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September 27, 2012

September 27, 2012

In Focus This Week

I. In Focus This Week

Getting them registered is just part of it
Two programs work with voters to get absentee ballots

By M. Mindy Moretti

Voters across the country began heading to the polls (or mailbox) in a number of states this week as absentee and early voting kicked off for the 2012 presidential election.

According to the United States Election Project, in 2008 approximately 39.7 million (30 percent) of all votes were cast before Election Day. That was up from 20 percent in 2004.

Although there is no way to say what the early/absentee vote may be for this year, Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Center at Reed College predicts that by the time November 6 rolls at least one-third of all voters will have already cast their ballots.

In Florida, elections officials are encouraging voters to vote early or absentee due to an exceptionally long ballot and in Ohio, every resident received an absentee ballot application.

Still, even with the numbers of early/absentee voting growing each election, it’s not always an easy task for voters to find out how they may cast their absentee ballots.

Two new programs however are making it easier for Spanish-speaking and military & overseas voters to cast absentee ballots.

Voto Ausente USA
This year, the U.S. Vote Foundation and the Hispanic Communications Network (HCN) teamed up to create the Voto Ausente USA Spanish-language website aimed at voters in 12 states.

The site offers state-specific absentee voting information for the 12 states with the highest number of Spanish-speaking voters.

According to Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president and CEO of US Vote, there was a bit of serendipity involved with creating the site.

“I was in Puerto Rico attending the NASS Summer Conference and a call came in from the founder and chairman of HCN, Jeff Kline. He simply asked if we had considered making a Spanish-language version, and he offered his HCN resources to team up and make it happen,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. “That started it. I had been surrounded with Spanish-speaking American voters for the last four days, and was totally open to the idea. Just needed a push, which he provided. Then, when we looked at the Pew research, and the low Hispanic turnout issues, I was immediately keen on helping to improve the situation for these voters.”

The Pew numbers that Dzieduszycka-Suinat is referring to indicate that in 2008, only 49.9 percent of the eligible Latino voters cast ballots as opposed to 65.2 percent of eligible black voters.

Voto Ausente USA is similar to US Vote’s other sites including the Overseas Vote Foundation’s website which is geared toward military and overseas voters. Dzieduszycka-Suinat said because U.S. Vote’s site is not engineered for multiple languages, it was easier to create a separate site.

Although there are a number of jurisdictions with large Spanish-speaking populations (many falling under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act), Dzieduszycka-Suinat said that due to time limitations, the decision was made to focus on the 10-12 states with the largest Spanish-speaking populations figuring that the site will be available to about 75 percent of the population.

“We had limited time and resources,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat explained. “So we looked to the Census and quickly assessed that if we focused on the top 10-12 states with the highest Hispanic or percent Hispanic population we could likely reach 75 percent of the voters through only those states.”

Since the site launched earlier this month the US Vote and HCN have been working hard to get the word out to the affected markets.

“HCN is also running spots on their radio network of 254 Spanish language stations during the month of October promoting the website and encouraging Latinos to take advantage of the convenience of absentee voting,” said Maria Nape with HCN.

Nape said they will monitor the traffic to the site throughout the process to determine its effectiveness and make adjustments accordingly for future elections.

Our Mission Your Vote
Our Mission Your Vote is a consortium of 13 Florida counties working together to help military and overseas voters in the Sunshine State cast their absentee ballots with a one-stop website.

The 13 counties, which represent the majority of the state’s military installations, partnered with Democracy Live and Microsoft to provide a secure, state-of-the-art site to allow members of the military to download their absentee ballots.

The site is meant to make it easier and faster for military and overseas voters to case their ballots.

“We conduct absentee voting today just as we did during the civil war. We mail a soldier a ballot and hope he gets it. He votes and mails his ballot back and hopes we get it in time to count it,” Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections, Paul Lux told a local Fox affiliate.

The ballots can either be completed using an online ballot-marking wizard, or printed and filled out by hand. Once the ballots are complete, it is up to the voter to mail the ballot back. Voters can then subsequently track their ballots online to ensure that they were delivered to their county elections department in a timely fashion.

The program, which received initial state approval in late 2011 was first used during the primary and was spearheaded by Lux.

The coalition received a $1.6 million grant from the Federal Voting Assistance Program to create the site.

Counties participating in the program include Baker, Bay, Bradford, Clay, Duval, Escambia, Leon, Nassau, Okaloosa, Pinellas, Putnam, Sarasota and Wakulla.

