Something we don't like to think about, but we must

From our friends at SmartElections.US:

You are passionate about what's happening in the world around you. You want be powerful and create change. You research the issues, contribute to the dialogue, participate in your community – and most importantly – you vote. Not only do you vote – you reach out and make sure others are voting as well.

But: is your vote being counted? And is it being counted for the candidate and the issues that you support? That is much harder to know. We need to become informed.

The Westchester County Board of Legislators will convene a Committee of the Whole (COW) meeting on Wednesday, July 29 at 10 a.m. to hear from the Commissioners of the County's Board of Elections (BOE) about how to improve voting conditions in November in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Washington Post: "According to data from the BOE first published by the Intercept, up to 1 in 5 mail-in ballots were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes. The majority of mistakes are due to missing or late postmarks, and missing signatures. Preliminary numbers from the BOE show an invalidation rate of 19 percent in both Manhattan and Queens and 28 percent in Brooklyn, just in this district. That rate, if applied to all of Brooklyn, would equate to 34,000 ballots thrown out, in a borough with the city’s largest population of black residents.

"By comparison, in Wisconsin and Georgia, two primaries considered to be chaotic, the mail-in ballot rejection rate was 1.8 and 3 percent, respectively…
"All the action in their contest is focused on the count, and it is something out of a dystopian thriller about office tedium….The pace is equivalent to watching a sloth eat bark….
"The governor’s executive order called for the ballots to have business-class postage-paid return envelopes. In a normal year, voters provide their own stamp, which is considered first-class mail and always postmarked. ,,, It is not standard,.. to postmark the type of business-class mail used in New York’s primary election."

Some key points:

"Thank you for hosting this important Joint Meeting to discuss election administration in Westchester and for organizing the Election Information Gathering Task Force to receive feedback from the community about their voting experience in recent elections. I want to recognize your leadership in that regard. The voter access policies, siting, and resourcing decisions that impact our fundamental civil rights are too often shrouded in secrecy and generally lack accountability under New York’s still-antiquated Election Law.

...the countywide access and timely public designation and publicity of the plan, WBOE was drastically out of compliance in Fall 2019 and Spring 2020.8 Because WBOE has not yet indicated it will change course, we must lay out and defend these laws here.

… it would be disingenuous in the extreme and irresponsible for us to collectively shrug at these circumstances and attribute the vast and pervasive array of administrative irregularities,lack of transparency, statutory non-compliance, training issues, and questionable resourcing that have plagued Westchester elections for as long as we can remember, and particularly those issues that preexisted the Pandemic.

...at each turn it appears some counties have no inclination or ability to abide by New York State Board of Elections reporting deadlines and that when local boards miss filing deadlines little investigatory,enforcement, or corrective action is taken, including with respect to chronic patterns of noncompliance,nor is action taken to assure the public that these violations won’t be repeated. For this reason alone, state and local lawmakers and the Attorney General should take an active role.”

Testimony of VoteEarlyNY
presented to the
Westchester Board of Legislators Joint Meeting of the
Committees on Budget & Appropriations, Law & Major Contracts and Public Works
July 13, 2020

Contact:Jarret Berg, Esq., Co-Founder, VoteEarlyNY
Jarret.berg@VoteEarlyNY.org

FROM THE WESTCHESTER COUNTY BOARD OF LEGISLATORS

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

The Westchester County Board of Legislators will convene a Committee of the Whole (COW) meeting on Wednesday, July 29 at 10 a.m. to hear from the Commissioners of the County's Board of Elections (BOE) about how to improve voting conditions in November in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pursuant to Governor Cuomo’s Executive Order No. 202.1, as extended, in order to protect public health and maintain necessary social distancing, the meeting will take place without in-person public access, but, as with all our public meetings, the proceedings will be streamed live and archived on our website, www.westchesterlegislators.com.

A live link to the stream will appear on the Upcoming Events section of our online meeting calendar at https://westchestercountyny.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=1 when the meeting begins.

"Fearing nightmare scenarios such as attacks on voter registration databases and state websites tallying results, U.S. officials are leading simulated training exercises to get ready for Nov. 3. The "tabletop exercises,”..., will include thousands of state and local election officials in addition to intelligence and cybersecurity officials in Washington amid concerns about threats from Russia, China and other countries.”

Are Westchester County Board of Elections commissioners participating in these simulated training exercises?
Allegra Dengler

“Oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

I’ve been singing that Animals’ tune for a month. I move my lips, but I’m not sure my words are understood.

It begins with a stone-cold fact: Mail-in ballots are lost by the millions—especially the ballots of low-income young and minority voters, those folks often called, “Democrats.”

The seminal MIT study, Losing Votes by Mail, warns that 22% – more than one in five ballots – never get counted.

2020 ELECTION
Mail voting is the safest method in a pandemic. But pitfalls could trip up a potentially decisive number of people.

July 18, 2020, 3:30 AM CDT
By Jane C. Timm

New Yorker Sasha Aickin, 43, has no idea if his vote counted.

FROM THE INTERCEPT: "IN THE LEAD-UP to the election, Cuomo touted a change in the law that allowed absentee ballots to be dropped in the mail in New York as late as Election Day, June 23. Now those ballots are the ones least likely to be counted; a major reason the Cuomo-run Board of Elections is using to invalidate ballots is a lack of a postmark if the ballot arrived at the BoE after that date. Cuomo could fix this issue easily by issuing an executive order accepting all signed ballots that come in within a few days of the deadline….If a major Brooklyn post office was not postmarking ballots, that means voters who cast legitimate, timely ballots won’t have theirs count through no fault of their own. Return mail that is postage-paid, like a ballot, is generally not postmarked — the mark is used to make sure a stamp isn’t re-used, but since there’s no stamp, the postal service doesn’t need to mark it —"

Quote of the Day: "How much of a hassle it is to vote is generally a matter of design, not accident, according to Carol Anderson, the author of One Person, No Vote and a professor of African-American studies at Emory University. ‘Long lines are deliberate, because they deal with the allocation of resources,’ Professor Anderson said. She said it’s frustrating to see long lines reported in the news media as evidence of voter enthusiasm: ‘What they really show is government ineptness. And oftentimes a deliberate deployment of not enough resources in minority communities.’”

