Becky Bond

Okay, thank you all for coming. My name is Becky Bond, and one of the reasons that we're all here is that there are thousands of decisions that are made long before election day which determine who can cast a ballot and whether that ballot can be counted in an election. That's everything from how easy it is to register voters, under what circumstances voters might be purged off the rolls, how many ballots are printed, what kind of machines are used, where polling places are located.

So the idea of how our elections work – it's not just about what happens on election day. Much of what determines how healthy our democracy is happens well in advance of November 4. In 2006, with other concerned election reformers, I started the Secretary of State Project, and we raised $500,000 to elect five out of seven Secretary of State candidates in battleground states. Our simple idea was that the easiest way to get reforms implemented was to put someone in charge of the election that believes in reform and integrity.

Now, I'm very honored to have here today four fantastic panelists to tackle this issue with you, the audience. The first person I'd like to introduce – I'm going to introduce everyone quickly and then we're going to start the panel – is Secretary of State Deborah Bowen, who is seated here to my left. [Applause.] So Secretary Bowen, as you know, is California's Secretary of State. In the middle of a national crisis of confidence in elec-tions, she ran for the Chief Election Officer position of California. California has more voters than Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio combined.

And she's a true hero of our movement, and the things that she does every day in Califor-nia touch the rest of the nation, and set the standard for reform. And in fact, in her first year, she banned most touch-screen voting machines in our state – from California. [Applause.] It's amazing. So we're very lucky to have her. She's a true hero.

Renee [Paradee] is doing some of the most amazing work. She's a graduate of the Columbia Law School. She's been a federal appellate court clerk, and she's worked on drug law reform for the ACLU. Now she's doing some of the most important work in the country at the Brennan Center for Justice, which is a premier election rights thinktank in the country, where she's working on three main things: one, universal voter registration; two, redistricting; and three, campaign finance. [Applause.]

Jonah Goldman is the Director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections, which is a project of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. And he is one of the key leaders of what we call the election protection movement and the election protection coalition. And he's on the front lines of what lawyers and citizens can do to make sure every voter can cast a ballot on election day. [Applause.]

And sitting next to Secretary Bowen we have Steven Rosenfeld, who's a Senior Fellow at Alternet.org. He's co-author of What Happened in Ohio?, a documentary record of theft and fraud in the 2004 election. And he doesn't just dwell on the negative; he's also written a book, which he'll talk about – Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting, which just came out.

When election day comes, the outcome of close elections could be decided by actions taken today, and these are actions that Steven is actually covering every day on his blog on Alternet. For example, he's been the one bringing to the public attention the fact that the Veteran's Administration is actually banning voting registration drives from hospitals. So he's talking about issues that very much will make a difference in the election. [Applause.]

So with that, I'm going to turn to our great panelists, and we'll start with the Secretary of State from California.

Secretary of State Bowen

Thank you. It's really great to be here. And how many people were at the lunch with Lawrence Lessing? All right, good. Well, I really want to build on what he was talking about, because I think that where we have been since 2000 and 2004 in this country with elections is in a real crisis of confidence and a lack of trust. And it is very difficult to go register people to vote, encourage them to learn the issues, to be engaged, if they don't feel that the system itself has integrity; that their vote will be counted as it was cast, and that the results will be accurately reported.

So my work as Secretary of State, and the platform I ran on, was basically to work through every issue in a methodical and a really mind-numbingly boring fashion so that we could get to the meat of whatever the concerns were, address the issues, address not just the actual conflicts and concerns but the perceptions of places where there might be unfairness or opportunities for cheating in our voting system or with regard to the voter roles, and then, move forward and put in place systems that basically meet the criteria that were used to established this country, which is that we have a system of checks and balances.

And we have enough places where there are checks and balances so that if someone attempts to wrongfully alter the outcome of an election, which I define as any behavior other than a campaign to encourage people to cast their ballots voluntarily in a certain way, and then accurately tallying and reporting the vote – that that will be detected and corrected, and will be pretty much impossible to get away with; and that it does not depend on who the poll worker, the voter, the political parties, the county registrar of voters, or the secretary of state are. The system itself will be robust enough to catch and turn back any attempt at corruption, wrongdoing – and, as well, incompetency.

Because some of what we deal with is just problems in human error, and that is particularly a problem in big jurisdictions like Los Angeles County, which can get, in a busy election year, thirty to forty thousand new voter registrations A DAY leading up to the deadline, most of which are handwritten; containing names of almost every imaginable ethnic derivation; and all it takes is one character to be off or one space to be off and you have the potential for disenfranchising someone who is an eligible voter.

So the range of issues that we have to deal with starts very early. And in California, the first thing I did was, fulfill a campaign promise to do a top-to-bottom review of all of our voting systems. And again, looking a where the vulnerabilities were, where there was the potential for error. And we contracted with the University of California to do the review. And I'll just tell you a couple of quick stories about how it worked.

The first time that I went down to see what the researchers were doing, I said, "Well, how do you start when you're doing a security review?" and they said, "Well, we read the manual, and every place where it says, 'Do not turn the machine off while this process is happening,' we turn the machine off while that process is happening. So we want to see if that affects the correctness of the equipment or the tally."

