February 19, 2008
St Joe County Vote-Count Failures in 2007 Elections
Posted by kathleen61 under Green Party | Tags: ballot access, disenfranchisement, Green Party, Mishawaka, South Bend, St Joseph County Election Board, third parties |In the 2007 local elections, the St Joe Valley Green Party gathered signatures to place one Green Party candidate on the ballot and also ran three write-in candidates: for South Bend Mayor, South Bend Common Council At-Large and Mishawaka Common Council At-Large.
Election Board’s “Solution” for Handling Write-in Votes
Green Party members and the write-in candidates attended several St Joe County Election Board meetings prior to the November 2007 elections to press the board on how they intended to handle legally cast write-in votes this time around. The Election Board reported that “diverters” could be purchased for each ballot scanner, which would divert ballots cast with write-in votes to be counted separately after the polls closed. Citing the cost of the diverters, however, the St Joe County Election Board’s “solution” to handling write-in votes in 2007 was to require voters to place ballots with any write-in votes into a separate bin below the scanning device. The local print and television media ran stories on this procedure devised by the Election Board.
Problems Persist
Multiple problems as a result of this “solution” were observed and reported by voters as well as designated Green Party observers in the 2007 election:
1) Violations of privacy
Anyone present at the polls knew when a voter had cast a vote for a write-in candidate because of the separate treatment for ballots with write-in votes. Therefore, these voters’ privacy was violated by virtue of where their ballots were required to be placed. This was especially true for voters in Mishawaka, where only one candidate, the Green Party candidate, was a write-in candidate. Anyone voting for this candidate would automatically be revealing their choice for the At-Large seat when they put their ballot into the “special slot for write-in ballots”.
2) Human Error Disenfranchises Voters
Furthermore, several instances were documented in which voters were erroneously instructed by poll workers to put their ballots into the scanners, despite the voter’s objections to the contrary.
In these cases, the voters had more information regarding the handling of write-in votes than did poll workers. When ballots with write-in votes were fed into the scanner, the machine tallied a “write-in” vote but was unable to read the name the voter had written.
Re-Count Question
Although the scanning machines reported write-in votes had been cast, to determine for whom those votes had been cast would, according to Election Officials, require a recount. Going forward with a count of the write-in votes would have cost the local Green Party several thousand dollars including lawyer and filing fees as well as the cost to open the scanners at each precinct in both South Bend and Mishawaka. This, agreed Green Party members, amounted to a de facto poll tax and thus refused to ask for a recount on principle.
Once again, as in 2006, the St Joe County Election board:
1) disenfranchised voters
2) failed to provide citizens with information on the baseline of support for a third party
3) violated federal statutes in failing to count legally cast votes.
What you can do:
1) write a signed email to votegreenmichiana@gmail.com, which we will print and present at the next St Joe County Election Board meeting on Wednesday, March 12 (this will be their first meeting since the November 2007 elections).
2) attend the next St Joe County Election Board meeting on Wednesday, March 12 at 10:00 a.m. in the County Council Conference Chambers (4th floor, corner office, County City Building; ask security guards for directions, if necessary)
3) call the County Clerk’s office at (574) 235-9635
4) send this piece to a friend or post it on your blog to help generate phone calls and emails prior to the Election Board meeting on March 12th.
and tell our elected officials, whose duty it is to uphold our Democracy that you
a) want to go on record with your feelings about this issue
b) demand the St Joe County Election Board goes on record to apologize to the voters who were disenfranchised and to the write-in candidates whose votes were disregarded in direct violation of federal election law in 2007 and 2007 and
c) demand the St Joe County Election Board invest in the mechanisms needed to properly count legitimate write-in votes.
March 3, 2008 at 3:27 am
Hi Kathleen: Once again, the information that you have provided is dynamic. I have only one request: Can you talk more about the certified signatures that need to be provided? I have never heard of this and would like to know more.
March 4, 2008 at 3:11 am
The signatures for placing a candidate must be from registered Indiana voters. Signatures must be gathered on official forms (CAN-19).
If the candidate is seeking a state-wide office, signatures can be gathered from voters in any county but the signatures must be submitted to the Voter Registration office in that voter’s county of residence. So, when I gathered signatures for a candidate for Secretary of State (a state-wide office), I carried multiple forms to accomodate different counties. Standing at the Farmer’s Market in South Bend, I may have encountered voters from St Joe, Elkhart, Marshall and Lake counties. I would then need to pull out the form for whatever county in which the voter lived. The voter had to print their first and last names, date of birth, address of where they were registered to vote and their signature. All of this had to be legible (with the exception, I suppose of their signature).
Completed forms would go to the various county Voter Registration offices for certification. If anything was off on the signatures, that signature would not be counted (typically the person was not registered to vote or had moved without re-registering to vote). Each county’s Voter Regsitration office tallied the accepted signatures and reported those numbers to the state as a running total.
If a candidate was running for office for a specific district or precinct, the signatures must be from voters living in whatever district or precinct of the office the candidate was seeking. So, when I ran for South Bend’s 1st District seat on the Common Council, signatures had to be from voters living in South Bend’s 1st District. I had to gather a number equal to 2% of the votes cast in that precinct for Secretary of State in the last election. So, for example, if 5,000 votes were cast in the 1st District for the Secretary of State’s race in 2006, I needed to submit 100 certified signatures from voters in the 1st District in order for my name to appear on the ballot as a Green Party candidate. (These are close to the actual numbers).
Incidentally, a person can also run as a “write-in” candidate for any office as an independent or for any party if they do not have the requisite signatures to get their name on the ballot. They must still file as a candidate by the early July deadline. They are still required to file campaign finance records however, without certified signatures, that person’s name will not appear on the ballot. There will only be a “write-in” option on the ballot for the office the person filed for. It is then up to voters to become informed about who the write-in candidates are because these folks typically do not have the finances to mass market themselves. The voters must know who the write-ins are prior to election day because poll workers will NOT inform voters about write-ins at the polling stations. Voters wishing to cast their votes for write-in candidates bubble-in the “write-in” choice on the ballot for that office and must write the candidate’s name on the line next to the bubble.
Whether the county election boards actually count legitimately cast votes for write-in candidates has been a bone of contention for the state and local Green Parties in the last two elections. Although it is a federal offense to fail to count votes cast for legitimate candidates, the St Joe County election board failed in the last two years to count all votes cast for legitimate write-in candidates. There were two write-in candidates for US Senate in the 2006 election (one Democrate and one independent) and write-in Green Party candidates in the last two elections. I do not know why the Democratic contender for US Senate had to run as a write-in; I don’t know what the requirements for getting on the ballot as a Democrat or Republican were for that race. It seemed strange to me that the Democrats did not have a contender on the ballot for that race other than they didn’t want to commit to funding a race they figured would be lost to an incumbent Senator Richard Lugar.