidence in our elections as this man has in his ship.

Davidson County Chancellor Russell Perkins will conduct a temporary injunction hearing today, Thursday, Nov. 5, in the lawsuit filed by Common Cause of Tennessee to compel state officials to implement the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act.

The Tennessee Voter Confidence Act requires the statewide installation of a paper ballot voting system and audit trail for the 2010 elections. Common Cause is represented by the Nashville law firm of Branstetter, Stranch & Jennings; University of Memphis Law Professor Steven J. Mulroy; and Voter Action, a national legal advocacy organization working to protect the integrity of U.S. elections.

The hearing will take place at 1:30 pm in Division IV of the Davidson County Chancery Court, Courtroom 411, 4th Floor of the Metro Courthouse, 200 James Robertson Parkway in Nashville.

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Tre Hargett’s Christmas Present

On October 14, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
The war on fair elections comes earlier and earlier every year.

The war on fair elections comes earlier and earlier every year.

Secretary of State Tre Hargett got a shiny new present for Christmas and the voters of Bedford, Lincoln, and Rutherford counties got lumps of coal.

Seriously, who cares about a fancy new website and “election night results program!” if we can’t be sure that even one vote cast on the touch screen electronic voting machines used in yesterday’s House District 62 special election was counted accurately?

The most important feature of a free and fair election system is transparency – being able to verify that what goes in is what comes out. The touch-screen electronic voting machines used yesterday provide zero transparency. The votes cast on them are 100% unverifiable.

Secretary of State Hargett knows that 93 out of 95 counties cast votes on these machines and yet he continues to want us to use them in election after election. Why, as the guardian of our democratic process, doesn’t he want to fix our broken election system?

Why is Tre Hargett more concerned with shiny new toys instead of accurate elections?

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