An Interloper's Journey to Election Day
On Friday, October 31 I made first contact. It's Washington County. I'm in Hillsboro, Oregon and I clicked send after typing my request to the state elections division with the subject line Provisional Ballots.
Hello
I am requesting information on the use of provisional ballots in Oregon. Especially: Why are they used, and when should a voter use one? How does the elections division guarantee that provisional ballots will be counted? How are they reviewed?
Thank you,
K. Shawn Edgar
The next day at 9:17 a.m. I received a response from Elections SOS, and it went a little something like this only I've summarized it to increase efficiency and enhance readability:
Dear Shawn,
A provisional ballot is one that is issued when the eligibility of the voter has not yet been determined, or when the county elections official issues a ballot to a voter who resides in another Oregon county.
For example: if someone goes into the county elections office and says they are a registered voter but the county cannot find that they have registered, they can give the person a ballot but will not count the ballot unless they find that the person was registered by the deadline.
Let me know if you need further information. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Brenda Bayes / Elections Division
This was good, and fairly clear but nothing I couldn't have found in their paper literature and their online help pages. I needed to delve like Rosencrantz kept waiting for Guildenstern to do in that play about them by Tom Stoppard.
Brenda
The information definitely helps, however, after researching the 2000 and 2004 general elections and the lead-up to this one, questions remain. Are counties in Oregon using the so-called exact match criteria set up by the poorly named Help America Vote Act (HAVA)?
If so, how is the eligibility of a voter determined? If a person comes to her county elections office, and says she is registered but the county official cannot find her information, or a detail of her name is different (e.g., a hyphenated name missing the hyphen) the person will be given a provisional ballot. Once the voter votes the ballot, who decides either to count it or not count it? What resources will be used to verify the name, address, etc.?
Also, how often are voters removed from the rolls for inappropriate or mistaken reasons? If that person comes in to ask about her ballot, how can she prove registration? Can she demand a regular (non-provisional) ballot?
Robert Kennedy Jr. and investigative reporter Greg Palast have spent a lot of time and effort spreading the word that provisional ballots should not be used, and that a large number of this type of ballot had been thrown out in 2000 and 2004, denying possibly hundreds to thousands of legally registered voters either vote.
None of these questions should be taken as an accusation that Oregon elections division would intentionally act inappropriately.
Sincerely,
K. Shawn Edgar
My lengthy inquiry led to an unsigned and presumably hasty response without the benefit of punctuation, except an occasional period. I've transcribed it as I received it:
Oregon is required to follow and comply with the requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act The county elections official are charged by statute to inquire into the validity of any elector and to conduct all elections. When a first time registrant registers to vote they are required to provide the DMV# and if they do not have on they must attest to this and then provide their last four digits of their social security number if they do not have a social security number they must attest to that and provide a copy of identification The Oregon Centralized Voter Registration System will do a cross check with the DMV number provided by the elector with the Department of Transportation verifying that this is the person who the license was issued there is also a cross check with the Social Security number Counties do not do any purging of records within 90 days prior to any election.
So, this is where my Washington County elections office entered the story. I had simultaneously emailed them similar questions and received similarly flat textbook answers answers in which the responder avoided details about any possible problems. It's all by the book, sir. It's all by the book, they ensured me.
After two to three links had grown in our email chain, I received a direct response from whom I believed at that time to be the divisions number one man: Luther K. Arnold Jr., the Senior Administrative Specialist.
Mr. Arnold's email was short, directly to the point. And breaks down this way to the best of my recalling.
Dear Mr. Edgar,
Please call me so I can answer any further questions about provisional ballots or security of ballot drop sites, or any other questions that might come out of it.
Sincerely,
Luther K. Arnold Jr.
I took down his contact essentials without replying because an Okay, will do sort of message seemed pointless. I was just happy Mr. Arnold had come across so ready to discuss the voting process with me.
On Monday, November 3 when I phoned Mr. Arnold, however, the perceived eagerness quickly turned to a avoid-and-resist dodging technique. His only full answer was that he couldn't answer anything fully. He directed me to the Oregon secretary of state's office. All over again.