And then I was also really affected by a book that I read by a gentleman named Bruce Schneider. It's called Beyond Fear. And it talks about how we assess risk and how we deal with risk. And I carried around for a long time a potato chip bag. I'm sure you've all had the experience on an airplane of being unable to open one of these, or even in your hotel room or at your table. Because it's sealed in such a way that if you can't find the little spot, it's impossible. But with a really simple tool, which I happen to have here – ballpoint pen – in one hole, I can completely destroy the entire security system in this potato chip bag.

And some of our voting systems had similar, what I would call brittle security. And what we want is a layered approach so that we've got physical security, software security, procedures, and then checks on those procedures so that all along the way, we have checks. And ultimately in California, I favored a system of using largely hand-marked paper ballots, because it solves the problem of needing to worry about what is happening inside a computer where we cannot know what is happening internally.

And this is compounded by the fact the in all the systems we use, the code is proprietary. It is privately owned. And California – the only person who has the right, legally, to look at that code and review it is the Secretary of State. So not even the County elections officials who are responsible for buying equipment have the right to review the code. And even if they did, we don't do this work because we're experts in computer security and programming.

So we wanted a system where we have an original record of the voter's intent, and that is a permanent software-independent record that we can use for audit and verifiability. And we use ballot-making devices to allow voters who have disabilities to be able to vote in the same manner as any other voter. So that's [where] we went in California. [Applause.]

But going with that, we have to make the entire process of setting that up publicly accessible. We had a law in California that only members of the two political parties could observe the testing of voting systems. So if you declined to state or an interested party, you had no legal right to watch what was happening. We've always had in California a mandatory one percent random audit – a hand count – after elections. But we added to that, since I've become the Secretary of State, a new rule that says that if an election is within a half a percent, we will automatically hand count ten percent of the ballots in that race in order to resolve the discrepancy. And if we haven't resolved the discrepancy with that ten percent, we'll count another random ten percent.

This is a first effort of what I think will be an iterative process. But the goal is to bring the science of statistics into the process of verifying election results, and to set up a system that does not rely on a candidate being willing to fundraise to challenge the outcome and ask for a recount. Rules that if there are certain kinds of discrepancies or if it's close will give us an automatic recount on behalf of the public and the voters, not on behalf of candidates or campaigns, but because all of us have an interest in getting it right. So that's really critical.

Two other things that I've worked on – one is making voter registration easier. In my Office, we've just completed a redesign of the voter registration form. And I think that it went from something like 1,400 words on it to a little over 700. The average reading level that's required to complete it has dropped, because it's just simpler and easier to understand. The form, as we were using it, looked like somewhere between an IRS form and and an issue to appear before the Spanish Inquisition – [laughter] – in a Monty Python sketch.

And it's going to be, I think, much simpler and there should be fewer mistakes. And I've actually had people who spend time registering voters say to me, "Oh, thank goodness, because I've had to lie to people all the time about how long it will actually take to complete this." [Laughter.] And it shouldn't be a trial to register to vote. It's a fundamental vote. It should be a simple matter to complete it. So we will be using that form.

I've also worked on the issue of getting into veterans' facilities to be able to register to vote. I wrote a letter to the Federal Director of the Veteran's Administration asking that they designate the federal veterans' facilities a motor-voter agency under the National Voter Registration Act. I got back a letter declining that; saying that having people there registering voters would interfere with the core mission of the VA and interfere with their ability to deliver services to veterans. So I'd like to thank Senator Feinstein for really being on top of this issue. She's been really holding the VA's feet to the fire. And there's a lot going on on this right now, so it's very important that we don't have these kinds of barriers.

And finally, something that really should come at the beginning, which is all of this effort to work to empower people to vote has to start with young people. And I don't mean 17- and 18-year-olds. I mean fourth grade in California, which is our first government curriculum. And that's when we need to start learning and democracy. And I believe it should be integrated with the rest of the curriculum. If you're doing a science segment on climate change, a rational part of that is, well, who makes these decisions, and how do we, as citizens, affect the decisions? And it needs to be related in our curriculum to the issues that are actually being presented.

So that is very important. We do a high school mock election in California. We did it in the primary for the first time this year. We still have resistence from some schools who don't want to engage because they view it as...well, I guess it's not in line with their core mission, maybe. [Laughter.] Even though it fits in with out curriculum in California. So we continue to work on that, as well as working to get high school students to work at the polls.

The average age of a poll worker in America is over seventy years old – the average age. Now, when you put any kind of computer – even it's to deal with a ballot-marking device for accessibility – into a polling place where the average age is over seventy, you're asking for trouble. [Laughs.]

And so having high school students does a number of things. First, it gives us people who can work the really long hours that are required at the polling place, are used to staying up all night. And in California, a lot of our high school students are bilingual, which helps us with our language challenges. And finally, it's a really critical first-hand experience for our young people. They get to actually be a part of it. And in California, you can be a poll worker before you are eligible to vote. If you are sixteen and have a 2.5 average, you can be a poll worker.

