(Blackamericaweb.com) – Radio personality Tom Joyner, Gregory T. Moore, executive director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, and Ken Smukler, president and co-founder of VoterLink Data Systems, will be among a group of voting rights advocates testifying on Capitol Hill Wednesday about polling place irregularities documented so far during the presidential primary campaign.
The Committee on House Administration, which oversees elections and the day-to-day operations of the House of Representatives, has held a series of hearings to address issues involving voter registration, the operation of voting machines and problems that arise at polling places.
“It’s probably unprecedented what we’re doing,” laying out voting problems before the general election, Moore told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
By being able to analyze data from the primaries, he said, “there’s a chance to address some of these things through administrative procedures with the boards of election and the secretaries of state.”
“The Tom Joyner Morning Show” and BlackAmericaWeb.com joined with the NAACP to establish 1-866-MY-VOTE1, a voter alert line that allows people to find out where their polling places are located, register to vote and report problems at the polls.
Following the 2000 election, Smukler helped create a national toll-free hotline which tracks voter questions and complaints. The information is put into a database, and patterns and irregularities can then be recorded and analyzed.
In addition to compiling the information, Smukler told BlackAmericaWeb.com, “every voter, at the end of their call experience, will be transferred to their local Board of Elections” for additional help.
For clients such as the NAACP and “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” Smukler said, “we experience all the call traffic on a live stream at the Web site. We monitor it all around the country, and we can see [the calls] distributed online and listen to them online, see when it’s spiking and go into that area and see where there’s a problem. Then we work with election officials” to get it fixed.
He said the system allows monitors to determine not just the location of a problem, but the specific nature as well, whether a polling site has run out of paper ballots, a voting machine has broken down or if lines are especially long and too few poll workers are available to assist voters.
Some of the patterns that have emerged include inadequate training for poll workers, not enough poll workers to handle heavy turnout and changes in voter ID requirements in some states that have caused confusion for poll workers as well as voters.
“The main problem is the failure of a lot of boards of election to reach the capacity they need to handle they heavy influx of new voters,” Moore said. “That’s just not being as prepared as they should be.”
He noted that the process is also complicated for a lot of first-time voters who find the process more cumbersome than they expect it to be after they register because polling places can change, they may not be familiar with the voting machines or other issues arise.
Moore also said that during the primary season, the problems are more likely to be technical than an attempt to disenfranchise black voters.
“Every now and then, you do have what you had in Ohio and Florida — the challenging of voters, the purging of voters from the rolls,” Moore said. “The trickery that Tom [Joyner] talks about usually happens in November, and in the primaries, incompetence is a bigger problem and the attempt to cover up those problems. But it’s good that [Tom] raises those issues.”
So far, Smukler said, elections officials have had a love/hate relationship with the hotline. While the information is useful to officials, they aren’t exactly happy that it is available to the public.
“Up until two, four years ago, if a reporter asked about problems (at the polls), they could say, ‘Yeah, we had some problems, but nothing major,’ and because no one could call them on it, that’s what would happen,” Smukler said.
With the tracking system, he said, officials can be confronted with precise data “and now they have to explain what’s going on.”
He said he hopes the testimony will make states and election officials sensitive to the impact these problems have on voters and that they will be addressed early enough to avoid similar problems during the general election in November.
“I am confident that these problems would not be addressed if it hadn’t been for TJMS and the MYVOTE1 hotline,” Smukler said. “There would be no incentive because fixing the problem costs money. They’re not going to fix it unless they are forced to do it.”
