PA GOP Describes Special Election Irregularities in Letter to PA SOS

The Republican Party of Pennsylvania asked acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Robert Torres to investigate several "irregularities" during last Tuesday's special election in the 18th Congressional District.  Democrat Conor Lamb won the race by just 627 votes over Republican Richard Saccone, a small enough margin that even a relatively small number of confused or disenfranchised voters could change the outcome of the race.

An attorney and authorized campaign representative was prevented from observing vote counting in Allegheny County:

First, an authorized campaign attorney, Russell Giancola, presented several forms of permissible credentials but was prevented from observing the computation of the vote count in Allegheny County Tuesday night. . . . While attorney Giancola was finally able to obtain this compliance with the inappropriate preconditions, the delay deprived the campaign of the right to have counsel present during the computation reporting process.

Allegheny and Washington Counties failed to provide the notice to military and overseas voter required by the Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act.  Voting machines were not calibrated properly:

Third, we received multiple complaints throughout the 18th Congressional District regarding calibration issues involving the voting machines.  Numerous voters have called the Party and the Saccone campaign to complain that they selected Rick Saccone on the voting screen, only for Conor Lamb to appear on the confirmation screen.  It is our understanding that some of these issues were not resolved during the Special Election.

Poll workers failed to follow provisional ballot procedures:

Fourth, the Party received numerous complaints about voters not appearing on the voter rolls, and being denied the ability to cast a provisional ballot at their polling place.  In at least one instance, a voter was denied a provisional ballot at his precinct and directed to vote at his prior precinct in the neighboring county where he used to reside before moving several months ago.  This violates voters rights under the Help America Vote Act and Commonwealth's implementing statutes and regulations. In addition, given the closeness of this election, denial of the right to vote for even a small number of eligible voters could cast the outcome of this election into doubt.

When the Democrat-controlled Pennsylvania Supreme Court instituted a new congressional district map last month, it kept the previous lines for Special Election.  Both U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania declined to overturn that new map today (more about that on this blog tomorrow).  When voters tried to search for their polling place, they were incorrectly shown polling places under the new map:

Finally, as your office was made aware on election day, the Department of State's website www.votespa.com errantly directed voters to polling places matched to their address under the recently imposed Pennsylvania Supreme Court map . . . rather than the congressional district lines in use for the Special Election.  Since election day, we have heard from potential voters in Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District who attempted to vote but were informed that they did not live in the district any longer. 

This illustrates some of the ills of court-ordered district maps - they create confusion for voters, generate administrative hassles (and opportunities for errors) for election officials, and disrupt constituencies mid-term.

We hope that the Pennsylvania Department of State takes these allegations seriously and investigates these irregularities so that the integrity of future elections is not called into question.

Need for Accurate Voter Registration Lists Highlighted at Election Integrity Commission Meeting

Don Palmer, a Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, former Secretary of the Virginia Board of Elections, and former Florida Director of Elections, testified before the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity today about problems of errors in voter registration lists, the recommendations of previous bipartisan presidential election commissions, and the need for accurate voter rolls:

A series of national level commissions have pointed out the wide scope of the problem concerning the inaccuracies of the voting rolls, and the negative impact on election administration and voter confidence. They have also pointed out the vulnerability of our system to voter fraud and irregularities that result from the inability to maintain accurate voter rolls.

Each of these commissions identified the problem and provided recommendations, yet here we are again, facing the same issue and still searching for answers and the will to do something about it. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after the 2000 election required counties to work with new statewide voter registration systems to share data for list maintenance purposes and to maintain an official voter registration list. This reform required the states to interact with individual counties because the increasing mobility of our citizens demanded a system where county election officials could receive eligibility and registration information on individuals when they move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to resolve duplicates. However, the mobility of voters across state lines is almost as significant as within a state, thus requiring the states work together in coordination with each other to resolve the problem. . . .

The voter registration systems in the states desperately need to be upgraded to add capability and made more functionally accurate, secure, and to better facilitate the sharing of registration data between states. Investment in the newest technologies would also allow better matching processes at the state level that improve list maintenance and interact more efficiently with local election officials. Bad matches, false positives, or lack of matching capability is often the result of older systems and software that doesn’t provide the ability to overcome errors in the registration.

Investment in the latest technology will also provide additional security for state and local voter registration systems. While most states already have robust hygiene programs to protect our voter registration systems, new technology would assist in these enhancements.