So we're looking to leverage as many places as we can where we can get young people engaged in this process, even before they're old enough to vote. Because they'll bring the others with them. And it's just like Netroots Nation; they take the message out and spread it. So I'm looking forward to your questions. Glad to be here, and I'm happy to share the potato chips afterwards. [Applause.]

Becky Bond

And next we have Renée.

Renée Paradis

I'll start by noting that I'm a graduate of the public school system in California and remember very well the fourth grade curriculum where you build a mission with sugar cubes. [Laughter.] But here I am so something must have worked. I think I'd like to drill down a little bit on the question of voter registration, which is what my work at the Brennan Center primarily focuses on. Only about 70% of eligible Americans are registered to vote, so you're basically talking about a group of 30% – people who are eligible but are not registered.

And the people who aren't registered, they're sort of who you might imagine would have trouble registering. They're people with low literacy skills, they're less educated people, they're maybe people who have newly become eligible after completing criminal sentences, they don't have a lot of money, necessarily, they don't have a lot of free time, they're the low-information voters that we've been hearing a lot this election season.

It's a set of people who aren't necessarily going to take advantage of an online registration form. They're not necessarily going to go to the DMV. They're not necessarily going to seek out the opportunity to get registered. And so the things that sort of get those people registered, that bring them into the system, is someone who goes out and says, "I'd like to register you to vote today. It's third-party voter registration drives; it's when County registrars take the time to go out into communities and find people and say, "We'd like to register you to vote today" and collect their form and bring it back for them. It's that kind of person-to-person engagement.

And so this issue that Secretary Bowen mentioned of the VA hospitals not allowing voter registration I think really ties in to understanding what it's going to take to really raise that number – to go from 70% to eighty to ninety to a hundred. It's going to take seeing voter registration as part of your right to vote; that in addition to having the right to go to the polls on election day, you have the right to ensure that you're registered before then – that there aren't barriers to that happening.

And in 2004, we saw an incredible amount of voter registration. We saw huge drives go out, go into communities where people are unregistered. Another group of people who often don't get registered are college students who may be newly eligible but aren't sure that they're eligible at their new address. They don't necessarily go to the DMV. So you saw a lot of voter registration activity – people going out and doing drives among these communities.

And this sort of interesting thing that happened in the fall of 2004 was that we saw that our systems depend upon the level of registration that we have. And so in Ohio, for instance, they basically allocated resources to polling places before the huge drive that you saw in the summer. And so a lot of the reason that you had huge, long lines was that they did not anticipate the number of people voting. In particular, the polling place that served Kenyon College was open until three a.m. because none of the students were on the rolls in May when they would set them up.

And so the thing that we're looking to do in terms of reforming voter registration is trying to think about ways to not only enfranchise people, but ways that enfranchise people that can also help us to plan elections, and so by getting people on the rolls earlier. And so the thing that we're really looking at is universal voter registration, is trying to think about ways to get people on the rolls earlier, trying to think about ways to make sure that you are on the rolls and are able to vote on election day.

So that's our overall picture of what we see as the place voter registration should be going. In terms of this year and the work that we do in the short-term, we look a lot at restrictions on voter registration drives, as I talked about. And the other thing that we look a lot at in terms of voter registration is ways that people get on the rolls and stay on the rolls – the database matching problems that Secretary Bowen was talking about where when you register to vote, they try to match up your record to the DMV or the social security administration. And so if you're a single digit off and your record doesn't get matched, in some states, you won't be placed on the rolls, and in other states, you have to show ID when you get to the polls.

And then purges that happen of registration after you get on but when you show up on election day, it may be that you've been taken off the rolls because your mail went astray. And all of these problems that we look at tend to effect the same kinds of people who had trouble getting registered in the first place, who when they did get registered, submitted their form through a drive and not through the DMV, so it's not filled out electronically, it's filled out by hand, who may live in places where addresses are a little less accurate and mail service isn't great, and other people who may be less likely to have accurate information in government data bases.

So I think for us, when we're looking at the problem of voter registration and of electorate preparedness, it's really thinking about how to reach that 30%, ways to think about, both in the short-term, putting them on the list this year as much as possible, doing voter registration drives, making sure those drives are protected, making sure that people are able to go out there and register and vote. But then in the long-term, thinking about how we can fix this system to ensure that we get a higher rate of registration.

Woman

Okay, thanks, Renee.

[Applause.]

Jonah

Thank you. And I want, first of all, to say how happy I am to be up on this panel with great friends and an old friend in what is a sort of an emerging part of a movement, which is to try to protect the infrastructure of elections. And it's sort of the silver lining that we all see, I think, in what happened in 2000 is that we're now having this conversation. Before 2000, this conversation pretty much didn't exist and that's great. And I'm also happy to be up here with four other people who have the unfortunate condition of having to follow Larry Lessig, so we're sorry if we're not quite there.

And Becky actually asked me if I had a PowerPoint and I was like, "I'm not even touching PowerPoint after that." But I want to sort of continue on his theme and with the risk of continuing on a theme of that presentation, but at the end when there was a discussion of the democracy crisis, we all are talking about a sort of a small sliver but a not unimportant sliver. We're talking about a sliver that, perhaps, if it was fixed before, the 537 votes in Florida would have probably not been something that we were really all that concerned about because whether it's a question of ballot design or a question of purges, or a question of about a dozen other pieces of this election administration puzzle that we all sort of fit in to, we probably would be in a very different situation now and in a completely nonpartisan way, that's just the reality that we face.

