Botched Super Tuesday voting haunts state (updated)

ALBUQUERQUE — Six weeks before the presidential vote, the forgotten debacle of New Mexico’s Democratic caucus last February is casting a shadow on preparations for what is expected to be record turnout in a key battleground state, where Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck-and-neck in the polls.

Seven months ago, 17,000 New Mexico voters had to cast provisional ballots in New Mexico’s Super Tuesday Democratic caucus because of uncertainty about their eligibility to vote.

Since then neither the Democratic Party, the governor’s office nor the secretary of state’s office has investigated why more than ten percent of the Democratic caucus voters could not cast a traditional ballot. Many potential voters discovered their party affiliation had been changed or dropped while other’s names didn’t appear at all on the voting lists at their usual polling stations. A joint summit between the governor’s office and the Democratic Party to look into the matter, scheduled for April 25th, was called off by both parties, and never rescheduled.

It is possible that the collective decision of the state’s political leadership to ignore one of the most highly publicized election bungles in the country may come back to haunt the New Mexico on November 4.

Provisional ballots are given to voters whose eligibility to vote is in question either because of a recent change in address, an error in registration or an uncompleted absentee ballot. Votes submitted provisionally are only counted if the county clerk can verify the voter’s registration status before the election is certified. The problem is that county clerks seeking to verify a voter’s status will have to refer to a centralized list which has deemed the voter ineligible to cast a traditional ballot in the first place.

A number of factors contributed to the extraordinarily high incidence of provisional ballots in the Feb. 5 caucus. The elections were run by the Democratic Party, not the state, and the party’s lack of resources contributed to shorter polling times, undertrained poll workers and long lines.

“There was no single silver bullet” for the breakdown, says Josh Geise, interim executive director for the Democratic Party of New Mexico. Asked why the Democratic Party did not pursue an investigation, he replied, “We’ve done some of our own research, had a couple committee meetings and hired a data consultant.”

He states that the Democratic Party is looking into it internally and deciding whether it will hold a caucus in the future but he says there is no reason to believe that the voter rolls are not accurate.

“The major reason people end up voting provisionally is because people show up at the wrong place,” he told New Mexico Independent.

But an Associated Press (AP) report published weeks after the caucus calls into question that assessment. In the report, volunteer poll workers and voters are said to have pinpointed problems with the voter lists at the polling places and “raised the possibility that the trouble may have originated not with the party but with the voter lists Democratic organizers were given by the Secretary of State’s Office and county clerks.”

The report goes on:

In Mora County, for example, where half the voters cast provisional ballots, about 1,000 Democrats were stripped of their party affiliation in the secretary of state’s databank and so were never given to the Democratic Party for the caucus list, County Clerk Charlotte Duran said.

In one Bernalillo County polling place, last names beginning with the letter “A” were missing, said Lynn Jacobs, a volunteer poll worker at the site.

In San Miguel County, voters on an entire street did not appear on the list, said Pat Leahan, director of the Las Vegas Peace and Justice Center who observed the caucus.

In regard to Mora County, Geise says that the county clerk had been changing voters’ addresses prior to the election and that was the reason why people’s names got dropped.

However, weeks after the election another AP reported that “Secretary of State May Herrera had discovered that the problem originated in July 2007 when employees in the Mora County Clerk’s Office accidentally removed voters’ party affiliation while flagging names of voters in a previous election, which is routine maintenance done on the voter lists to keep them current.”

How could the accidental scrubbing of 1,000 voters from the roles in a town comprised of roughly 5,000 people go unnoticed? “I don’t know what happened,” said Duran in an interview with New Mexico Independent. She says that she initially thought it was because of all the software updates at the time being performed by the company that maintains the voter rolls for the state of New Mexico, Election Systems & Software (ES&S).

Duran told AP that she contacted ES&S but was unable to get a guarantee that the problem would not crop up again. “They couldn’t answer me or they didn’t want to,” she said.

Duran is currently running tests on the voter lists for Mora County every Friday in order to be ready for November 4. “So far everything looks good,” she says.

“The problem occurs when someone tries to fix the county clerks list,” says former State Elections Director, Daniel Ivey-Soto. “In the caucus, it looks like the Democratic Party may have tried to make the lists cleaner and that’s where the problems occurred.” He says that the Democrats did the best they could with the resources they had, but that the lesson learned was that there’s a reason why professionals handle elections and they’re not cheap.

In an April interview with Santa Fe Reporter’s Julia Goldberg, Gov. Richardson stated, “I expect we’ll have the summit sometime in the fall and the purpose is to ask voters, county chairmen, party activists, ‘What do we do with the caucus?’”

