In Focus This Week
Officials look to corporate world for solutions to poll worker shortage
By Katie Glover
electionline.org
Faced with a severe shortage of poll workers, election officials across the country have turned to the corporate world for solutions, seeking rules that allow employees to have paid time-off to serve.
Prior to the 2006 general election, the Associated Press reported that the nation was short at least 500,000 poll workers. The New York Times reported that 2 million poll workers were needed for the election but only 1.4 million were trained. The poll worker shortage has become so pressing that some states have contemplated implementing a poll worker draft. ABC News reported that Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, might enlist poll workers in 2008 as courts enlist jurors.
New federal requirements laid out in the Help America Vote Act have made it even harder to recruit poll workers.
Jason Yocom, Salt Lake County’s chief deputy clerk, said that there has been “a shift in the type of people interested.” Electronic voting machines and intensified training have made the job more difficult for older poll workers, and younger citizens cannot leave their 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. jobs.
“We lost people who had done it for years, out of fear,” Yocom said.
Many states have laws that ensure paid time-off work to cast a ballot, but few have similar provisions for time off work to serve as a poll worker. In Minnesota, however, it is written in state law that “an individual …may, after giving an employer at least 20 days’ written notice, be absent from a place of work for the purpose of serving as an election judge without penalty.” Even with the Minnesota statute as a model, few states have adopted such legislation and the severe shortage of poll workers continues to hamper elections.
With state legislatures reluctant to help, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in 2004 took action to remedy this pressing shortage of poll workers and made a public appeal to corporations, federal government agencies, and private organizations and held a public hearing on poll worker recruitment, training, and retention.
The EAC launched the National Poll Worker Initiative, asking corporations to “assist poll worker recruitment efforts by allowing employees to be released from work to volunteer for Election Day service without having to take a personal or vacation day.”
At the time, then-EAC Chair DeForest B. Soaries, Jr. compared corporate support to the corporate support of jury duty obligations. The EAC distributed more than 600 letters asking employers to release their employees to serve as poll workers without loss of pay.
The results of this initiative have been slow but some companies and federal agencies have adopted new poll worker policies. According to the Secretary of State’s Web site, California permits state employees to take time off, without loss of pay, to serve as poll workers on Election Day. In response to the National Poll Worker Initiative, the United States Department of Agriculture has also changed its policy to grant administrative leave to employees who work as poll workers and take poll worker training before Election Day.
The initiative has been the most successful at the county level. Sherrie Swensen, Salt Lake county clerk, has asked local corporations to give their employees the day off to serve as poll workers on Election Day, and in return, become an ‘official election sponsor.’
The reaction has been “slow going at first but we are starting to get some responses,” according to Yocom, “and I think it’s going to build with the 2008 election.”
Yocom noted that it is an opportunity for corporations to “provide a public service to their employees and be a good public citizen.”
Ohio’s Franklin County has been particularly successful at getting the private sector involved with democracy. Deborah Koch, an employee of Kids Voting Ohio who works closely with the county Board of Elections, said that the county launched a Champions of Democracy initiative that encouraged corporations to give their employees time off work to volunteer at the polls. “They had a great response,” she said and many of the corporations used this opportunity “to publicize their volunteer efforts.”
MSNBC reported that several Central Ohio companies, including American Electric Power Company Inc. and the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium participated. Kimberly Lust of State Farm Insurance also confirmed her company’s participation in the Champions of Democracy program.
Katie Glover is a senior at the University of Richmond majoring in journalism and political science. Katie is interning with electionline.org through the beginning of August.
In Focus This Week II
Groups Allege Systematic Effort to Politicize Justice Department
Brennan Center details four-pronged strategy to dismantle DOJ’s infrastructure
By Kat Zambon
electionline.org
Though the U.S. Attorney scandal has been receiving attention both on Capitol Hill and in the press, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law say that it’s just one part of a systematic effort to use government institutions for partisan ends by the man nominated to be one of four commissioners at the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Hans von Spakovsky was one of two former Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division attorneys that Brennan researchers say were instrumental in an effort to use department resources for voter suppression. A presentation by the two groups, posted on a Brennan Center Web site The Truth About Fraud, describes the four-pronged strategy to dismantle DOJ’s infrastructure, spread fear of voter fraud, restrict registration and voting and pursue politically-motivated prosecutions.
