Posted on 11/10/2007 7:43:23 PM PST by StopGlobalWhining
An elections official said she has received between five and 10 complaints about Tuesday's judge of elections at precinct 25 in the HUB-Robeson Center -- College Democrats President Enrique Ortiz.
Centre County Elections Office department clerk Jodi Neidig, who was in charge of recruiting elections officers for the HUB, said she "can guarantee" Ortiz will never work for Centre County during another election. She said she was "extremely disappointed" in the way precinct 25 was run as a whole.
Ortiz, speaking on behalf of himself and not the College Democrats, said the HUB polling place was "horribly run" and an "abomination of democracy," but placed the blame squarely on the county elections office, which he said is staffed by "incompetent losers." He said Joyce McKinley, the elections director, should be fired.
Ortiz added that McKinley is trying to blame students for what the elections office did wrong, such as nearly allowing a student to vote twice Tuesday.
"[McKinley] knows her job is at stake, and she's trying to shift the blame to the students," he said. "It's a public relations move."
Neidig said she would have rather had poll workers from Bellefonte Area High School working the polls on Election Day than "some of the college students we had."
She said the county recruited elections poll workers from the political science department, in hopes that they would take their duties seriously.
"No longer using students [as poll workers] -- that's a huge possibility," she said. "Some students took it seriously and did a good job, but it's obvious that some just thought it was a huge joke."
Ed Lundgren (senior-political science), a poll worker for precinct 24 in the HUB, sent a letter to Neidig complaining about Ortiz.
Lundgren said that perhaps students should not be trusted to operate polling places.
"If it's going to be like this, then yeah, maybe they shouldn't use students," he said. "There were enough instances that I can see where Centre County would be concerned about using students."
Lundgren said Ortiz's actions "reflected poorly on the Penn State population as a whole."
He said Ortiz spent little time at the polling place, where he was supposed to be all day. Instead, Lundgren said Ortiz spent most of his time in other areas of the HUB, coordinating the College Democrats' "get out the vote" campaign.
Lundgren added that although Ortiz ran the polls poorly, he did nothing to "sway voters" inside the polling place.
Here is the story in the Daily Collegian from the day before, the day after the elections:
Posted on November 7, 2007 12:59 AM
Student calls attention to flaw in voting system
When Meg Krause went to vote in yesterday's election, she entered the HUB-Robeson Center and showed identification to the student working the polls inside Heritage Hall.
After verifying Krause's name and signature with the list of registered voters, the worker then started logging Krause into one of the touch screen voting systems.
Despite this seemingly perfect display of democracy, there was a major problem. On the verge of being whisked into a booth to commit voter fraud, Krause (junior-public relations) alerted the poll worker that, hours earlier, she had voted at her precinct's other location in the College Township Municipal Building.
"Save my morals and ethics, I could've voted twice today," Krause said. "When you think about what could've happened had this been a national election and people had known about this ... it's pretty bad."
Krause, who was writing a story about the elections for her journalism class, decided to test the system after spotting a second voting location for her precinct at the HUB.
The Centre County Elections and Voter Registration Office split precinct 44 -- which includes the East Halls dorms of Stuart, Stone, Snyder and Hastings -- into two locations to accommodate the on-campus students who had trouble getting to the municipal building in past elections, said Joyce McKinley, director of the Centre County Office of Elections.
Voters with on-campus addresses had to vote in the HUB, while voters with off-campus addresses had to vote in the municipal building, a rule to which McKinley said no exceptions were allowed. McKinley said the voter lists could not be separated because of a state law, so poll workers were instructed to check voters' addresses before allowing them to vote.
Krause, who lives off campus, said the student working the polls at the HUB didn't check her address before letting her vote, only requesting her student ID and signature.
Krause said the error "shows a lack of organization and prior planning on behalf of the elections office."
McKinley said the elections office would have eventually found out that Krause voted twice, the penalty for which is a "stiff fine" and possible jail time. Because of ballot confidentiality, though, McKinley said there would be no way to identify who was voted for or void a double vote.
McKinley said poll workers in both the municipal building and the HUB were trained to check the addresses and reminded again after Krause called McKinley to report the problem.
Greg Smith (junior - political science) said he was a poll worker for precinct 44 in the HUB. He said the students working at the HUB were never told to check voter's addresses before allowing them to vote. Smith said the poll workers were only alerted to check addresses around 3 p.m.
Michael Lenbeck-Edens, judge of elections at the municipal building, said he wasn't told to check voters' addresses before allowing them to vote until 3 p.m. yesterday either, after Krause alerted the elections office of the problem. Two other poll workers at the municipal building said the same thing.
"Normally, we don't check anyone's address," Lenbeck-Edens said. "They sign their name, [we] compare signatures and then they're allowed to vote."