But one of the things that we've not yet gotten to because, again, this is sort of somewhat new and where the folks here really can play an incredible part is that there needs to be more sunshine on this process. Obviously, as we heard at lunch and I think all of us are convinced and are evangelists for this, there needs to be a lot of sunshine, also, on what's going on with a little bit more of the political parts of the process. But from a funda-mental part of the process, one of the things – and Renee referred to this – when you look at what happened at Kenyon in 2004, the fact that there was no planning, the fact that there was only planning based on numbers that everybody could have told the election officials, who were making those plans, were irrelevant numbers at the time.

That's something we don't know because we haven't asked as much as we need to and, unfortunately, there aren't 50 or 51 or 53 Deborah Bowens out there; there are a couple and thanks to the work that Becky did, there are more than there used to be. Actually, well, there's not; there's only one Deborah Bowen but – [laughter] – it wasn't a genetic project; it was a political project. But there are others, there is a small club of terrifically progressive and enlightened chief election officials, but as Secretary Bowen will tell you, there's a whole bunch of election officials that are implementing this on the ground level that may not have the same priorities that she does.

But what you all can do, and I think that this is really an important piece and it's something that we're trying to really highlight, is that there's sort of a two-part to this puzzle: there's before November 4th and there's after November 4th and there's a lot to do before November 4th. There's a lot of questions that need to be asked: How are election officials preparing for what they're doing? How are decisions being made? How are pole workers being trained?

All of these questions are questions that aren't necessary asked in a public way and if they are, the answers, unfortunately, are going to be astonishing. But at least we can ask them now, in the summer, and we can ask them in the early Fall when some of these decisions are being made. And maybe we can effect the outcomes because we know what good processes are, largely because we have people like Secretary Bowen, and there are thousands of great local election officials across the country that are really doing things in ways that are trying to get to our goal, which is to have every voter be able to cast a ballot that's accurately counted.

But the other thing that we all can do, the other thing that the blogs can do and where you all are sort of like the – I don't want to say, like, ethanol because that's bad, but maybe like the sugar-based, or maybe, like, the winter [vines] out in west Texas right now – the sort of new power to the media to be able to really have this discussion in a way that's smart and that's thorough. And then, maybe you drive those other people, who are basically reading your blogs and then repackaging it and putting it in newspapers, to be able to package this story also, which is that there's a lot that can be done to make these decisions differently, to make these decisions more effectively, to make it more likely that folks are going to get through the process and that they're going to be able to vote about the counts.

But one of the things that you'll find when you do that is you're going to talk to a lot of election officials who have the best interest of the voters in mind and they'll tell you the reason why they can't get every voter registration on the registration rolls by election days, something that, I think, this year might prove to be a huge problem or they can't make the accurate decisions about how to put election machines in appropriate ways, is that they don't have the resources.

So one of the things that you all can do is connect those dots because, unfortunately, the dots aren't always connected. There are county counsels, there are city commissions, there are different political bodies that have the ability to pour more money into this process but they don't because nobody ever really pays attention. When they're running for office, nobody's telling them, "You have to fix the election system." But when we do put a little bit more, like I said, sunshine on this process, it's more likely to go in a way that’s going to help, like I said, every voter, our ultimate goal.

And we know what the real consequences are, I mean, we saw it in 2000 and we've seen it since 2000 and 2004 in Ohio and we've seen it across the country; we saw it in 2006 in Sarasota, Florida. There's a lot of these consequences that we know of, but on election day, the real names and faces, the real voters who go to polling places and are not on the voter registration rolls, or are told the wrong rules by poll workers who mean well but are poorly trained, or who are turned away because election machines break down and there aren't adequate processes for when that actually happens, so voting just stops in precincts.

These are things that if we asked the questions now that we can potentially get a much better process as we move forward. But, in some ways, the more important issue is how to keep the story alive for after Election Day because we can do a lot between now and Election Day to make sure voters have a better chance of getting through the process. And, again, we've got great folks like, Secretary Bowen and Secretary Carnahan, who just walked in who's another just hero of all of ours, who are going to make it better than it was if they weren't there.

But what we need to do is illustrate to people that this is not a political issue; this isn't a political issue. Politics live and die by this issue but this issue isn't political. This is a policy issue. There are solutions that can overcome a lot of these problems. Election Day registration and permanent registration and universal registration, if that happens, we cut down on enormous numbers of these types of problems for Election Day registration.

[Applause.]

And the thing is that it's realistic. We're going into a moment where, first of all, where we've built the policy infrastructure. There are the Renee [Paradies] of the world, who are actually getting the great work that she's been doing out and it's resonating. There are all of you who are focusing on this. Steve has been doing this type of reporting now for a long time and it's really become powerful and resonant. And now, what we can all do with that is take advantage of a political moment where we have coming up in the next congress, regardless of what happens at the presidential level, where people are more receptive to this issue. There's a policy infrastructure in congress for this issue. We can have this discussion. We can talk about Election Day registration.