Those who support the former DOJ employees’ actions, however, contend partisan politics by Democrats – particularly on the issue of voter ID – have led to noisy opposition to President George W. Bush’s nominee to become a commissioner at the FEC.
Recently, Bradley Schlozman, former civil rights division head, was called to testify about his knowledge of the U.S. attorney purge while von Spakovsky, former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, appeared before the Senate two weeks later to be confirmed as an FEC commissioner.
Seven former DOJ voting section employees have been especially vocal about changes at DOJ during Schlozman and von Spakovsky’s tenure. In a June 11 letter to Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Bob Bennett, R-Utah of the Committee on Rules and Administration, the former employees explained how von Spakovsky in particular injected partisanship into hiring decisions for the section and altered performance evaluations, ultimately undermining morale in the section.
Specifically, the letter detailed the process behind the Georgia voter ID law pre-clearance. Four out of five career staff members concluded that the law would negatively impact minority voters. The one attorney who disagreed was a new employee with nearly no previous experience in enforcing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. After the employees submitted a 50 page memo explaining their logic, the state of Georgia submitted corrected data that showed that hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters did not have the required ID, a disproportionate number of whom were poor, elderly or minority voters.
Von Spakovsky prevented the five member panel from considering the new data according to the letter. The law was pre-cleared on August 26, 2005, the same day that the corrected data was submitted.
However, “the personnel fallout after this review is at least as disturbing as the decision-making process,” the letter said. The Section 5 unit’s deputy chief who led the review, a 20-year veteran of the voting section with 28 years of experience in the civil rights division was involuntarily transferred to another job without explanation. The three other employees faced retaliation and criticism and eventually left the voting section while the lone dissenter received a cash award. Since then, half of the section’s attorneys have left the section in addition to four analysts with more than 25 years of experience.
Speaking at a June 7 press event, Tobey Moore, a former DOJ voting section political geographer, explained that after he participated in the team that discouraged pre-clearance of the voter ID law, von Spakovsky and Schlozman filed a retaliatory complaint against him with the Office of Professional Responsibility based on emails they searched without his permission. The complaint was dismissed three months later. “All of us felt retaliated against for pursuing our recommendation,” Moore said.
After the confirmation hearing for von Spakovsky, Irene Garcia, director for the Judicial Watch Miami office said the primary reason Democrats oppose his nomination is because of his support for voter ID in Georgia.
““The Democrats thought that was racist … even though the state of Georgia offers free identification for everybody,” she said.
The Brennan Center, however, said von Spakovsky’s partisan bias extended beyond his signing off on Georgia’s voter ID bill, citing recently-released emails that, they say, show him attempting to influence the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to support proof-of-citizenship requirements in Arizona and trying to cancel a research contract on the impact of and need for voter ID.
According to the Brennan Center, von Spakovsky discouraged Bush from reappointing Paul DeGregorio, former EAC vice chair to the commission at the end of DeGregorio’s term for his failure to cooperate. Bush eventually appointed Caroline Hunter, former Republican National Committee deputy counsel to fill DeGregorio’s position.
Von Spakovsky was also behind a DOJ decision that voters couldn’t go to court themselves to enforce the Help America Vote Act, a position that has been rejected by federal courts.
A July 2 article in The Wall Street Journal said that von Spakovsky’s nomination “has drawn bitter opposition” because former DOJ employees “make strained claims he pushed for laws requiring voters to show a photo ID as a means to suppress black voter turnout” and “derailing two investigations into possible voter discrimination.”
