“There are two ways to win an election,” according to People for the American Way, the progressive advocacy group founded in 1981 by Norman Lear and Barbara Jordan. “One is to get a majority of voters to support you. The other is to prevent voters who oppose you from casting their votes.”
Voter suppression is often associated with the Deep South, with its history of Jim Crow poll taxes and literacy tests aimed at discouraging poor and minority voters from casting ballots. In more modern times, Florida Republicans infamously purged thousands of voters who happened to have the same names as convicted felons in the run-up to the infamous Bush/Gore election debacle. This proved more than enough to tip the scales for “W.”
Northeastern Democrats smugly assume they are on the side of the election angels. These election stunts are only pulled by good ol’ boys named Billy Bob or Roscoe, in places like Alabama and Mississippi—right?
Well, not always. New York Dems conveniently forget the 20th Century machine politics of the Corning era in Albany; or how in 2016 over 200,000 valid voters were wrongly purged from the voter rolls in Brooklyn prior to the Clinton/Sanders primary, with the knowing participation of top Democratic election officials in the City.
And so we turn to Columbia County, where a truly head-scratching thing has been happening to dozens, and potentially hundreds, of new voters. Whether this is is due to honest mistakes, incompetence, or by malicious design is for the reader to decide. But the effect is the same: Some new voters may have already been discouraged from voting.
Per our introductory post, New York Democrats are celebrating news that their party’s new registrants in 2018 have wildly outpaced new GOP voters. Locally, new Dems outnumber new Republicans by a margin of 1,434 to 128, according to Charlie Ferrusi of the Columbia County Young Democrats. (Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that over 2,500 local Democrats requested absentee ballots, while fewer than 700 Republicans did the same.)
However, it appears some of these new voters may already have been discouraged from participating in Tuesday’s general election by none other than the local Board of Elections.
This fall, the Columbia County Board of Elections sent a large number of letters to new registrants, demanding personal information that virtually all of them had already provided when. The letters added that if people did not reply by mail, they would be required to show ID at the polls.
The letters on CCBOE letterhead were unsigned, and did not include a reply envelope.
Requiring people to show papers at polling places is a classic voter suppression tactic, typically associated with those Red State Roscoes — who understand that certain Democratic voters are less likely to carry ID, and more likely to be intimidated if authorities demand it.
The situations in which election officials are allowed to demand physical identification papers are very narrow. Yet the Columbia County Board of Elections this year has been sending out potentially intimidating letters with a duplicate request for driver’s license and Social Security info from many who had already provided it — and threatening to demand hard proof at the polls if that is not provided by mail in advance of Tuesday.
In the wake of that Bush/Gore election debacle, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was enacted, stiffening requirements nationwide for new mail-in registrants to provide basic identifying information. Before HAVA, all voter registrations were treated as presumptively valid, unless a specific challenge was made by a campaign. Now, the State’s voter registration form asks for one of two types of data: either the number on your driver’s license, or the last four numbers of your social security number. These can then be used to verify that the person is real, and that they are only voting in one place.
Very few new registrants fail to provide at least one of these two pieces of information; and since HAVA’s inception it has been even rare for Boards of Elections to find cause to question a registration. Only if a voter’s identity does not match State records and cannot be verified do inspectors have any right to request hard-copy proof of your identity at the polls. (In fact, this veteran campaigner has never seen that happen across several decades of involvement in elections, including assisting new registrants, or sitting for hours as a poll-watching.)
A former Board of Elections official agrees that asking for ID at the polls is a very narrowly-prescribed activity. The former official outlined the local Board’s data entry process as follows for each voter, who is asked on their registration form to provide either the last four of their Social Security number, or their full driver’s license number:
“The drivers license number as given is put into the database… Each day all new registrations from every county are sent to the State… The master database has a cross check with DMV, if the name, address and DL number match what the state DMV has for same person then the county gets an ‘ID Verified’ for the voter. If it is not verified, which happens when people move and don't let DMV know, then it comes up in the Poll Book next to the persons name that the ID needs to be verified at the polls. THIS IS THE ONLY OCCASION THAT IT IS LEGAL TO ASK FOR ID AT THE POLLS IN NYS.”
Despite these limitations on confronting voters, a Hillsdale Democrat (whose identity is blacked out in the form reproduced above) had his registration handled very differently.
The voter registered in person at the Board’s office at 401 State Street in Hudson, hoping that doing so in the flesh would minimize postal or clerical slip-ups. The voter, a weekender, not only provided both pieces of identifying data—his license and last four of his social—but also says he was asked improperly to show his driver’s license to the clerk. (This site knows of no provision in the Election Law for demanding to see a person’s actual license when registering in person.)
Despite having done all that was required, in late September the Hillsdale voter was surprised to receive a follow-up letter with a duplicate request for the same identification he’d already supplied… demanding that he mail it in, or risk be challenged at the polls to prove his identity.
The voter brought this strangely duplicative demand to the attention of a friend, attorney Koethi Zan, and her fellow Ghent committeeman Patti Matheney (also a Ghent Town Board member). The pair, who have helped dozens of voters to register in recent years, then embarked on an arduous effort to resolve the issue with Democratic elections commissioner Virginia Martin and other Board of Elections staffers.
