[EL] Fwd: ELB News and Commentary 6/17/20

[Rick Hasen]

Can the fallback be an emergency or provisional ballot, which the state later checks against voter registration records to insure that the voter voted the correct ballot?

From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> on behalf of Douglas Johnson <djohnson at ndcresearch.com>
Date: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 at 9:16 PM
To: Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] Fwd: ELB News and Commentary 6/17/20

It sounds nice, but I believe "paper copies of e-registration books" are not a real solution in counties (like Los Angeles) that have implemented 'open voting' (where voters are not restricted to only voting in their 'home' precinct). E-Registration books are needed in jurisdictions (such as Los Angeles County) where voters can go to any polling place (voters are not limited to only voting in their assigned precinct). It's simply impossible for every polling place to have a printout listing the County's more than 4 million registered voters (especially if we allow voters to register right up to election day).

E-Registration books work, or the whole thing falls apart.  (And my own personal experience in the March primary -- when I was the only voter in the precinct voting more than a week before election day, yet it still took nearly 10 minutes to find me in the registration books, testify to how early the problems with LA's system were evident.)

The only fallback I can imagine would be to send away all voters who are not in their "home" precinct (or give them all provisional ballots), and then have paper copies of the registration book for that "home" precinct. But that's a really poor fallback.

- Doug

Douglas Johnson
National Demographics Corporation
djohnson at NDCresearch.com
phone 310-200-2058
fax 818-254-1221


So It May Be Those ePollBooks (at Least Partially) to Blame for Long Lines in Los Angeles and Parts of Georgia (and Why We Need Paper Backups of Registration Records, as Recommended in “Fair Elections During a Crisis” Report)<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=112333>
Posted on June 17, 2020 7:56 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=112333> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Kim Zetter<https://news.yahoo.com/la-county-report-blames-voter-083006015.html>:

The hourslong wait times that snarled the March 3 primary in Los Angeles County stemmed from malfunctions in the electronic tablets used to check in voters at the polls, according to an unpublicized county report that adds to questions about the nation’s readiness for November.

The report concludes that these devices — known as electronic poll books — and not the county’s new $300 million voting machines were the source of those delays. Although the voting machines also had problems, the report faults inadequate planning, testing and programming of the poll books that workers used to check in voters and verify that they’re registered — technology that has also been implicated in this month’s meltdown at the polls in Georgia’s primary<https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/10/jon-ossoff-georgia-election-chaos-310429>.

Electronic poll books store a copy of the county’s voter registration list and automatically update that list as each voter checks in. Because Los Angeles County did not have backup paper copies of the voter list, poll workers were not able to check in voters when the devices failed, leading to long lines.

The findings about the March primary, which Los Angeles County quietly posted to its website recently<https://lavote.net/docs/rrcc/board-correspondence/VSAP-Board-Report.pdf?v=2>, have not previously been reported.

See Recommendation 12 from our Fair Elections During a Crisis<https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/2020ElectionReport.pdf> report:

Recommendation 12: Election administrators should create a resilient election infrastructure to deal with the unexpected, including complications related to COVID-19. Resiliency measures include having enough ballots on hand to accommodate high voter turnout, redundant election machinery, and paper copies of e-pollbook voter registration records.



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