But what we need is for all of you to, first of all, do the sunlight before Election Day. Make sure that people are making decisions in a way that's better than the decisions that have been make before, but then, also, keep the story alive after Election Day. Let people know that this is an issue in February of an off year and not in October of an election year. And that's really what we all have to do. So I look forward to taking your questions and thanks very much for having me, again.

[Applause.]

Man

Hi. Well, it's a real delight to be on this panel and I recognize a bunch of folks in this room and I'm really thrilled to be able to talk to folks like you. I mean, Nathan over there, the research director for Acorn, they're doing voting registration drives in twenty-two states – I think it's twenty-two, maybe it's twenty-four – other people who work for the California democratic party on the ground. And bloggers, I tell people that I cover elections from a voter rights perspective and they say, "What's that?" And what that really means is that I look, for example, for the trickle-down effect of things like selective enforcement by the Justice Department of things like the Voting Rights Act, and I won't even give examples.

And I look for things like, what is the modern face of voter suppression and what is the modern face of padding the vote count. And when we hear about, as the Republicans will raise, the issue of vote count fraud, it's really stopping black and brown and low-income people from voting. And we have to talk about it as institutional racism and not some abstract thing. So this is the kind of stuff that I look at.

But I'll keep my remarks really brief. I came to this issue...I didn't look for it; it fell into my lap and there's an independent media success story that I've been able to – and I'm pretty self-effacing, but for you bloggers. I was the executive producer of an Air America radio program, the Laura Flanders show in the summer of 2004. All summer long we had people on from the [5/27] saying, "Oh, we are registering people to vote. Don't worry, no problem. And Ohio, it's down, it's gonna be fine."

Well, we did the election night broadcast and I remember the exit poll numbers flipping on CNN. And afterwards, like everyone in the country, we were saying, "What happened? Who do we talk to?" Well, I put Bob Fitrakis on the air and Cliff [Armbeck] on the air and we raised $120,000 for what became the [Moskie]/Bush Election Challenge Suit. Now, we knew that wasn't going to go anywhere, but everything we gathered under oath, with the money that we raised, which is a higher standard of evidence that the media uses because we wanted it to be a standard of proof in the courts, we gave to John [Connors]. It became the [Connors] Report.

It was Bob Fitrakis who briefed Barbara Boxer and Stephanie Tubb Jones and they questioned the Electoral College certification of Ohio's votes. And for a moment there, we actually said, "What's happening?" And the thing is, I went and helped those guys, because they're not particularly well-organized, write two books on what happens in Ohio and we were able to prove that there was, through a really old-school way, that there were violations of the Voting Rights Act. And we filed a federal suit and the judge said, "Preserve the ballots," and then we discovered that two thirds of the ballots had already been destroyed by local __.

But the point of that is, this was not the mainstream media and it was working with people who were activist lawyers. But the big thing I take away from that is in the summer of 2004, people were not looking at the landscape of what is happening and what is likely to be a problem in the fall. And that is my primary motivation in doing what I have been trying to do, which is to look at what is different now that's not retelling 2004 so we can be better prepared.

And I wrote this little book for [alternate], based on the primaries, because – and a lot of people who are doing voter registration week will give this to you for free – because the primaries were more than a dress rehearsal for a high turnout election and the truth of the matter is, and I'm embarrassed to say this because people like Secretary [Carnahan] and Secretary Bowen], you're doing everything you can to make the system able to absorb a high traffic, high turnout, but a lot of states – we're looking at covered bridges that should be four-lane highways – they're not really prepared in many, many respects.

So let me just, very briefly, say what's different about 2008 and where, I think, some of the big solutions lie. A lot of people have paid attention to how the touch list, the paper list of electronic voting machines can malfunction and people recognize, more or less, that you have to have a paper ballet, at least to start, so you can have a verifiable audit trail. What's new in the systems are the computers and the database management parts where people are trying to create these state-wide voter lists.

When Secretary Bowen came into office, one of the first things that she had to do was deal with this name-matching problem that was rejecting thousands of registrations. A lot of states are dealing with that for the first time right now. That's happening against the backdrop of a justice department that is pressuring states to purge based on bogus census statistics and you're dealing with lots of local election officials who are, frankly, overwhelmed with the number of registrations they have to...

And the thing is, that becomes just one little piece of a potential iceberg. Election machinery, it's really interesting, we know that the Republicans want to complicate the process so that people leave and, in essence, that the poll challenges of the past don't need to do the work anymore because, really, the poll workers of today are overwhelmed with new ID requirements, new computers to work, and they're trying to do the best they can.

And the thing is – I guess I'll just sort of sum this up very quickly – I looked very carefully at where all the breakdowns were in the primaries and in 2006 and the largest number of electronic votes that were lost that we know of were in the 20,000 magnitude. Well, we are having hundreds of thousands of people registering to vote and we are having new scrutiny of the counting aspects of these systems. What we need to do is we need to remind people that they have to verify their registration information, especially this year, because all the things that can stop people from voting, whether it's Republican challengers, caging, ID requirements, all that sort of stuff will be overcome if people know that they're registered, know what ID is required, know where to go to vote, and expect to wait in line and have a little patience with the process.