In addition to these recommendations, Mr. Palmer made a variety of other practical recommendations to the commission that would help states maintain more accurate voter registration lists.  We thank Mr. Palmer, and the other experts who took the time to testify before the commission today, for sharing his expertise and experiential wisdom.

Concerns with Klobuchar-Graham Election Security Amendment

Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have co-sponsored an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act providing for federal funding for state election security measures.  While the security community has embraced this amendment, and we thank Sen. Graham for taking the problem of election security seriously in a way that attempts to respect state power, we have some concerns about this measure:

• It is a serious amendment of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that should be approached carefully, and the process should include hearing where various stakeholders testify.
• It places enormous new responsibilities on the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an agency which has struggled to fulfill its existing mandate and operate its existing advisory boards, which faces a budget crisis, and which may not have the authority to accomplish what the amendment requires.
• The EAC already accomplishes many of the functions in this amendment, but the amendment adds more bureaucracy and spends more money to do it.  It is an enormous aggregation of federal power.
• It formalizes the role of the Department of Homeland Security and the Executive Branch to set standards, which the states are required to meet to receive federal funding.  Currently, the EAC is the only federal standard-setting standard entity for elections, and it is an independent agency.
• An existing voluntary program to certify voter registration systems appeared to be working well, aside from DHS withholding important security information from the states last fall.  States are agreeing to this new measure because they are already doing these things on a voluntary basis and need the funding, but a voluntary program and a mandatory (at least, from the perspective of funding) program are vastly different in terms of who is controlling the election security standards and systems.
• It excludes states that use direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines.  While there have been some serious problems with DRE machines (and Virginia decertified all DREs in the state last week), DREs are the only machines many localities have and they make voting easier for voters with disabilities.
• It would allow states to implement mandatory voter registration and other progressive reforms with federal funds.

This amendment needs some serious study and input from election administration experts--not just computer, national security, and cybersecurity experts--before it moves forward in the Senate.

Among other burdens placed on the EAC, the amendment requires it and a commission to conduct an investigation of the foreign interference in the 2016 election and the potential for interference in future elections.  An existing commission, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, is already investigating election security and voting machines as part of its mission to study the U.S. election system and what promotes or decreases voter confidence in the system.  The next meeting of the commission is tomorrow, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern.  RNLA will be live-tweeting the meeting.

DOJ Supports Ohio's Efforts to Clean Voter Rolls

In a welcome change from the Obama Justice Department's opposition to states' efforts to protect the integrity of their elections, the Trump Department of Justice filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court earlier this week in support of Ohio's process of removing inactive voters from the voter registration rolls:

Ohio and several other States have long used a registrant’s failure to vote for a specified period of years as grounds for sending an address-verification notice under 52 U.S.C. 20507(d)(2). That practice does not violate the NVRA. 

A. It is undisputed that Section 20507(d) itself does not restrict the grounds on which States may send address-verification notices. Instead, the court of ap- peals held that sending notices based on nonvoting violates Section 20507(b)(2)’s prohibition on removing a registrant “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” That is not the best reading of Section 20507(b)(2) as originally enacted, and it is foreclosed by the clarifying clause that Congress added in HAVA. . . .

C. The NVRA’s history and purpose reinforce the conclusion that States may send Section 20507(d)(2) notices based on nonvoting. Before the NVRA, most States removed registrants who had failed to vote for specified periods. Most of those States notified registrants and allowed them to avoid removal or re-register, but the notice procedures could be burdensome—and a few States failed to provide any notice at all. The NVRA eliminated the practice of removing nonvoters without notice and required States to use more protective notice procedures. But the legislative history indicates that Congress did not require States to abandon entirely the widespread practice of treating nonvoting as an indication that a registrant may have become ineligible. 

Allowing States to send Section 20507(d)(2) notices based on nonvoting is also consistent with Congress’s objective of ensuring accurate voter rolls while leaving the States substantial flexibility. Ohio and other States have determined that the most appropriate way to maintain accurate voting lists is to use nonvoting as an indication that a registrant may have moved, and to seek to verify the registrant’s continued residence using the procedure in Section 20507(d). Under the flexible structure Congress adopted in the NVRA and clarified in HAVA, that judgment is left to the States.

