PeaceChicken.com

Last Tuesday I was an election protection official for the Ohio Democratic Party. I had to attend one of their training sessions to get all the info on voting rights, rules, and the responsibilities of being an observer. The training was a couple hours, held in a union hall on South High Street. I was probably the youngest person there, and most were there to be trained for working at the 1-888-DEM-VOTE call center on election day. They were extremely short on volunteers. Not even enough to put one person at every precinct in Franklin County.

Because I had to work, I wasn’t able to get to my assigned precinct until about 4 o’clock. I went to Linmoor Middle School where there were 2 precincts operating in the auditorium, 17-D and 17-E. It’s a rather poor section of Columbus, about 99% black voters. Almost all of them were carrying a “Turn Around Ohio” (Democrat) mailer to vote off of. Of course there weren’t any Republican observers there, I doubt they care about precincts like these, seeing as Blackwell only got 44 votes to Strickland’s 286.

Before I get to the bad observations, let me note the good things I saw:

• Plenty of poll workers (about 5 @ each precinct)
• Enough machines (5-6 @ each), all in working order
• No waiting to vote (though this could be seen as a bad thing in terms of voter turnout.)
• Poll workers enforced the “no campaigning” rule very strictly. Voters weren’t even allowed to have their voting cards out of their pockets before they got to the machine. And when the NAACP came by to give free t-shirts to the poll workers, they wouldn’t accept them because they thought they were counted as campaign material and they shouldn’t even be in the building. For the record, the shirts were not advocating anything but voting in general. So maybe the poll workers should have worried more about the ID and ballot rules instead..?

Now, the bad thing I saw, many voters were voting provisionally. This could simply be because people hadn’t updated their registration (which means their vote will likely be counted.) Or it could be the poll worker’s lack of understanding the rules, so when in doubt they gave prov. ballots. I wasn’t sitting close enough to see what the reasons were, I only saw people filling out the forms.

The bigger problem that stemmed from the provisional ballots became known at around 5 o’clock. I was talking to one of poll workers, just casually, nothing about the voting. Then he looked over at the other precinct’s table and saw one of the poll workers taking the yellow copy of the provisional ballot affidavit and putting it in the envelope taped to the voting machine. Just as they do with the white slips a poll worker tears out once a voter signs the poll book, it’s a receipt for each voter, tied to each machine so the counts can be balanced. Once the poll workers became aware of their error, they looked at eachother in a confused way, then laughed about it, thinking it wasn’t a big deal. At the end of the night when they were getting all the papers in order and closing down the machines, they looked at the pile of yellow papers on the table and had no idea what to do with them.

They didn’t know what to do with that pile of papers because the yellow copy of the provisional ballot form is supposed to go to the voter, not kept by the poll worker. On both sides in capital letters it says “THE YELLOW COPY MUST GO TO THE VOTER.” Because the provisional ballot application is an affidavit, a legal document, the voter is entitled to a copy. It also has all the information about how they follow up with the Board of Elections to prove their identity and make sure their vote is counted. There’s an identification number that the BOE uses to retrieve their ballot. Without this copy, a voter doesn’t know what their number is, they may forget the details of ensuring his/her vote, like how they only have 10 days to follow up with the BOE, how to contact the BOE, or what exactly they have to provide to the BOE to prove their identity. So the fact that the poll workers at 17-E went from 6:30am-5pm without giving provisional voters this paper is a serious issue.

Now that it is known and documented, I was asked today to write up a testimony and send it to the ODP for use in upcoming legal actions. Specifically one very soon where Judge Marbley (who suspended the Absentee ID requirement) will be asked to extend the 10 day deadline for provisional voters to verify their identity.

If the ODP hadn’t assigned a poll observer there, this problem would’ve never been known. So this just goes to show how important it is for citizens to take an active roll in the democracy we claim to be so proud of. It’s our duty to hold the system and process accountable and make sure every single person’s vote is counted. As we saw a week ago, one vote can make all the difference.