No such meeting has been held. Representatives of the governor’s communication office told New Mexico Independent they were unaware that a summit to look into the caucus issues was ever planned. As of this posting they were unable to provide a statement as to why the governor was not looking into the matter

As a result, one of the key actors in the Super Tuesday debacle, ES&S, has escaped serious scrutiny. The firm, which provides the software and maintenance of a voter-roll database for the state of New Mexico, has a horrendous service record with a history of discrepancies in voting outcomes, according to a report compiled by VotersUnite.org, a non-partisan organization that studies election integrity.

The state’s dependence on ES&S began in 2000 when then secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, contracted ES&S to compile a statewide voter database. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) — a response to the millions of voter discrepancies experienced during the 2000 election — mandated that states develop an official statewide, computerized voter list.

ES&S is one of a handful of voting equipment and software maintenance companies that have cornered the U.S. market after the implementation of the HAVA legislation. The firm, along with Premier, formerly known as Diebold, count over 80 percent of American votes.

In early 1996 Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) was chairman of American Information Systems, which later changed its name to Election Systems and Software. During Hagel’s Senate campaign of the same year, he failed to disclose his association with the company. He went on to win the seat with a majority of the votes counted by machines of his former company.

The firm has made headlines across the country in recent years. According to a St. Petersburg Times story published in May of last year:

ES&S, the nation’s largest manufacturer of voting machines, has been under fire for a series of problems — mostly poor customer service — across the United States last year.

Indiana launched an inquiry into poor service, settling when the company agreed to pay $750,000. West Virginia filed a formal complaint against the company with federal officials. Arkansas put together a panel to investigate.

“ES&S let Arkansas down,” Arkansas Secretary of State Charlie Daniels said last year. “They let our election officials down, and they let me down.”

In Arkansas, an ES&S machine transferred votes from one election to an entirely different race.

ES&S was sued by California in 2007 for selling the state over 1,000 uncertified voting machines. Colorado’s secretary of state decertified its ES&S vote-counters last December but reinstated them in February due to pressure from other state officials. New Mexico uses the same apparatus.

The Democratic Party as well as the secretary of state’s office, however, have stated on the record that they have full confidence in the voter rolls. But the state’s contract with ES&S, as posted on the NewMexicoMatters.com blog run by Democratic activist Gideon Elliot, contains ambiguous language about ES&S’s access to the software and database.

“The Procuring Agency shall permit the Contractor reasonable access to the agency’s premises and to the equipment and software for maintenance and inspection under normal operating conditions,” the contract states.

Given its record of bad service and detrimental impact on elections, New Mexicans may be wondering why the state would allow the company access to its citizen’s voting data. As of this posting New Mexico Independent was still waiting for comment from the Secretary of State’s office and will update the story when we receive it.

*UPDATE- James Flores, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office replied in an email to questions asked by the New Mexico Independent.

When asked about the plan of operation for security and maintenance patch upgrades by ES&S to the database software, Mr. Flores responded, “This is managed by both ES&S and SOS IT personnel. It is coordinated with the counties as to not interfere with County Clerk’s operation.”

When asked who checks the information after ES&S has performed an update, Mr. Flores responded, “ES&S does validation and we have both County Clerk office and SOS IT personnel involved.”

However, no details of the operation plan was given and according to an addendum to the original contract, the customer is expected to “Validate any data input and output in the day to day use of VR application.” This would indicate that if Mary Herrera’s assessment that the accidental scrubbing of voter’s party affiliation in Mora County began in July of 2007 is true, then there was a period of seven months where the data being inputed by the county clerks was not being validated by the secretary of state’s office.

Mr. Flores indicated that ES&S does not have access to the actual database.

By all indications of the contract, however, the company does have access to the software that runs the database.

When asked if the secretary of state’s office was confident in the company and its ability to provide accurate services to the citizens of New Mexico and the integrity of its electoral process, Mr. Flores responded, “Yes. SOS manages ES&S at this point as opposed to past and the SOS now governs all actions taken by ES&S with the system.”

When asked to comment on a partial list of documented failures by ES&S (web), Mr. Flores said he had no comment.

So with less than two months until New Mexico voters go to the polls to help pick the next president, the mystery of why so many people’s voter affiliations were changed or dropped on Super Tuesday remains unresolved.

New Mexico voters can check their current registration status at VoterView .

*Editor’s note- The original sentence: “The problem is that county clerks seeking to verify a voter’s status will have to refer to a centralized list which has deemed the voter ineligible in the first place.” Has been changed to, “The problem is that county clerks seeking to verify a voter’s status will have to refer to a centralized list which has deemed the voter ineligible to cast a traditional ballot in the first place.”

Also, the original sentence: “The firm, which compiles a voter-roll database for the state of New Mexico and delivers it to the secretary of state.” Has been changed to read, “The firm, which provides the software and maintenance of a voter-roll database for the state of New Mexico.”

The New Mexico Independent regrets the error.