How do you move election officials to rid the electoral process of its glitches? The answer is … slowly. Gradually. Denise Lieberman explains:

“Under the law, at least in Missouri, so much of how we conduct elections is discretionary. In other words, what I mean by that is election officials … there’s a lot that’s unstated in the law. There’s nothing in the law that tells election officials how to train poll workers. They have full rein to decide how they’re going to do that themselves. And we know that poll worker error is probably the leading cause of wrongful voter disenfranchisement. So what sort of legal stick do we have then to tell them that they have to train their poll workers better? There’s so-o-me. I mean, this memo sort of outlines that you have these legal responsibilities to make sure that these elections aren’t botched. But in terms of advocating for a specific kind of reform, I … there’s nothing in the law that says they gotta do it. [Laughs.] So you have to work with them and convince them why it’s important, and that you’re not their enemy, that we’re all sort of going for the same end goal.

And the fact is that I’ve been working with these officials now since 2000, since the 2000 elections, and … they have improved. We spent a ton of time, I mean in 2006 we had a ton of problems in St. Louis County. St. Louis County’s still our greatest area of concern in the whole state. But they did do a good job improving some of the areas that were really, really problematic in ’06. And so that deserved mention. They did reduce the number of provisional ballots that were handed out.

Now. There’s still a problem with how they hand out provisional ballots. And that’s something we’re still going to continue to work with them on. But they reduced it by half. And there were way more voters this time around, so that really does show that some of their training in that area improved.

So, I tried to be positive on that front [when I spoke at the public comment session the Board held in late November] because the fact is we were able to resolve all the problems, other than Velda City, we were able to resolve every single problem that came up on election day. Which is unbelievable. In every other election where I’ve run the legal command center, we’ve ended up in court by the end of the day.

Given the efforts of the Board of Elections in the county, then, to eliminate glitches on the big day, I asked Denise if we could assume that the foul up at Velda City resulted from a combo of carelessness and ignorance rather than from deliberately ignoring what they should have known would happen. She insists they should have known the problem would occur. True, the Board of Elections runs its own numbers in advance to calculate for each polling place how many ballots and how many machines will be needed, how many poll workers and how much space. But they base those numbers on 2004 electoral results.

The St. Louis Voter Protection Coalition ran much more specific predictions for each precinct in St. Louis County. They asked political scientists to predict more accurately what to expect in each precinct.

Denise:

They did so based on past voting patterns, based on rates of types of voters–frequent voters, infrequent voters, new voters–based on census data by age, by all of these other factors. There actually was quite a bit of scientific data that was put out concerning turnout rates by all of those factors–by race, age, income, as well as whether that area saw a surge in voter registration. So we ran St. Louis County’s figures through that kind of an analysis.

The Voter Protection Coalition wrote a report , complete with spreadsheets, predicting which polling places would have problems–most of them in North St. Louis County, including Velda City. They presented that report at a Board of Elections meeting before November 4th, and they asked for specific actions to prevent foreseeable problems.

As a result of that report, the Board did print additional paper ballots for eighty polling places and did agree to allow voters using them to vote on any available surface rather than waiting for a privacy booth. Unfortunately, as to the privacy booths, not all of the polling places got the memo.

So when you talk about was it deliberate or not, we gave them a full spreadsheet by polling place that gave them all those numbers. You know, what I said at the election board meeting was problems like Velda City were absolutely predictable. We predicted it beforehand, we suggested what needed to be done to address it. They didn’t necessarily do so for all of those places.

It’s heartening to see so much cooperation between the St. Louis Voter Protection Coalition and the election board, but at the same time it’s frustrating to see how many right-on suggestions the board has shrugged off. If somebody, out of the goodness of his heart, hands you research far superior to your own, based on much more detailed analysis, that would head off problems you’re in charge of avoiding, what kind of gooney bird would you be to sneeze at it? That’s all I’m sayin’.

Who could blame African Americans in St. Louis for wondering whether deliberate malfeasance at the Board of Elections caused the ridiculous waits in line at some of the predominantly black polling places? Sure, waits of an hour or even two were common throughout the metro area in the morning. And granted, most of the polling places in North St. Louis County didn’t have any longer waits than other places in the area.

But the real problem polling places were all in neighborhoods with a high proportion of African-American voters. The voters themselves were dogged and good humored. And the Obama campaign posted people at each poll to do what they could to relieve the stress–including bringing donuts and White Castle burgers to the longsuffering.

Velda City, of course, was the worst of the worst, as this report from a roving poll monitor for the St. Louis Voter Protection Coalition explains.

One young African-American man vented at last Thursday’s Board of Elections open meeting about the long lines being a form of intimidation, a way of keeping blacks from voting. But the chaos at some polls resulted more from carelessness than from deliberate efforts to disenfranchise anyone.

