Common Cause Blog

Reform the Electoral College -- quickly!

We've worked hard for the past couple years to get rid of the Electoral College in its current form by enacting the National Popular Vote plan in enough states to reach 270 electoral votes. A great opinion piece today in the NY Times makes a strong case for why we need to pass NPV in many states now--in 2009 and 10--and not wait around.

New York and Indiana, briefly

Machine malfunctions--no surprise, given that New York continues to use lever machines that will finally be retired in the next couple years--are being reported at a higher rate than ever before at our New York election protection call center. They've fielded nearly 300 calls on voting equipment problems, and some polling places in New York City have lines as long as four hours.

Upstate, meanwhile, the poll workers at a SUNY-Albany precinct were turning students away -- the problem has apparently been solved, but not before many students were rejected when they were inexplicably kept off the voting rolls:

Ten swing states we expected, and others we're watching

Welcome to Election Day! Today is the culmination of our voter protection campaign.

The past two presidential elections have turned on states with major problems on Election Day. One month ago, Common Cause and two partner organizations released Voting in 2008, a report documenting the progress and the remaining challenges to voting in ten swing states. At the time, the list of Florida and Ohio, as well as Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, seemed like an impressive survey.

Florida's Incomplete Vote Count

No matter what happens on November 5th, I can already tell you that Florida's vote count will be an inaccurate reflection of its people.

I just got off the phone with the sister of Brian Lawson, who turned 18 last February. Based on past election in Florida, Brian was skeptical that his vote would be counted, so she had to work hard to convince him that he should take the time to register himself. Finally, in early September, he did.

Then, on October 7, one day after the voter registration deadline had passed, he received a notification from his county election supervisor that his voter application was incomplete because he had failed to check the box that says:

"⁭I affirm that I have not been adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting, or if I have, my right to vote has been restored."

Brian's discouraged, but he's not crazy. He called his local elections office, asking to correct his form, but was told it was too late for him to come in and check the box, even though the election was still weeks away.

According to Florida law, Brian would have had to complete his application by checking that box prior to the closing of the registration books on October 6 - yet the notification telling him he needed to do so wasn't postmarked until, you guessed it, October 6.

Under Florida law, the person who accepted Brian's registration form (and who failed to tell him it was incomplete) had 10 days to turn it in. Then, the state has 13 days to enter it into its system and another 5 days to process notifications of incomplete applications. That adds up to 28 days, or four weeks, which in Brian's case was how long it took before he knew there was a problem with his registration form.

In 2004, more than 14,000 registrations were rejected for being incomplete, such as missing a check box like Brian did. That's 14,000 votes not counted, making our election results an incomplete expression of the will of the people. For this and other reasons, out of 830,157 applications received between January 2006 and September 2007, 76,000 did not result in a new registration.

Some of those may have been duplicates, others erroneous applications. But in Brian's case, and thousands of others, it was simply denying a red-blooded tax-paying American the right to vote because a bureaucrat wouldn't let him check a box.

DC Board of Elections AWOL?

I moved two months ago and one month ago I sent in a new voter registration form to update my address in Washington, DC.

For the past month, on the DC Board of Elections web site, when I searched for my "voter registration status" I got the following message:

Registered Voter
PENDING APPROVAL PER RECEIPT OF SIGNED APPLICATION

Of course, the signed application is what I sent in a month ago. I called on Friday to see if perhaps the online database just wasn't updated. The woman told me it was, but they'd gotten a ton of registrations and would be processing them through the weekend. "Don't worry," she said, "but call back on Monday to make sure."

Today, Monday, is the voter registration deadline for DC. I just called. This time, I got a busy signal at the Board of Elections.

Snapshot of Student Voting

Tova Andrea Wang, vice president for research at Common Cause, Kristen Oshyn, The Century Foundation

In an election cycle that witnessed an increase in young voter turnout across the country during the primaries, Rock the Vote (RTV) predicts that young voters will turn out in such high numbers in four states in November that their votes will impact the outcome of those states’ elections. The four states RTV predicts will feel the greatest impact of young voters are Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado and Ohio. As a forthcoming report by Common Cause and The Century Foundation details, of the many young voters out there, a significant number of them are also student voters, who too often must confront unique obstacles to voting. Given the key role students will play this year – and the possible backlash by some partisans to prevent them from doing so – such problems could influence how large of an impact they will be able to have in these states and throughout the country.

Of the four states cited by RTV, Virginia stands out as the most likely to pose problems for students attempting to vote while at school. Establishing residency is frequently one of the larger hurdles that students must overcome when seeking to vote at school and Virginia sets that hurdle very high with some of the strictest residency requirements in the country. In addition to burdensome residency requirements, Virginia’s State Board of Elections’ student voter guidelines have long been ambiguous and misleading. Its student voting information website directs students to a ‘self-guided’ questionnaire meant to “assist applicants” in determining their residency and includes questions on their plans following school and whether their parents claim them as dependents on their tax returns, but really seems to be designed to deter student voting.

Walmart electioneering?

This comes from our intern Jamie McConkey, who will continue to follow this Wal-Mart story

Common Cause's advocacy for fair elections doesn't just focus on public officials and institutions. We'll challenge unfair practices wherever they may occur, so when the Wall Street Journal published an article earlier this month alleging that Wal-Mart had been warning its employees not to vote Democrat, our ears began to prick up.