On Primary Election Day, Tuesday, June 23, 2020, I voted at Nepperhan Community Center in Yonkers. I was fortunate not to arrive until about 9am, when I found a line outside in the parking lot of perhaps 25-30 people, many of whom had already been waiting for a long time. It took another 45 minutes before I was admitted to the building to vote. I was told by election inspectors that it had taken hours before a Board of Elections employee had arrived to help them set up the voting machines. The machines we voted on were Dominion ICE hybrid printer-scanners. So these expensive new machines, apparently, did not save us any time on Election Day. Or perhaps the problem was inadequate training of poll workers.

Dear Legislators,

Thank you for your investigation of the recent primary and the serious effort you are making to restore a functioning democracy to Westchester. The most alarming aspect of the Commissioners’ conduct has been their insistence that their infrastructure and voting machines are impervious to cyberattack. This cavalier attitude towards cybersecurity is disturbing. There are many vulnerabilities in Westchester. The voter database and electronic pollbooks are known to be vulnerable to hacking from enemies foreign and domestic. The commissioners insistence on buying and using the infamous Dominion ICE machines threatens the integrity of the vote count, as it can mark on and invalidate votes without the voter’s knowledge. Were the procedures recommended by the NYS Board of Elections to ensure secure operation of the Dominion ICE followed everywhere it was used? Mail in ballots are very vulnerable to fraud and loss, especially so when implemented in a rushed manner. Every effort must be made to ensure that we have an election we can believe in this November. That requires transparency and responsiveness that the current BOE commissioners seem unwilling or unable to provide. If the BOE won’t do it, you as the Board of Legislators can provide some transparency through a voter assistance website that would provide correct information and ballot tracking for voters, including updates on the length of lines.Would it be possible for you to utilize a county cybersecurity expert to oversee the BOE security? “It’s time America’s leaders got serious about voting security."

With all 50,575 in-person ballots counted, Bowman, ...leads Engel by more than 12,600 votes. Absentee ballots, meanwhile, are still being counted, with delays caused by the historic number of absentee ballots cast because of the coronavirus pandemic .... The Board of Elections has said it is not sure how long it will take to finish counting absentee ballots, though the Bowman and Engel campaigns say they’ve been told that it will take until early August….“We recognize that Mr. Bowman’s lead is substantial, but when the outstanding ballots are well more than three times that margin, it is also clear that primary voters deserve a clear and accurate count (with ballots in question examined fairly by each campaign), however long that requires,” Engel spokesperson Tom Watson said in a statement….Watson said the purpose of the lawsuit was to make sure the campaign had access to the ballot-counting process and to ensure that every ballot is counted. “It can go both ways, you can contest it to be included as well as contest it to be excluded,” he said. “In theory, you wouldn’t want all this to happen behind a curtain, where you’re accepted or not accepted, and there is no access to that process….As the pandemic has led to a surge in mail-in voting across the country, it is likely that it will take weeks for the results of the presidential election to be finalized if it’s a tight race.

Westchester residents spent about two and a half hours Wednesday night reciting a litany of harrowing stories trying to vote from their experiences during the June 23 primary.

Residents participated in the Board of Legislators’ Election Information Task Force virtual meeting Wednesday night to discuss what the Westchester County Board of Elections could do to improve voting for the November general election. Concerns are also expected in the fall about how to protect the health of poll workers and voters and how to manage a large turnout.

From Westchester County Legislators.

Let them know what your experience was with the recent primary.

• Email: BOLPublicComments@westchesterlegislators.com

• Online: To register to speak via the Board's Webex online teleconferencing system, please go to this link: https://westchestergov.webex.com/westchestergov/onstage/g.php?MTID=e544cf7dd60ae8922a643c64a2ea73444.

The Board of Legislators would like to hear first-hand experiences from those who voted this June as well. They are asking voters to share their experiences, as specifically as possible, by email at BOLPublicComments@westchesterlegislators.com.

Numerous problems with yesterday's primary. Some people didn't receive absentee ballots. Long lines (some voted after 11 PM, waiting 2 hours). malfunctioning machines. Fewer polling places than usual creating more lines. NYS must correct before November.

For the biggest city in the country, a dramatic and fast expansion of the mail-in voting system has come with challenges.

Watch this show!

Remember when we were watching the coronoavirus way over there in China, wondering if we should be concerned? PBS Newshour covered what just happened in Georgia. If you are wondering if that could happen here, the answer is yes. Unless NYC and NYS ban these voting machines, we’ll be standing on line to vote on them as soon as this November, The Westchester Board of Elections is pressuring Westchester to buy these Dominion machines used in Georgia, and the NYS Board of Elections is moving towards certifying an even more troubleprone and hackable ESS BMD (Ballot Marking Device).that the NYC Board of Electios is eager to buy.

Many New Yorkers say voting in the primary Tuesday was a nightmare.

Some people never got their absentee ballots, and others were waiting in line for hours.
The line to vote at Bronx Regional High School snaked around the block for most of the day Tuesday.