{"id":7243,"date":"2016-10-31T07:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7243"},"modified":"2016-10-30T14:36:24","modified_gmt":"2016-10-30T18:36:24","slug":"a-critical-error-in-early-voting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7243","title":{"rendered":"A Critical Error in Early Voting"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

On Saturday, I was given a ballot by election officials at the Wheaton early voting site that would have allowed me to vote for John Sarbanes for Congress.\u00a0 The problem is that I live in Jamie Raskin\u2019s district.\u00a0 And after I posted the story on Facebook, three friends of mine said that similar things happened to them.\u00a0 This incident points to a significant flaw in the early voting system that needs to be addressed.<\/p>\n

To understand what happened, let\u2019s review how the early voting system works.\u00a0 A key difference between early voting and election day voting is that voters are allowed to use any early voting site in their county regardless of where they live.\u00a0 So unlike election day voting at a precinct location, election officials at early voting sites are responsible for making sure that voters get ballots reflecting the districts in which they live.<\/p>\n

The first step in early voting is a check-in, during which a staffer verifies a voter\u2019s identity and gives the voter a registration slip indicating his or her precinct and district information.\u00a0 Next, the voter proceeds to a table at which another staffer checks the registration slip and gives the voter an appropriate ballot.\u00a0 The voter then fills out the ballot in a booth and proceeds to a scanning device, where the registration slip is collected and the ballot is inserted, scanned and retained.\u00a0 Lastly, the much-desired \u201cI Voted\u201d stickers are disbursed.<\/p>\n

In my case, I checked in, got a registration slip reflecting my information accurately and was given a ballot.\u00a0 When I started marking the ballot, I noticed that one of my choices for Congress was John Sarbanes.\u00a0 That was a problem since I don\u2019t live in his district \u2013 I live in Congressional District 8, home of Jamie Raskin.\u00a0 I returned to the ballot table and told them I had the wrong ballot.\u00a0 Upon checking, the election staffer said, \u201cGood catch,\u201d gave me a new ballot and told me to take my old ballot to a different area.\u00a0 Acting on instructions, I marked the old ballot as spoiled, folded it in half and put it in an envelope containing other spoiled ballots.\u00a0 I asked the election staff what would have happened had I indeed voted for Sarbanes.\u00a0 They said they didn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Once I told the story on Facebook, two of my friends told me that they were initially given the wrong ballots by staffers at early voting, but the mistakes were caught before they could bring the ballots to the voting booth.\u00a0 A third friend said she was given a wrong ballot and, like me, she returned it to the staff to get a correct ballot.\u00a0 This latter incident happened during the primary.<\/p>\n

These were honest mistakes, and whenever human beings are involved in a process like this, mistakes happen.\u00a0 The problem from a systemic perspective is that there is insufficient redundancy built in to prevent and correct these mistakes.\u00a0 Once the ballot staffer gives a voter a ballot, there is no person other than the voter who can make sure that the ballot is the correct one.\u00a0 By the time the voter approaches the scanner, there is no way to be sure that the ballot accurately reflects that voter\u2019s districts.\u00a0 And when the ballot is scanned, it\u2019s too late to tell because there is nothing on the ballot itself identifying the precinct of the voter who cast it.\u00a0 For all anyone knows, that ballot is accurately counted.\u00a0 A paper recount would not find otherwise.\u00a0 Worst of all, there is no way to track these mistakes.\u00a0 Unless people like me report their experiences, it would be hard to know that this problem is occurring at all.<\/p>\n

The result of all this is that an unknown number of ballots are being cast for candidates by voters who do not live in their districts.\u00a0 The scale of that problem is mitigated somewhat because this is a presidential year, and the only variability in this county\u2019s ballots occurs between the three Congressional Districts.\u00a0 But in a mid-term year, there will be elections in five County Council districts and eight state legislative districts in addition to the three Congressional Districts.\u00a0 There will be many ballot permutations reflecting voters who live in different configurations of these districts.\u00a0 So the potential for mistakes is much higher.\u00a0 Relying on individual\u00a0voters to prevent these mistakes is not an adequate solution.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too late to correct these errors for the ballots already cast, and unless election officials act immediately, it may be too late to clean up the process for this election.\u00a0 But there is time to build safeguards into the system for the 2018 elections, during which the issue will be even more critical.\u00a0 The State Board of Elections and their overseers in the General Assembly need to make sure that this problem gets fixed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. On Saturday, I was given a ballot by election officials at the Wheaton early voting site that would have allowed me to vote for John Sarbanes for Congress.\u00a0 The problem is that I live in Jamie Raskin\u2019s district.\u00a0 And after I posted the story on Facebook, three friends of mine said that … Continue reading A Critical Error in Early Voting<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[151,227],"tags":[1545,1571],"class_list":["post-7243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-early-voting","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-early-voting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-1SP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7243"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7247,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243\/revisions\/7247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}