Shannyn Moore published the following in Mudflats and as
a Compass opinion piece in last Sunday’s Anchorage Daily News:
The election on Tuesday was nothing short of outrageous. At press time,
we understand that more than half the reviewed precincts didn't have
enough ballots for voters. People were unable to vote even after, in
some cases, making stops at three and four polling places. The law
requires the city to print enough ballots for 70 percent of registered
voters. The actual turnout this week was in the vicinity of 27 percent.
So where were tens of thousands of unused ballots?
...In 2004, more votes were cast than the official statewide
totals. In George W. Bush’s case, the district-by-district tally was
292,267, but his official total was 190,889, a difference of 101,378
votes.
In that year’s U.S. Senate race, Lisa Murkowski received 226,992
votes district by district, but her official total was 149,446, a
difference of 77,546 votes.
There has never been an adequate explanation of the fact that also in
2004, 20 of 40 state House districts had more ballots cast than they
had registered voters. Turnout in 16 of those districts was more than
200 percent.
We’re still using the same Diebold AccuVote machines that California decertified for a pattern of glaring anomalies.
Here's an account from Mudflats of the ballot mayhem:
Election 2012 Gone Wild: The Saga at Precinct 830
Bent Alaska's Mel Green learned that the woman who ran the temp service overseeing election workers was a member of a church actively working to defeat Prop 5:
Mona McAleese, Labor Services Manager for ESS Labor Services (per her Linked-In profile), is a long-time member of Chapel by the Sea, according to a testimony from McAleese from February 15, 2009 on Chapel by the Sea’s website.
McAleese’s affiliation with both ESS and Chapel by the Sea may be
completely unrelated to the problems of this election; but the
connection is nonetheless worth taking note of: Chapel by the Sea was
of the top three contributors to Jim Minnery’s anti-Prop 5 “Protect Your
Rights” group. Chapel by the Sea has also figured in election night accounts:
Linda Kellen Biegel, writing in
The Mud Flats, – ESS was contracted because the new electronic timekeeping program
“couldn’t handle it.” As a result of the company’s demands for private information, many long-time pollworkers quit. This allowed ESS to hire their own people.
- There are reports of information radically different from
historical election procedures being given to poll workers, then
subsequently to voters:
- My colleagues told me that around 5pm they were very low on ballots so called the Clerk’s troubleshooter for more. 45 minutes later the Troubleshooter showed up with more ballots, and with an armful
of Questioned Ballot envelopes.
- The Trouble shooter said that the Clerk’s office wanted those newly arrived ballots to ALL be voted as a QB, with the voter signing the QB Register, placing the ballot into the QB envelope, and dropping the
evnelope into the QB box.
- The poll workers were instructed to tell Registered Voters that they were not allowed to sign by their name in the Register, and that even though they were registered, they must vote their ballot as a Questioned
Ballot.
- So, all voters who entered between 6pm and 8pm were counted as QB;s only, whether or not they were on the Register. Most people were dismayed and complained; one can assume they were on the Register.
- There are reports of voters never receiving their absentee ballots,
even though they applied for them well within the time frame.
- There are persistent rumors of a bus or busses coming from the
Valley carrying people to the polls. Further investigation is required.
- There are persistent rumors from voters and poll workers
recognizing folks as Valley residents who registered in Anchorage for
this election. Again, a full investigation is required to determine if
that is the case and if so, how many precincts are involved.
- To date, we have been given no proof that the Muni was in
possession of the required number of ballots…just their word. Where are
the photographs of these stacks of unused ballots?
Anchorage's city clerk, Barbara Gruenstein, who oversaw the election, has
issued a fifth Media Advisory, in which she said:
We apologize to the community. We had sufficient ballots, but did not allocate enough of the ballots to the individual precincts, given the turnout and number people who voted outside of their precincts. The use
of an outside payroll vendor was not a factor.
Dan Wheeler, a city attorney for Anchorage, who serves at the pleasure of just-relected anti-Prop 5 Mayor Dan Sullivan,
issued a conflict-of-interest-free media advisory of his own, insisted that voters denied their right to cast ballots weren't
really disenfranchised because earlier voters represented them adequately
unless it can be proven that later voters wouldn't have voted the same way, due to the "rule of proportionality," which he found in a 1989 Anchorage city attorney opinion citing
Hammond vs. Hickel.
Eric Christopher Adams,
writing in the Alaska Dispatch, scrutinized Wheeler's logic:
Here's a simple explanation of "proportional allocation." Let's say
your precinct ran out of ballots at 5:30 p.m. Prior to running out of
ballots, 55 percent of votes had gone in favor of a proposition and 45
percent had opposed a proposition. Based on the 1989 legal analysis,
votes that were not cast because of a ballot shortage would be
"generally allocated" by that same proportion -- 55/45. So voters who
turned up after 5:30 p.m. but were turned away would be divvied up based
on how those voting from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. had voted.
Is that a fair standard or application of the law?
"Absolutely not," said ACLU of Alaska Executive Director Jeff Mittman in an interview with Alaska Dispatch Monday afternoon.
"The supposition of proportional allocation is absolutely ridiculous.
To presume that the demographic of voters who showed up between 10 a.m.
and 6 p.m. is the same demographic that would show up from 6 p.m. to 8
p.m." is preposterous, Mittman said.
Who votes mid-day? Retirees, senior citizens, voters predisposed to
certain values, Mittman contended. And who votes late in the day? Young
voters, professionals, people with different values and ideologies.
"To presume you just somehow 'up the vote' for one side or the other
just makes everything worse," Mittman said. "It takes a highly
problematic election and makes it a grossly problematic election.
"We already know voters were disenfranchised" with 53 of 121 precincts running out of ballots, Mittman added. "This is a fact."
Mel Green
ruminated at length in
Bent Alaska:
Is it possible that the strategy which worked so well to scotch the
Anchorage equal rights ordinance in 2009, was adapted to also scotch
the Anchorage Equal Rights Initiative — Prop 5 — in 2012? Is it
possible that Minnery and the
Anchorage Baptist Temple’s Jerry Prevo, again, bused in people from the outside the Municipality?
In any case, one theory that could fit the facts we have so far might
posit an organized effort to bum-rush the precincts with the high
levels of questioned ballots, leading to ballot shortages. It was simply
a matter of exploiting a weakness in the standard election procedures
about how the number of ballots distributed to the various precincts — a
weakness that the Municipal Clerk’s office had never figured for a
weakness, because it had never been challenged before by so many people
casting questioned ballots before.
If someone planned such a bum-rush
to take place at multiple precincts — say, about 43 percent of them —
simultaneously, during the after-work rush to the polls, a bottleneck
would be created: the clerk’s office would have to contend both with too
few staff and with high city traffic to resupply all the affected
precincts — all that on top of the confusion and overwhelm that workers
at the precincts would be feeling with the unanticipated problems.
All
such a plan would require would be someone with the inside knowledge of
how ballots were distributed to the precincts, in order to know how best
to bum-rush them.
Is that what happened?