In a sweet political-style feedback loop I wound up on the phone with the above-mentioned Brenda Bayes of the state elections SOS. Ms. Bayes was cordial and answered my questions by the book refusing to even consider my base assumption that elections have faults and the process has been manipulated in our recent past (see documents by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast).
Ms. Bayes' great contribution to this part of the story was to pass me the name Mickey Kawai. She turned out (on the other end of our loop) to be the manager of my Washington County elections office the exact kind of person I was hoping to talk with in the first place, a true in-the-muck foot soldier.
On the phone with Mickey Kawai later that day, the background noise from her end spoke in many voices urgent and oscillating. With my eyes closed the scene through the receiver became a whaling ship at sea, and Mickey Kawai became a captain both crazed with the possibility of a kill (that being a seamless process) and sane as thick concrete surrounding nuclear fission in progress (that being the possibility the process would fly apart).
However, her voice told me she was holding it all together the chaotic operations of a county elections office the day before our biggest election day in recent history and the amped regular citizens eager to participate in her domain. At the same time there was an underlying threat of a Chernobyl-sized mishap hanging in the air, as much on my end as hers, congealing the entire county.
Unlike the mangers of the Chernobyl nuclear-plant in north-central Ukraine, Mickey Kawai managed to keep her office fuel elements (every participant) cool enough to avoid a meltdown, at least as long as we were on the phone together.
And before I disconnected, she had convinced me to come in with my video camera the following day for the big event. To observe. To participate.
Early on that day, November 4, I had to work my "real" job from 8 to 1, and then bolted straight to the elections office camera and tripod in hand. My good friend and fellow interloper, Mr. Waldow, met me on the way.
We drove by the county building. Two lanes of backed up automobiles for blocks, the right lane full with voters preparing for a drive-by drop of their ballot into the heavy steal box flanked by county workers under a portable tent set up in front of the main entrance.
Even from my car, as we passed in the left lane, evidence of smiling helpful faces and eager voters fulfilling our national mandate appeared to the eyes as a clarion call to the ears.
Out front we met county press officer Philip, wearing a high-contrast yellow reflective vest and name badge. Philip gave us the lowdown on the orchestrated effort to reduce traffic and line time, the state and county police played a predominate roll. Also, a second drop site had been set up across the four-lane highway at Kmart.
Now the meat. Inside I set up the tripod and video camera, got shots of several vote casting stations provided for those citizens who didn't receive or lost a ballot, or simply preferred to come in and cast by hand. Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, but many county elections offices have voter's booths and offer provisional ballots, as mentioned above.
According to Philip, Washington County residents choose for diverse reasons to drop off their ballot on election day, hence the crazed scene described outside the building.
Ballots flow into the county office from every precinct, and are sorted and the outer envelope is removed by party workers. Other workers verify signatures on the back of the actual security envelope that contains the ballot by crosschecking voter registration cards via computer. And then the security envelopes are "wanded in", meaning each one's arrival is documented by hand-held bar code scanners.
The next part of the operation is all about straightening the ballots and feeding them into the computerized counting machines made to a large extent by a company called Elections Systems & Software (ES&S). Of course, ballot length changes from election to election, and the longer the ballot, the more difficult this process becomes, often causing delays and mistakes.
In a review of voting systems, the EVEREST Report found that every component of the ES&S optical scanning machines were vulnerable at the precinct level to physical tampering that would cause the machine to reboot, adding delays and confusion, as well as the PCMCIA memory cards the scanners use to encode ballot types. At the level of the board of elections office network attacks were found to be the biggest threat.
Although Philip, our press officer, and the staff he introduced us to, were helpful and knowledgeable, they could not bring themselves to believe what they inevitably termed conspiracy theories, and refused to believe my base assumption (formed of previous experience and research like the EVEREST Report) that all ballot counting software and hardware are risky and vulnerable to tampering. They only repeated the refrain that every effort was made to protect and double check the systems.
In the moment I wished I had a hard copy of the EVEREST test results to show them, to make them see, but although their heart was in the right place, their eyes were shackled by training and a need to protect operations - and save face.