Lenbeck-Edens said the "whole issue could be avoided" if the four dorm buildings in precinct 44 were given their own precinct.
McKinley said that was one possible solution. However, she added that the problem could also be resolved by absorbing the HUB polling location back into the municipal building or not allowing students to serve as poll workers at the HUB in the future.
HUB poll workers declined to comment, but McKinley said this was the first year it was run entirely by students. She said it was "just chaos" at the HUB, adding that precinct 44 in the HUB only had four voters as of 5 p.m.
"We will take it before the board and talk about it. We did this to accommodate students and some groups," she said. "Next year is going to be one whopping big year with the presidential elections, so we have to take this performance into consideration."
Smith said the students running the polling place were not at fault in allowing Krause to nearly vote twice, and the right of running a polling place should not be revoked.
"That would be ridiculous, because we were perfectly fine in the last election," he said. "Students are all really capable and dedicated."
This sounds like a total screw-up by management, whoever that should be.
Yay! Hastings is where I lived as a freshman.
Political science is essentially pre-law so obviously the probability that there will be fraud and corruption in anything the poli-sci students (future lawyers) do is tremendous. They certainly should not be handling a voting precinct. That’s a no-brainer.
The “election officials” themselves need to be removed from office. The very idea that they so no conflict of interest or ethical problem in the first place, before election day, that the person running the center was leading the “get out the vote” effort for one party. This requires a county, legal investigation and if I were the GOP I’d ask a judge to throw out any election in that particular precinct.
A couple problems here:
(1) Having two polling places for the same precinct using identical paper voter lists only invites election fraud. The County should form a new precinct for the dormitories and remove said dormitories from any other precinct.
(2) One can argue that at this juncture in our history, practically everyone with any significant political opinion subscribes to a partisan ideology on one side of the red/blue chasm or on the other side. But an officer of a political party—and the President of College Democrats fits that role—should not serve as a poll worker to avoid conflicts of interest. The County should take better care to avoid recruiting such apparently unbalanced bitter partisans, and Ortiz should have recused himself.
Meg will NEVER work in a rat campaign EVER. She has broken the rat code of omerta by telling her story. By 30 she will be a conservative.
One problem with making a precinct for just East Halls (mostly freshmen) is that the only years they bother to vote are in presidential years. Otherwise, a precinct would be manned all day twice a year for 3 voters, then in the 4th year turnout would be a bit higher. Because PA doesn’t remove people from the polls till they haven’t voted for several years, and the individual turnover in East Halls is probably 90%, the election rolls show over a thousand registered voters - but most of them aren’t there anymore. How can we know who is? We can’t cleanse the rolls based on University residence lists.
It’s a difficult situation for the county, with a part of the county (State College and the surrounding municipalities plus the Unversity) being dominated by the school.
The PSU head of emergency management says that on any given day there are 55,000 students,faculty and staff on campus. Campus is surrounded by the Borough of State College - population 28,000. Many the students live out in the surrounding municipalities, where they don’t dominate the voting precincts, but the East side of campus is in College Township (not the Borough) - and it’s adjacent to mostly farmland. The precinct was made large enough to include enough permanent residents to make it reasonably effective to man the precinct every year, and the polling place was in the municipal building (2-3 miles from East Halls). Student organizations claimed that students in East Halls couldn’t vote because they didn’t know where the municipal building was, and they didn’t have cars to drive there. It’s long been a problem that East Halls students tried to vote at the HUB where the rest of the students (whose precinct is in the Borough of State College) and were turned away because they were in the wrong precinct. It looks like the county made an attempt to work with those complaints, but the outcome wasn’t very positive. The good news is that only a few of those registered in that College Township Precinct would have known where both the municipal building and the HUB were, so any double voting would have been small - only 192 people voted in the entire precinct.
See my post about my recent gig as the Republican Alternate Judge in a Democrat precinct. Our system in Texas detects a lot of people who are registered to vote in two or more counties. It appears that this is about 2% minimum of the electorate. My county automatically cancels the registration of a voter who shows up on the rolls of another county. However, without Republican volunteers working at the polls voter fraud is much easier. In the 1996 election one Democrat precinct in Texas simply waited until the polls closed and cast a straight ticket ballot for every voter who did not show up. Much cheaper than vans and box lunches.
“I’m sure they didn’t realize that poli-sci has been taken over by the left, or that this young man was leading a party ‘get-out-the-vote’ effort.”
That ignorance is, in my view, no more than confirmation of their incompetence.
Now, sure enough, the elected officials who appoint the polling officials to each “board of elections” (under its various local titles) is not looking for the creme of the crop. But, that is the voters’ fault, and unless the voters demand more “election board” competency in who is selected for those bodies, then fraudulent elections is what the voters can expect and deserve.
You should be writing to your county and local officials to demand reforms and discussing same with friends and neighbors.
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