And we can talk more about this later, but really, if you take a look in this, you'll see that we're going to have a high turnout election. We're going to have some issues with some of the voter databases. We're going to have some issues with some purging. We're going to have some issues with training poll workers, with using new equipment, and we're also going to have to have some issues with the media not calling the election on election night when the ballots aren't counted. And you guys and the bloggers, I can't tell you how important this is.

Just California alone, half the state is going to vote by mail if you don't include Los Angeles. There is just no way that it is humanly possible, with the best of intentions, to know what the vote count is at a eleven o'clock on Tuesday night. So we have to tell, at least the state media, if not the national media, to hold your horses, to use the old Texas expression, and not force people to concede and let people try to have an honest count. And I'll just leave it right there.

Woman

Well, I want to thank everyone – [applause] – for being timely in their remarks so that we have time for questions because I know that you all do. I do want to point out, again, as Jenna pointed out, that we have Secretary of State from Missouri, the Secretary Robin Carnahan here. How many of you have blogs? Okay, how many of you are familiar with Act Blue? Okay, Secretary Carnahan is up for election this cycle. She is on Act Blue. While we're talking, you can probably add her to your blog page and I encourage you to do that.

Secretary Bowen is running again in 2010. She is also on Act Blue and you can continue to give an advance of the election. You can also, more important, go to [www.deborahbohan.com] and sign up, not just so that the campaign can contact you, so that if I need help pushing auditing standards or standards for how we count provisional ballots and who gets to watch how provisional ballots are processed, that we can be part of what the Netroots can do, which is coordinated work to get these kinds of things done and so that you know what you can do in your own local community because that is where things get done.

Okay, so I'll start with one question and then we're going to go to the audience. I want everyone on the panel, just very quickly to state what single election reform that we could enact would result in the most votes saved or the most additional votes produced. Was it electing secretaries of state? Is it Election Day registration? Is it abolishing the Electoral College? I would just like for you to pick – it's not the only thing – but to pick the thing that you think would have the biggest impact.

Woman

Well, I'm going to say universal registration again and I'm just going to say that the reason why I think it's a system...where the government puts people on the list well before the election, now, starts going out and finding people and making sure they're registered. And the reason is, I think that people who don't vote, we know the best way to get them to vote is for somebody to contact them and say, "Hey, I think you should come vote for X." It's actually a partisan message. And if people aren't on the list, campaigns and non-partisan groups can't find them and encourage them to get out, so that's what I would say.

Man

I would agree but I would add that having a verifiable audit process would do so much to restore public trust and I know it's really arcane and it's, like you said, it's in the boring level of details, but in addition to... When people go to vote, we just have to ensure that they feel that the can trust the results because we have seen too many elections where we have not been able to trust the results and look at the quality of our political dialogue as a result.

Secretary Bowen

Well, I'm actually shocked that in this country that we haven't developed standards for random auditing and for verification of what is the way in which we transfer power in a peaceful way. But I think, also, I'd go beyond this discussion about the mechanics and say that if we really want a great deal higher participation in this country, we have to have public campaign financing.

[Applause.]

Woman

Okay, so we're going to take questions now and I want to urge you to ask a question. If you want to make a comment, which you will, please keep it very short or we'll move on because I know everyone wants to hear from Secretary Bowen and the other panelists. Okay, so we'll start with you right here.

Audience Member

Secretary Bowen, thank you for what you've done from the election integrity [unit]. ________ Thank you from the bottom of our hearts and I just want to add the question: As demonstrated from heightened democracy ___, the ease with which ____ can also be hacked, my concern is that, if the measurement for a ten percent hand count is ___ a half a percent off, it seems like it would be ______ to create a _____ to avoid that and have you thought about that _____?

Secretary Bowen

Well, we actually have but remember in California that we have a baseline one percent random precinct count, so it's not... The new requirement that it's within a half of percent was added to a random precinct count. But, but, also, I want to say again, this effort to develop audit standards that are statistically sound is at the beginning. The committee that I put together last year to look at how we can do this is in its early stages and we had a little bit of experience in June in California. We'll have more, I think, in November and we have some counties that are going to be doing some voluntary hand counts of a larger number of ballots, so that will give us some baselines. But whatever it is, whatever the number is, mechanisms have to be sufficient and we also have to be willing to continue to look at them.

I chaired the energy committee in California for six years and I watched how Enron took the market rules and the smartest guys in the room constantly figured out new ways to get around them. And that's going to happen in any human endeavor and it means that we have to have a continuous improvement process and that we have to learn from every other state's experience and every other election jurisdiction's experience. And we have to be communicating in a much broader way. If there was something going on in Arizona that could happen in California but hasn't yet, I wanna know about it and be able to deal with it before it happens, not afterwards. So it really just has to be scientific.