At Velda City, for example, eight machines were delivered, but–for lack of room–only three were set up. This was occurring at the city hall, so why didn’t the mayor scream bloody murder to the Board or just make another room available? Judge Joe Goeke, the director of the Board of Elections, said at Thursday’s meeting that when he found out about the problem at 4:00, he called Velda City and was told that they didn’t have room to set up the other five machines. Goeke informed them that they had damn well better find some more room. Now. And they did.

But considering that the first black man ever to run as a presidential candidate from a major party was on the ballot, Goeke–if he took his job seriously–could have, should have, sent people to take a look at polling places in African-American neighborhoods and moved them to larger quarters if necessary. Blacks turned out to vote at three times the usual rate, so one little room in city hall was obviously going to be inadequate. There was an empty grade school a block away. Aargh!

And who is to blame for the confusion about whether voters could mark paper ballots without waiting for privacy booths–confusion common at polling places across the county. The Board decided the week before the election that voters need not wait for a booth. But the election judges at Velda City, and at many other polling places, believed that voting any old where was not allowed.

The decision to let voters mark ballots on any hard surface was taken at the urging of voting rights groups. Too bad the Board didn’t follow through with letting the election judges know about it–though the board members, Goeke in particular, did crow that the election protection people had been wrong, wrong in criticizing him for not printing more paper ballots than he did.

Another problem that the St. Louis Voter Protection Coalition–as well as the Obama campaign–tried to head off in areas of high black population was the dampening effect on voters of police presence at the polls. The law allows officers to be at a polling place only in response to a specific problem or complaint. One roving poll monitor for the coalition explained what happened when he saw a police officer hanging around Berkeley Middle School:

Well, I went in, I went to talk to the officer. I said, “Hey, your presence here could be intimidating to people coming to vote, so can you please, you know …” She said “Oh, I’m sorry, my sergeant told me to keep an eye on these cars. Some cars got broken into. But I’ll, you know, I’ll take off.” I said, “OK, great.” You know, problem solved.”

Uh, then I went to Dellwood Recreation Center where I heard there was another police presence. And I went up there, and there was a cop, you know, standing in line, you know, in uniform, wearing his gun and talking to voters in line. I said, “Excuse me, sir. Could I have a word with you?” He said, “Yeah, what’s up?” And I said, “You know, you being here is intimidating people from voting. Or it could. Police arent’ supposed to be hanging around polling places unless they’re on official duty.”

He told me that he was talking to his family and that he was done talking to me. Then I called the command center, and he received a call on his radio about ten minutes later. Then he received a call on his cell phone about twenty minutes later. And then he stared me up and down for about twenty more minutes and he left.

There was no conspiracy among police departments to intimidate voters by hanging around polls. It was more just that a stray cop here and there couldn’t resist acting like a tough guy.

The St. Louis Voter Protection Coalition offered several ounces worth of prevention to the Board of Elections–most of which the Board chose not to implement. But there will be other elections, and the Coalition is already working to head off the problems they know will come next time around.

Could we please have a different director of the Board of Elections in St. Louis County? One who might, you know, find out before 4 p.m. that people were suffering six hour waits in line at one of his polling places. One that didn’t have to get that news from a  Post-Dispatch reporter.

Appoint me. Hey, I may not know the logistical niceties of planning an election, but I’d know how to put out a memo to all polling place supervisors mentioning that if the line got more than, say, five hours long–especially if the cause of the problem was obvious–that they should, like, call me.

And I wouldn’t pinch pennies during the most important election in seventy years. I”d print up enough paper ballots. Joe Goeke is sandwiched in between two election authorities who had the good sense to do that. Not him, though. He knew better than his colleagues and better than election protection activists who warned that ballots sufficient for 80 percent of the registered voters might not be enough.

But nothing is his fault, he says. Running out of ballots was the fault of those henny-penny, sky-is-falling voters who don’t trust touchscreen machines and wanted paper ballots. Hell, yes, they’re paranoid, and that’s one of the bright spots in this scenario, that the word about DREs is getting out.

Goeke is annoyed about it, though:

“There are small groups, whatever their agenda is, encouraging people to not use touch-screen equipment,” Goeke said.

Our agenda, Mr. Republican Elections Director, is to have honest and transparent elections. Forgive us.

And forgive us for threatening lawsuits over problems at 14 polling places in order to get more paper ballots delivered there.

I don’t know if it’s fair to blame Goeke because a few of his election judges went off the reservation. One of them at Lee Hamilton Elementary School in North St. Louis County was slowing the line down by insisting on seeing photo IDs. It took the mayor of Ferguson quite a while to get that problem sorted out. At another location, a judge believed he had the right to require two forms of ID and dismissed voters’ claims that the card sent to them by the County Board of Elections was sufficient.

Maybe Goeke had no control over that sort of incompetence or obstructionism–whichever it was. But on the issues he definitely could have controlled, he gets a D-.