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’.

As I explained in “Preventing election problems–AFTER the election. Part One.”, Denise Lieberman spent the better part of two years researching and analyzing which provisional ballots were rejected in the ’06 election in five critically important counties and why. But what I wrote was misleading in a way. What I mean is that I only focused on Denise, who works as the Missouri state coordinator for a national group called the Advancement Project. But Denise doesn’t work alone here. In fact, she isn’t even the leader of the group of activists she works with. She’s just one person at a table of equals comprising perhaps two dozen different groups interested in voting issues.

The St. Louis Voter Protection Coalition includes representatives from ACORN, Pro-Vote, different labor groups, a variety of people representing minorities and the disabled–NAACP, black trade unions, Latinos–and Missourians for Honest Elections (MOHE), which specializes in e-voting issues.

So the Voter Protection Coalition relies on Denise’s research and she in turn depends on the members to be her eyes and ears on the ground. She knows what the documents can tell us, but they know what their members can tell them about the practical realities of voter disenfranchisement. And besides, each representative brings that depth of knowledge in his area of specialty that makes the group what it is. The members of MOHE, say, can tell everyone at their table about the intricacies of the e-voting issue and about the most credible research on the topic.

Once everybody at their table has been heard from, the coalition decides on its common goals, decides how to implement them and then leverages its power as a group to advocate for election reforms. Most often that means working with local boards of elections, but sometimes it means advocating for legislation. The group plans to work, for example, to get early voting legislation passed.

Beyond pooling the knowledge and power of its members, the Coalition is important for several reasons. First, it avoids duplication. It hammers out the most appropriate way to frame any request to the Board of Elections. Otherwise, eight different groups might end up asking for similar information from the Board of Elections. The Board’s already got enough on its plate without the rising irritation of eight similar–but not exactly the same–requests … or fifteen of them. By the same token, the Board need not scramble to communicate with two dozen different voting rights groups. They just have to keep in touch with the Voter Protection Coalition’s liaison–usually Denise.

The group stresses that it is working to make the jobs of people at the Board of Elections easier by spotting the source of problems and offering solutions. The coalition points out that in some particular area, “we think you’re vulnerable. We know you don’t want people to be disenfranchised, so if you did the following ….” Many times, the Board has taken the Coalition’s suggestions. Of course, if the Board digs in its heels, the activists can sue, but the aim is cooperation.

So, for example, Denise’s research proved that minorities were disproportionately receiving provisional ballots and disproportionately having those ballots rejected. The question was why. And one of the answers–the most common answer–was poll worker error. That much became obvious early enough in the two  year cycle for the group to address the problem.

The reasons for poll worker error are no mystery. It’s a complicated job. It may not require a law degree, but the training manual is thick. When an election judge is faced with a line snaking out the door and a voter she can’t find on the rolls, which part of the manual should she consult? It’s not easy to put her finger on the right page, especially if she’s tired: the day does start before daybreak and lasts approximately forever. And maybe she hasn’t had a potty break or lunch because there’s no one to relieve her.

If the election judge is lucky in that situation, she’ll have  at her elbow one of those 4 X 6 palm cards that the Voter Protection Coalition wrote. It lists the top ten most useful pieces of information for election judges. And it’s so helpful that the Secretary of State’s office printed up 30,000 copies to put in polling places during this last election.

So the St. Louis Board of Elections recognizes that the St. Louis Voter Protection Coalition can be helpful. Just how much the Board sits up and takes note–or doesn’t–when the Coalition’s liaison speaks will be the subject of the final part in this series. Velda City, here we come.

The best time by far to solve election problems is after the election. Not on election day, not one month before, and not three months before. You start, says Denise Lieberman of the Advancement Project, two years before an election–in other words, beginning the day after. Because if you wait until three months before the election, all the decisions have been made and all the systems have been put in place. Anyone who waits until a month ahead of time to complain about, say, e-voting machines would be better off going to the movies. Even if that activist could convince a local election board of the dangers of DREs, it would be too late to do anything about it.

The Advancement Project is a national non-profit civil rights organization based in D.C. It promotes research, analysis, and advocacy, all of which are activities that don’t lend themselves to the hustle and bustle of an election. Lieberman, who is the Project’s Missouri state coordinator, has been a civil rights lawyer in St. Louis since 1995 and is a political science professor at Washington University. She is experienced in the areas of research, analysis and advocacy. In fact, she just spent the last two years putting those skills to work by focusing on provisional ballots.

Her superiors chose that area for her and others to home in on because such ballots only came into common use recently and many wrinkles need ironing out. After the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters in 2000, when the names of voters were inexplicably missing from the rolls or deliberately purged from the rolls–not only in Florida but right here in Missouri as well–the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 mandated the use of provisional ballots so that, in theory anyway, voters who faced such problems could cast a provisional ballot and officials could sort out later whether they should have been allowed to vote.

But the best laid plans, you know, gang aft agley, and so it is with provisional ballots. The theory has some flaws. One is that these ballots sometimes disenfranchise people who’d have gotten regular ballots under the old system and who’d have had their ballots counted. And besides, even the people who would not have gotten regular ballots may vote provisionally and still not get their votes counted when they ought to. Early in 2007, Denise and other Advancement Project attorneys from around the country were assigned to go down in the trenches and file public records requests so that they could get copies of every envelope containing provisional ballots in five critically important counties, including Cuyahoga County in Ohio. They did not want to rely on what state election officials said about the ballots. As she pointed out, of course they’re going to say that they’re only rejecting ballots of people that aren’t eligible. Her team wanted to know exactly why each ballot was rejected.

They worked with political science professors who were experts in geographic mapping. First, they mapped locations where provisional ballots were cast and then overlaid those maps with maps of which provisional ballots actually counted. Next, they overlaid those maps with census data and racial data.

“It turned out that provisional ballots were being disproportionately cast and disproportionately rejected in certain areas of the counties, areas that had higher minority and higher core low income populations. That was something that we were able to then prove, not just sort of speculate–you know, say ‘Well, it’s probably true that ballots of poor black people get rejected more often.’ And there’s some reasons we could easily speculate about why that’s likely to be true, but here we were able, we were, like, no, let’s actually sit down and read these ballots and then look at exactly why they didn’t count. And when you can look at the ballot, you can see, ‘Oh, this person actually was eligible to vote. The reason his ballot was rejected was because one of the election judges didn’t sign it.’ Right? And that’s just one example of the reasons ballots were rejected. There are half a dozen more.

(…..)

By combing through these boxes of documents, analyzing them in an academically credentialed, viable way, you know putting that analysis together, you then have an incredible picture of how this particular election policy is playing out.”

Lieberman would have liked to include St. Louis County in that seminal two year study. Unfortunately, she was unable to obtain the data. The St. Louis County Board of Elections refused to release the ballots. Nevertheless, she has been able to use the study in advocating for changes to the way provisional ballots are handled here–successfully, too. Since 2006, the County Board of Elections has reduced by half the number of provisional ballots issued, largely as a result of suggestions from Lieberman and the people she works with.

Furthermore, Lieberman sat down last summer and presented the results of the study to Robin Carnahan, who was interested in learning what the study showed–though she and Lieberman parted company on whether the state’s open records law requires that local boards of election turn over provisional ballots.

Sure, there’s still wide room for improvement, not only in how provisional ballots are handled in this state but on a host of other election issues. Lieberman doesn’t look like she’ll be losing a job for lack of work that needs doing. So just because her work isn’t being splashed across the front page of the Kansas City Star and the Post-Dispatch, don’t assume that progress in election protection has been stymied. It’s happening steadily, behind the scenes.