The Clinton administration filed 25 cases in its last five years while the Bush administration filed 35 such cases in their first five years, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“The confirmation hearing isn’t the only opportunity to expose and try to remedy the shenanigans that have been going on at DOJ,” Weiser said, adding that she hopes Congress will continue to investigate.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will convene a hearing next week on politicization at DOJ in hiring and firing decisions.
Election News This Week
- The Indiana Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union each filed requests before the United States Supreme Court this week asking the high court to review the legal fight over Indiana’s voter ID law. Voter ID has operated in two primaries and a fall election since the state legislature adopted a requirement that voters must produce photo identification at polling places. According to the Journal Gazette, the court will either agree to hear the case or refuse to consider it, but despite the fact that only a handful of the thousands of cases submitted are heard, Gerald Herbert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center said, “…this issue is one we see now on the front burner.”
- The Jefferson County, Texas Commission voted this week to create an election committee to review a recent decision by County Clerk Carolyn Guidry to notify local cities and school boards that the county elections office would no longer conduct municipal or school elections. According to The News, the June 14 letter from Guidry caused quite an uproar with local officials who said they were shocked and did not know where the money would come from to conduct elections. The committee, which will include Guidry, the county auditor, county tax collector, the assistant district attorney and other county officials will conduct a hearing to “address the burden of uncertainty Guidry’s decision left on several of the county’s cities and school districts.”
- As we get set to enter the dog days of summer, some local jurisdictions are cranking up the air conditioning in order to spare their new electronic voting equipment the indignity of high heat and humidity. In New Jersey, Bergen County freeholders approved a $42,000 air-conditioning system for the warehouse where the county stores its 1,200 Sequoia voting machines. Temperatures in the warehouse can reach 110 degrees and although a Sequoia spokesperson told The Record that the machines can withstand temperatures of up to 140 degrees, as anyone from the Mid-Atlantic can tell you, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. In addition to protecting its machines, freeholders also saw this as a personnel issue. With 11 full-time employees working in the warehouse, Patricia DiCostanzo, Bergen County’s superintendent of elections told the paper that it’s a long-overdue capital improvement.
- Act locally, think globally is a popular slogan on bumper stickers, but for one California county, the slogan could be act locally, think nationally. Two years ago, election officials in San Mateo County came up with an online tracking system for voter’s to track their absentee ballots to assure that they were received and counted. Now, U.S. Rep. Susan Davis, D-San Diego, has proposed federal legislation that would take that concept nationwide. “When we found out about San Mateo (County), that kind of really inspired us to move forward on this,” Aaron Hunter, spokesman for Davis told the Palo Alto Daily News. “We know it can work.”
Opinions This Week
National: Vote-by-mail, Holt bill, II, Voter fraud, Instant runoff voting
Arizona: Felon voting rights
Florida: Palm Beach County
Maryland: Linda Lamone
Massachusetts: Election-day registration
Michigan: Turnout
Mississippi: Voting machines, Turnout, Voting rights
Montana: Vote-by-mail
New Hampshire: Turnout
New York: HAVA
Some sites require registration
Job Postings This Week
All job listings must be received by 12 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday for publication in our Thursday newsletter. Job listings are free but may be edited for length. Whenever possible, include Internet information. Please email job postings to mmoretti@electionline.org
Elections Director I — St. Mary’s County, Md. Position is responsible for all facets of administering the election office including: personnel management, budgeting, implementation of a new voting system and voter registration system, and compliance with all state and federal election laws. Qualifications: Graduation from an accredited high school or possession of a high school equivalency certificate. Five years of experience applying federal, State and local election laws and regulations applicable to conducting elections, which must have included at least one presidential or gubernatorial election. 2 yrs. exp. directly managing an office or a project staff of two or more employees. Salary: $40,628-$66,051. Application: Interested candidates may find instructions on how to apply and obtain an application and application supplement by visiting the Department of Budget & Management Web site or by calling 410-767-4850, toll free 800-705-3493; TTY users call MD Relay Service, 800-735-2258. EOE Deadline: July 23
Salary: $40,628-$66,051.