The new attorneys at the Department of Justice are doing excellent work evaluating the law and reversing the politicized positions of the Obama DOJ when necessary.  It is imperative the Senate swiftly confirm Trump's DOJ nominees so that this important work can continue.

California Warned to Clean Up Voter Rolls or Face Lawsuit

Last week, Judicial Watch sent a letter to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla pointing out some of the evidence that California's voter registration rolls were filled with errors and demanding that California election authorities improve the accuracy of the rolls, as required by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and Help America Vote Act (HAVA), or face a lawsuit:

In the letter, Judicial Watch noted that public records obtained on the Election Assistance Commission’s 2016 Election Administration Voting Survey and through verbal accounts from various county agencies show 11 California counties have more registered voters than voting-age citizens: Imperial (102%), Lassen (102%), Los Angeles (112%), Monterey (104%), San Diego (138%), San Francisco (114%), San Mateo (111%), Santa Cruz (109%), Solano (111%), Stanislaus (102%), and Yolo (110%). 

In the letter, Judicial Watch noted that Los Angeles County officials “informed us that the total number of registered voters now stands at a number that is a whopping 144% of the total number of resident citizens of voting age.” . . . 

There is “strong circumstantial evidence that California municipalities are not conducting reasonable voter registration list maintenance as mandated under the NVRA,” Judicial Watch wrote in the notice letter sent to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. . . . 

“California’s voting rolls are an absolute mess that undermines the very idea of clean elections,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “It is urgent that California take reasonable steps to clean up its rolls. We will sue if state officials fail to act.”

The letter also requested various records regarding voter registration list maintenance that states and localities are required by the NVRA to keep and make publicly available upon request.  Unfortunately, many localities have resisted turning over this information to organizations like Judicial Watch and Public Interest Legal Foundation that are doing the important work of holding election officials accountable for keeping their voting lists accurate, as required by law.  We trust that this letter is the first step of a much-needed movement to improve the accuracy of voter registration records in California.   

The Dead Walk to the Voting Booths in California

Last week we shared a blog post surrounding the ongoing zombie voting apocalypse that was recently uncovered in California. Since that time, many tough questions have been asked.  Questions like: How did they not see this coming? How is this happening? Isn’t the government supposed to ensure election integrity? And most importantly, how can we stop it?

The fact of the matter is this is scary time we live in, but there are some simple answers to the panicked questions currently crawling out of California. First off, dead voters are not a rarity, and disappointingly enough, California is far from the first state to have the problem. Despite the shock and utter disbelief that followed the report, a quick Google™ search will yield all sorts of deceased voting activity. Activity that for one reason or another usually goes unaddressed. Vote fraud exists in many different forms in this country and sadly, this is not new information. Voter ID laws have started to address the in-person process but much work remains to be done in order to protect the integrity of our elections. That being stated onto the questions.

How did they not see this coming? / How is this happening?

A: It’s an excellent question and one that even the California Secretary of State and Auditor addressed publically.  The sheer level of dysfunction and mismanagement of funds in California dedicated to HAVA is just astounding. I highly recommend you take a moment and read the report. Page 39 references a previous audit which further illustrates the sheer magnitude and perpetual nature of the problem in the state. Now you may be asking what exactly does HAVA have to do with the zombie voting apocalypse? Well, HAVA, among many other things, provides the state with funds to ensure that their voter registration rolls are current and much like everything else in the world when money designated for a particular purpose is needlessly wasted or carelessly mismanaged, the system begins to break down. Pieces of the process start to fall through the cracks making fraud a far more likely and distinct possibility. In this case, dead voters are not being removed from rolls and somehow, these deceased individuals are continuing to vote.

Isn’t the government supposed to ensure election integrity? / How can we stop it?

A: Absolutely. California’s HAVA budget has been a catastrophe almost since the program’s inception. In a world where liberals and the left consistently raise voter disenfranchisement as one of their main concerns we have legitimate voters being disenfranchised by the dead with literally no consequences.  In all seriousness, this is a failure at the most basic level of election administration and we must demand accountability. If we continue to allow such a complete and utter disregard for the integrity of our elections, than a precedent will be set and much like the way a zombie infection spreads in the movies, so too will fraud continue to spread through our elections.

Vote fraud is alive and well. We have much work to do to ensure that our elections are and continue to be both honest and fair.