Presidential Commission on Election Administration

Presidential Commission on Election Administration Public Meeting Pennsylvania Convention Center 1101 Arch St. Philadelphia, PA 19107 Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1 >> Mr. Bauer: This hearing of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, all of you I'm sure are familiar with the work of the Commission. We are examining the issues that the President specified by Executive Order in March and we have here the third in our series of public hearings and an excellent panel of election officials to begin the morning. We have a full day, and so we necessarily are going to try to stick very closely to the time limits here, because we also want to leave time not only for the testimony, which in longer form version obviously we have in writing, but also for the Commissioners to have an opportunity to speak with the election officials and ask questions, so my colleague, Mr. Ginsberg this morning is going to be operating the time clock with his usual ruthless efficiency. Woe to all who cross him. In any event, with those opening words I'm going to turn it over to my co-Chair Mr. Ginsberg. >> Mr. Ginsberg: Thank you, Mr. Bauer, welcome, everyone. We are pleased to have you here, and as Bob says, we do have a very full day. We want to begin by extending the regrets of Mayor Nutter, who was supposed to be our leadoff witness and had to attend a funeral today, so he will not be joining us, but we are happy to have with us four distinguished election officials from around the country to present their perspective. What we'll do is have an 8-minute pieces of testimony for all of you then the Commission will collectively ask you questions after that. So our panel is Elaine Manlove, the Delaware Commissioner of Elections, Don Palmer, the Virginia Board of Elections Secretary, Linda Lamone, the Maryland Administrator of Elections, Marci Andino, the South Carolina Election Commission Director. So thank you all and welcome. Ms. Manlove? >> Ms. Manlove: Good morning. Thank you for inviting us. My presentation I guess is going to come up. It's on what we do in Delaware with electronic signature. And I have two topics, electronic signature for voter registration and actually we're expanding that and also, I have great concerns about election day and using schools as polling places, so I've added a couple slides onto the end. In Delaware, in 2009 we went live with this, where when people registered a vote at DMV we collect everything electronically, and that was a result of on election day finding out we didn't have people who had been to DMV and should have been asked to register to vote and for some reason we didn't get the application. So it's a voter registration method that involves capturing the citizen's signature and the application electronically. It transmits to our offices in real time. It has streamlined a method of how we did voter registration, it re-engineered the interface between elections and DMV, and it's eliminated the use of paper entirely. So it's a cost savings, time savings, and it saved immense office space. We have nothing to file. And there were a lot of unintended consequences. Our goal when we did e-signature was to make sure that on election day we had every application of every citizen who thought they were registered to vote, but it saved an inordinate amount of time and space that we didn't see. And it's accurate and it's secure. Go to the next one, okay. So in Delaware we use this at DMV but we're also working to take it to other aspects of what we do. We use it for scanning applications that come into the office, like the federal mail applications. They scan them in, they link that application with the signature to the electronic record, and then we don't need the application anymore. So we use it at DMV at the counter. They also have kiosks at DMV, self-serve kiosks. We have it there. At Division of Social Services we've also taken it live there, and we're still working to improve that. And on registration drives and public libraries and at the State Fair we also use e-signature. And this is the future of e-signature. We plan to take it to our web-based voter registration, and that should happen fairly soon. If we have a signature on file at DMV, we will be able to move that signature over and we'll apply that right to the application. Also, we're going to integrate it with Department of Labor, who was one of the agencies that does voter registration in Delaware and social services. Both provide a lot of online application from home, and this way we'll be able to tie this in. We're also using it with overseas voters. Schools. This has become my hot topic. Half of our schools are public polling places in Delaware, and I've asked -- we have a holiday for general election day, but our primary is not a holiday and I've asked the schools repeatedly for years if they would consider moving an in service day that they already have scheduled to primary election day. I've not been successful in that. Last year we had legislation to mandate that, and it never even came up for a vote, so essentially their lobby is 2 bigger than me. So I would love to see that become a federal mandate. I think in this time of security in schools, the last thing we need to have is voters wandering around the building looking for their polling place, which has moved to a far corner because school's in session and they're not giving us the gym or the lobby. So that is really the two things that are important to me. The in service days for school teachers would not take a day of study away from the kids; it would just translate to a different day and e-signature and the expansion of e-signature. So I'll be happy to take questions or wait until the end. >> We will certainly have questions for you, and what we'll do is we'll just move through our panel and then come back and engage with questions. Thank you. >> Ms. Manlove: Thank you. >> Mr. Palmer: Thank you, Commission members, for the opportunity to testify and identify the major issues experienced in the 2012 election, those areas of improvement that should be made in the process and the long-term challenges and solutions to running accurate and clean elections in the United States that enhance voter confidence in the process. One of the major issues that the Commission and the Commonwealth of Virginia is reviewing is the genesis and the causes of long lines in the precincts in Virginia. Lines are often the result of any attraction that a lot of citizens want to participate in, often at the same time. Voting is one of them. Every four years in presidential elections there seem to be lines. In many ways the lines in 2012 were very similar to 2008, so while we expect lines to some extent, we need to focus on the voters, our clients with the laser beam, to make the experience a positive one in which voters emerge more confident in the process and will return to vote another day. While we found lines were not widespread, there were problems in some of our high population and growing urban areas that need to be addressed. The localities with lines normally have problems in one or two of their precincts. For the purpose of our analysis, we'll call them problem precincts. While a small problem relative to the over 2,200 precincts statewide, a line over an hour needs to be addressed aggressively by the election community. And we are taking notes of lessons learned for ways that we can plan for and break those lines in the future elections. The way forward is a commitment by state and local election officials to break the lines. With a survey of local election officials and analysis by the State Board of Elections of the problem precincts, the precincts seem to have a number of common characteristics. First was a registered voter size of that precinct. The problem precinct, had a much larger number registered voters than the average precinct. Six of the major problem precincts had over 5,000 registered voters on election day. Another common characteristic, the precinct had a larger number and higher percentage of inactive voters than on average, some more than two times the average number of inactive voters. Many of those inactive voters actually showed up. They may have had address issues but they actually showed up to vote. Urban areas, high growth areas, precincts near highly transient voters and university precincts, precincts that had a large number of provisional voters, and precincts with low absentee voting rate precincts. Our survey found that most of the lines in Virginia were actually in the morning, followed by the late a.m. to early p.m. time period and then 10% of the lines were near the closing of the polls. So where were the choke points? In Virginia the choke points were overwhelmingly waiting to use the voting equipment. A major contributor of our waits can be attributed to use the voting system.

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