College Park’s election process is
I had the honor of serving as a poll-watcher at Davis Hall during the City elections in 2015. Well, I say “honor”, but poll-watching is not a glorious task. It starts at about 6 in the morning, and you are essentially trapped in a room for 14 hours, sitting alone in a chair, with no electronic devices to keep you company. If you can’t amuse yourself for long periods of time with nothing but a pen and a piece of paper, you’re going to have a bad time. The point of poll-watching is to ensure that a fair election is carried out, but it comes at a price: namely, sanity patience.
The process runs like this: People check-in at the desk, receive a ballot, fill in the circles for their candidates, and feed the ballot into an electronic scanner that pulls it into a sealed black-box. The scanners keep a count of the number of ballots scanned throughout the day.
When the polls close, a report is run at each scanner, containing two copies of a report which shows how many votes each candidate received at each machine. The election judges sign the reports and place them into a bag with a numbered seal, which is then transported to City Hall, where the seal is broken, the reports removed, and the results communicated to the public.
Unfortunately, as it is practiced in College Park, there are holes in this process large enough to drive a dump truck through.
We’ll start with opening the machines, which happens as the first step in the process. Typically, there are supposed to be large tote bins inside the scanner black-box, to catch the ballots as they are scanned during the day. At the end of the day, the bins are supposed to be removed from the machines with their tops closed, and a numbered metal tag used to seal the boxes, to prevent election workers from handling ballots, once they have been scanned and counted.
In College Park, there were no tote bins to catch the ballots as they fell in. The ballots simply dropped inside the machine, requiring someone to scoop them out after the election, and do whatever they do with them. Without securing the paper ballots properly, there can be no trust in them, in the event of a recount. Failing to seal paper ballots into a container without physically handling them is a fundamental error in the process.
Interestingly, there WAS a full tote bin in one of the machines when it was opened on Election Day, which appeared to be quite heavy. That bin was dragged-off to a corner of the room at first, then to an unknown location not long after the polls opened. The contents of that bin, and the source, will have to remain a mystery, I’m afraid.
But in the absence of tote bins inside the machines, it does raise the question of what eventually happened to the ballots scanned during the election, as well as the disposition of the contents of the bin I observed that morning. I mean, somebody’s ballots went into a dumpster.
There wasn’t much to report during polling hours. People checked-in, voted, and left. We did have the occasional break in the routine, though.
At one point, a bus full of seniors appeared at Davis Hall, looking for their proper polling place. Thanks to the redistricting, it seems as though they had been carted all over town. Davis Hall was their third stop, but not their final one. Where are the Spellman House seniors supposed to vote? And, could someone please let the bus driver know, next year?
An eyebrow or two was raised in the room, thanks to a guy in a construction outfit claiming to be “Dustyn Kujawa”, who was not quite sure of his address, or his district. To let you in on the joke, Dustyn Kujawa was one of the winning (and female) City Council candidates in District 4, and her name was not unknown to the election staff. As an “official” poll-watcher, I could have challenged this voter successfully, I suppose, but my task wasn’t to prevent foolish people from committing voter fraud. And if “Mr. Dustyn” is reading this, your vote really wasn’t worth risking a criminal record, a $5,000 fine and five years in prison, dude. I’m not sure if he went through with filling-out a provisional ballot, but I have to admire the sheer gall it took to commit so fully to such a bad decision. Of course, I should allow for the possibility that there are two Dustyn Kujawas in the world, and that they both happen to reside in College Park…in which case, I humbly apologize.
At the end of the voting period, the doors to Davis Hall were closed, and the reports were run from the scanning machines, as part of the close-out procedure. While the scanners print two copies of the reports, apparently the election personnel were under instruction not to post the copies for public viewing, not to allow anyone to so much as see the reports, or even to read the results out-loud.
Perhaps even more discouraging, the election folks claimed to be under some weird directive preventing them from viewing the reports, themselves, even though they were responsible for signing them. I don’t know if that was truly the instruction they received from the BoES Supervisor, or just some B.S. they made-up on-the-spot, but either way, I’ll call shenanigans. It’s bad policy, at best, and raises serious questions about the integrity of the entire process.
The tradition of College Park creating a circus environment around the election night results announcements at City Hall creates a mountain of problems for a fair election process. There should be NO mystery about this process, especially for the five or ten people who make the effort to show-up at the polling stations during close-out of the machines.
If those folks cannot review the reports first-hand as they are created, there is no guarantee that the reports read at City Hall are even the same reports. The public only sees that some paper was spit out of the machines. And placing them into a sealed bag at Davis Hall makes no difference, if the numbers on the seal are not observed by the public at both locations, or if that seal is broken out-of-view of the public. The machines could have been printing a grocery list, for all anybody really knows. The report announced at City Hall could have been created a week before the election. The reports used at the ratification meeting at City Hall could even have been created in the hours after the election. It would take an effort, perhaps, but not a miracle. And that’s the problem.
The City’s entire election process needs a fundamental overhaul. There is no integrity of the paper ballots, of the machine-printed reports, or of the results that are reported at City Hall; and even under close scrutiny, it is impossible to be sure of the results
- when the machine-printed report results are hidden from public view when they are created;
- when the paper ballots are permitted to be physically handled by election staff; and
- when any seals that do exist, are broken out of the public eye.
In short, I have zero confidence in College Park’s elections, as they are currently being administered. We need a completely reformed election process, possibly a new Elections Supervisor, and above all, a concerned, informed, and watchful public. College Park is too large to have to endure this kind of small-town nonsense.
College Park Matters 