Election News This Week

II. Election News This Week

  • Two pieces of legislation signed into law this week should make it easier for Californians to cast a ballot in future elections. On Monday Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 1436 into law, which beginning in 2015, will allow residents of the Golden State to register to vote on election day. The law can’t take affect until the secretary of state certifies VoteCal, the state’s new statewide voter registration database. Nearly half of all California voters vote-by-mail and another piece of legislation signed into law by Brown was AB 2080 will simplify who may turn in a vote-by-mail ballot. According to the Palo Alto Patch, currently, family members or persons in the same household can return ballots of vote-by-mail voters only “due to illness or other physical disability,” as noted on the ballot envelope.  AB 2080 eliminates this requirement, allowing a vote-by-mail ballot to be returned for any reason, without compromising existing safeguards.
  • The state of Florida released a final list of 198 names of noncitizens registered to vote in the Sunshine State. This number is much lower than the 2,600 Gov. Rick Scott had alleged when this process began.
  • File this one under oops! Apparently some Ohio residents are throwing out their absentee ballot applications thinking that it’s junk mail. “Some people were calling us and asking if we could send them an absentee application,” Bill Shubat, Belmont County Election Board Director told WTRF. “And we’d certainly be happy to do that. But we reminded them that the attorney general already sent them one. They indicated that they threw it out, and one person had shredded it.” Fortunately, unlike a ballot itself, the county can send residents a new application.
  • Last week we reported some impressive numbers of new/updated voter registrations in Maryland and New York since those two states went online with their voter registration. This week we have a report from Nevada, which went live statewide with online voter registration earlier this month that new registrations are averaging 550 per day.
  • This week, Facebook gave its users the ability to add when and where they registered to vote on their profile’s timeline. According to The Hill, in a blog post, Facebook said it believes the new timeline feature and its “I’m Voting” app with CNN “will result in a more involved and informed citizenry ahead of Election Day.”
  • Congratulations to TurboVote who this week signed up their 100,000th voter. The site, which electionlineWeekly featured back in July now has 57 college partners across the country with nine schools having signed up more than 20 percent of their student population with the voting site.
  • Personnel News: Following his arrest for a probation violation, Fulton County, Ga. Elections Director Sam Westmoreland resigned this week. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Registration Chief Sharon Mitchell, who has been with the county for about a year and has a decade of elections experience, will serve as interim director. Embattled Hawaii County Clerk Jamae Kawauchi hired Elizabeth Lehau Iopa, an elections specialist who has been with the department for four years to serve as the temporary elections administrator for the Big Island. Michael F. Colley recently resigned from the Franklin County, Ohio board of elections. Colley, who did not cite a reason for resigning, although he has been battling Parkinson’s, served on the board since 2003. Late last week, the Shelby County, Tenn. election commission voted unanimously to suspend Richard Holden, administrator of elections, for three days in October followed with six months of probation. According to the Commercial Appeal, Holden was suspended because of “personnel issues in the office” and problems with the August 2 primary.

Opinions

III. Opinion

National News: Voter ID, II, III, IV; Voter fraud, II; Election apps; Voter registration. II, III; Voter harassment; Student voting; Vote-by-mail; Election Day; Easy voting

Colorado: Voter purge; Scott Gessler

Florida: Hillsborough County; Absentee ballots, II; Early voting, II; Voting machines; Voter purge

Iowa: Voter purge

Maryland: Early voting

Massachusetts: Worcester’s elections

Michigan: Ineligible voters; Noncitizen voters; Absentee ballots; Ease in voting

Minnesota: Voter ID, II, III, IV

Mississippi: Section 5

Montana: Voter registration; Absentee voting

New Hampshire: Ballot counting; Poll workers

North Carolina: Redistricting

Ohio: Absentee ballot rule; Ballot access; Electoral College; Ballot security; Proof-of-citizenship

Oregon: Secretary of state race; Kate Brown

Pennsylvania: Voter ID, II, III, IV, V; Voter fraud

Rhode Island: Vote counting; Instant-runoff voting

Tennessee: True the Vote; Shelby County; Integrity at polls

Texas: Voter rolls, II, III

Washington: Voter registration; Secretary of state race

Wisconsin: Voter ID, II

**Some sites may require registration.

Job Openings

V. Job Openings

electionlineWeekly publishes election administration job postings each week as a free service to our readers. To have your job listed in the newsletter, please send a copy of the job description, including a web link to mmoretti@electionline.org. Job postings must be received by 5pm on Wednesday in order to appear in the Thursday newsletter. Listings will run for three weeks or till the deadline listed in the posting

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