Man

____ from Oregon, where we vote the nation on vote-by-mail. Vote-by-mail means that people – first of all, it's ____ – it means that folks have three weeks after they... If they don't get their ballot in two, they correct that problem and get a ballot in their hand. And those people can vote anytime, day or night, if they are swing shift workers or whatever they do, they have three weeks to vote.

I'm wondering about your reactions to vote-by-mail as a way of dealing with a lot of these problems and moving a one-state solution to a fifty state solution – anybody.

Woman

At the [Brennan] Center, we have a little bit of skepticism around doing all vote-by-mail, mainly because there's no demonstration that increases turnout among the people that we're most concerned about increasing turnout among, those among whose turnout is low to begin with. Vote-by-mail only works if your mail works. Mail service tends to be great in nice, clear suburban neighborhoods, not so great in cities, I know if New York... The worse your neighborhood gets, the more likely you are to not get mail consistently.

And that also means that you have to be on the list a lot further in advance. So I think that while we're open to ways to think about using alternate ways of voting to increase turnout, the question is, where should we try and get reforms in order to do the things we want to do.

Male

I should just add something to this, especially for this room, I've talked to some of the former lawyers, the career attorneys who [love/left] the justice department and they feel that one of the big plays, the mega play that may be made this election is that the Republicans are doing everything they can to complicate voting in polling places and they're going to jack up their numbers by voting-by-mail through their voting-by-mail and it's jut something that they're trying to watch and I'm trying to watch, and you guys just ought to be aware of that potential dynamic as well.

Secretary Bowen

Actually, California has hybrid system; we allow people to opt to become permanent vote-by-mail voters and that way they can do it if they want to. In California, our experience is that occasional voters are more likely to become regular voters if they opt to become permanent vote-by-mail voters. But this would be a huge issue in Los Angeles with thirty to forty thousand new voter registrations a day. It gets easier to deal with if we can move towards universal registration.

I also think we have to be really mindful of the fact that not all voters have the same high level of literacy that you would find in this room, but they're still entitled to vote if they're U.S. citizens and the polling place and the oral discussion may be more comfortable.

Finally, I had a really interesting discussion with Bill Bradbur, your Secretary of State, a couple of years ago and I said, "What happens if the signature doesn't match?" because, let's face it, our signatures change over time. And he said, "In Oregon, we just call Mrs. Jones and ask her to come down and sign a new ballot." I was trying to imagine how this would work in Los Angeles – [laughter] – where... I mean, I don't even think most people know where there registrar voters is and if you're taking the bus, you basically would have to take the entire day off work just to get there and back, and I think most people would say forget it.

So I think we have to be realistic about the differences about how we live and where we live and give people as many choices as we can.

[Audience member question – inaudible.]

Moderator

Jonah, you wanna take that one?

Jonah Goldman

Sure. Well, I hope I painted somewhat of a sunny picture by saying that we've built an infrastructure in Congress to have this discussion. Unfortunately, the infrastructure in Congress still is in Congress. So when we're talking about not being able to do things like energy policy or anything – I think that they can name post offices still – but otherwise, they can't do anything. There is a lot of good legislation there, and you'd expect that there would be more of an effort to get it done. And there actually has been.

I mean, if you look at the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention act, one of the less pithily-named bills in the Congress that was introduced by Senator Obama in 2005 and then again in 2006, when it was originally introduced in 2005, it had about six cosponsors, and then I think there was a press conference; there was a bunch of press there just because Senator Obama was there. And even in 2005, people liked to hear him talk.

But then in 2006, things changed. The bill has passed the House. It's passed the Senate Judiciary Committee. I think that, again, as much as there is nothing that gets done in all of Congress, that's to a millionth degree in the Senate. So now it's like every other sort of important priority we've had: it's in a backlog in the Senate to get to the floor, and there's not all that may days left where things can actually get done.

So I'm not sure in this Congress that we're going to see any real movement. I mean, just last week, the Emergency Paper Ballot Bill, which was Congress [Lofgren], who chairs the Election Subcommittee and the House Administration Committee – which, in real words, means that she oversees the committee that oversees elections in a lot of ways. I guess that really isn't so much any clearer, but anyway. [Laughter.]

Her bill couldn't pass on what is called the suspension calendar, which requires two-thirds of the House to vote on it to pass that way. So this is a really simple bill. I mean, it's a simple commonsense bill. It's a bill that basically says, if voting stops because of the machinery in a polling place, that there's another alternative that has to be there, a paper alternative, so voting doesn't actually stop. And that couldn't get through. And I think that it's probably because of the time that we're at right now.

But I think in the 111th Congress, in the next Congress, there is a really, really good shot of getting not just something little like emergency paper ballots, but we can have an election-day registration conversation, I think, in the next Congress. So again, I ended with sunshine again.

Becky Bond

Right here.

Audience Member

Is the criteria for purging voters consistent throughout all of ______ California _____, or if so, what are the chances that ____?

Secretary of State Bowen

The question is about purging voters. And the way the voter rolls are handled is unfortunately quite different from state to state and county to county, and not nearly transparent enough. California pretty much bends over backwards not to take people off the rolls. We'd rather have a duplicate if we're not sure. We do remove people when we have a confirmed match with our Coroner's Office. But sometimes THAT takes a while because you don't want to get that wrong either and have someone show up like in a Monty Python skit and say, "But I'm not dead yet!" [Laughter.]