Asked on Friday exactly how many new voters had received that letter, Martin said that “We're super busy and I can't promise that I can give you a number.” Eventually, Martin estimated the number in the range of 200-300 voters. (In speaking and writing about election integrity issues, Martin has often noted how frequently local elections are decided by just a handful of votes, or even just one.)
Martin and Board of Elections staffer Jim Dolan acknowledged that at times more than 40 such HAVA letters were generated in a single week by the Dem staff alone, but that the weekly number was more typically fewer than 10. (Dolan is also known to longtime residents as the controversial former Hudson Police Chief indicted by once and future District Attorney Paul Czajka.)
A follow-up visit to the Board of Elections office demonstrated, per a search by Mr. Dolan in their database, that the Board did already have the Hillsdale voter’s license and social security info attached to his record, making the second request redundant.
Zan wrote to Martin:
“It’s a serious [issue] that must be addressed — it’s a deterrent to voting. At a minimum it makes the voter worry that their registration is subject to special scrutiny and in the worst case — if there’s a voter without ID — makes them think they won’t be able to vote. … Not to mention that I think the form of the letter is in itself misleading bc [because] it refers to ‘recent’ changes in the law.”
HAVA was passed in October 2002, not recently.
Reactions from the Dem side of the BOE to Zan and Matheney’s inquiries initially ran the gamut, included a verbal denial from Martin to the Ghent Dems, claiming that the letters were proper. This was followed by an assertion by Mr. Dolan, again per the Ghent reps, that the list of notifications was generated at “random” among new registrations by the State.
The Ghent Dems contacted the State board, which reportedly rejected any idea of random generation. Martin, too, threw some cold water on that explanation:
“I think Jim is wrong about the ‘random generation’ by the state. It’s what the line here has been all along, but I think it’s not really accurate. The letters are generated based on what we enter in our database. OTOH, it does not appear that there is a one-to-one correlation between database entry and letters—it seems that not every voter who is coded that way gets a letter. I think that’s what’s meant by random generation—that somehow the state has an algorithm that determines which of those voters get a letter and which don’t.”
Eventually. in a message to Zan and Matheney on October 16th, Martin acknowledged that “I’m pretty stunned that we’ve apparently been doing it this wrong all these years,” reiterating a week later that “it seems [that] we have not been doing this correctly.”
In an email interview, Martin added that she “of course” shared concerns that the effect of any spurious contacts with or demands of voters could be to intimidate registrants or otherwise suppress voter participation. She said she believes that the Dems are “now mailing many fewer letters,” while professing ignorance of what the Republican half of the Board might be doing separately. (As a rule, officials actions of this type require the involvement of both parties, to prevent mischief.)
“Jim is now coding everyone who provided the required numbers as having been verified,” Martin continued; but the public may have to wait for Tuesday to pass uneventfully to breathe any sigh of relief.
So how did this election SNAFU happen?
Zan conferred with New York State Director of Election Operations Tom Connolly about their process for verifying identifications, providing him with a copy of the Columbia County Board’s letter. Zan reported back that Connolloy confirmed “that the only time the state would request that an ID be shown is if there was no DL [driver’s license] number or last 4 digits of SSN [Social Security Number] provided or if there was a mismatch.” Again, in the Hillsdale voter’s case, both had already been supplied, yet still the letter still went out.
Martin suggests that any “administrative” errors made locally may be ones that other New York counties are making as well, seeking to cast some of the blame on Albany by asserting a fault in “the state-certified registration applications that all county boards use... [A]dministrative processes that are supposed to reflect what the law says may be the root of the problem.
“One would think that the state would have diligently developed all these processes to conform with the law but that does not seem to be the case,” Martin said, adding however that “Our understanding of the issue keeps morphing.” The technical-glitch theory boils down to an interpretation of what the definition of the word “verified” is: “[A]pparently there are different understandings,” Martin says.
Dolan on Monday echoed Martin’s theory of what occurred, suggesting that there was a misunderstanding or disagreement within the Board about what consituted “verification,” and what boxes should be checked or unchecked when submitting new registrants to the State. Like Martin, he seemed confident that those who duly provided license or social security data will not be confronted at the polls on Tuesday, and will not be flagged in poll books as needing to provide any ID.
In promoting Columbia County’s practice of hand-counting all ballots, rather than relying solely on machine counts, Martin told The Christian Science Monitor, “We want to make sure our local candidates get every vote they are entitled to.” Similarly, she wrote in 2016 that “The ballot box, which through our history people have died defending, rightfully occupies a sacred place in any democracy. It must be fully secured until its votes are counted and the election is over.”
However, for those sacred ballots to be counted and defended, they first must actually make it into a ballot box. According to Matheney, Martin says that a spot-check of three towns locally found 18 residents marked down for ID challenges on Tuesday.
N.b: In a separate dust-up in October, Matheney reported that a relative who voted in person over-the-counter (“OTC” in electionspeak) saw another voter being told to take their ballot home instead, and then mail it back, adding an unnecessary step to the process. Matheney observed other voters leaving with their ballots, despite the fact that they could hand it in on the spot and ensure it arrived on time. By Thursday of this past week, the BOE had hired temporary staff to set up ad-hoc voting booths for absentee voters at the counter and in the hallway of 401 State.