But this is a place where I think the level of transparency is really not good, and we found we had NO transparency in this kind of Never-Never Land between the place where someone filled out the application and where it either matched or didn't match and what happened there. So there was nobody in the public who could see how many people were not able to complete the registration process and for what reason. So this is a place where I think national standards are highly appropriate. And the 111th Congress is probably our best hope for that.

Steve Rosenfeld

I should just add – this is a story that I try to follow. And one of the disturbing trends I've seen this summer is that... There's a law called the National Voter Registration Act that says that over two federal cycles, the local election administration will try to contact a voter to see if they still live at an address, and if they don't respond, then they will be purged or removed.

But what I have found is that there are these new statewide voter databases that are these wonderful databases. And some states are creating ____ understanding with other states, where they're comparing those lists with driver's licenses – you know, DMV lists. And if there is a duplicate name, even if it has the same date of birth, they're purging people instead of following the NVRA. And it's an issue that is becoming increasingly... It's a sending rather than a going away.

So wherever you guys are, you might just want to take a look at that or just be mindful of that, because unfortunately, that's the kind of the thing that...it's supposed to follow the federal legislation, the federal rules.

Renée Paradis

I'll just mention briefly that the Brennan Center has a purge report coming out that sort of does a study of purge standards in different states and counties, and has found that even within states, there is a lot of variation. And sometimes the State says, "Our counties do this," and the counties say, "No, that's not what we do." And there's a lot of variation.

Becky Bond

Is that available on your Web site?

Renée Paradis

It's coming. It's forthcoming. It WILL be on the Web site when it's....

Becky Bond

Which is brennancenter.org?

Renée Paradis

brennancenter.org.

Becky Bond

Okay, great. We have time for just two more questions. So in the green shirt right there?

Audience Member

I'm interested in... My information dates back to about 2000, when [we] claimed that the county clerks in California, there was no standards for knowing computers. So how can you oversee an election that's done by computers if you are afraid of computers? And I wonder, has anything been done anywhere to have standards for the county clerk?

Secretary of State Bowen

Well, county clerks in California, even, do not take office in the same manner. We have some counties in California where the county clerk is elected, and some in which the county clerk is appointed. So if you look at [Yolo] County, Davis, where the county clerk has some really interesting programs – she gets a University of California at Davis engineering student – one for every four polling places – to be a floater to go troubleshoot if there's a problem with an optical scan equipment or equipment for disabled voters. She's elected. In Los Angeles County, the county clerk is NOT elected.

And there's pros and cons to both. But I think what this really highlights is that we have, nationally, a system of election administration that is so phenomenally fragmented and different that it makes it extremely hard for activists and citizens to follow what's going on, and to determine whether or not there has been compliance with the law. It is not a system we would EVER create now, and it IS a system where I've had people tell me that the Carter Center would not be able to observe elections in the United States of America because we don't meet the basic criteria for having systems that are uniform.

And it runs into the states' rights rhetoric, which, as you well know, is used depending on whether or not somebody likes the underlying policy – most of the time. But elections affect all of us. What we learned, really learned, in 2000 and 2004, and this doesn't matter what state you live in, if something goes wrong in an election in another state, you are affected. And that makes the case, I think, for having some baseline federal standards sooner rather than later.

Becky Bond

That's great. We have time for one more question. Back in the corner over there.

Audience Member

____ really quick things. First of all, [I'm an] inspector of [a] polling place in my last election. I have two high school students volunteer for me because their history teacher gave the class credit for us. So how can we perpetuate that and encourage more teachers and school systems to make that standard?

And my second question is, to get private and corporate money ___ elections, what can we do to move the country towards ______ elections as being the requirement?

Secretary of State Bowen

I'm not sure what you mean by "publicly funded." You mean, public ownership of the software?

Audience Member

No, all elections being funded by public money.
Secretary of State Bowen

Oh, the campaigns rather than the administration.

Audience Member

Yes.

Secretary of State Bowen

Let me start with the easy question. I think, again, it's very much county by county in California how high school students are encouraged. And some states don't have any provision at all for high school students to work at the polls. But it's something that I think, actually, elections officials have been very receptive to, because recruiting poll workers is a huge challenge. It's a very long day. I did it myself for many years until I first ran for office. And even that year, I was on the ballot and I got a call from the County asking me if I would be a poll worker again, and I said, "No, no, I don't look good in an orange jumpsuit." [Laughter.]

So I do think we're moving in that direction. The public financing and some of the other reforms I've talked about, they're going to have to come from the bottom up; they're going to have to come from the communities and states first. I think we'll look somewhat like what I did when I carried the legislation that said you can't use a social security number as a [health] card I.D. number or student I.D. number, and we passed that in California in 2001. Now, two-thirds of the states have passed that.

As other state legislatures start saying, "Well, gee, is that's good enough for people in California, how come we can't have it?" And it takes that groundswell very often to get something done federally. Maybe this will be different next year, because this election has a possibility of bringing in some radical ability to make progress on things that have been stuck.

But I really encourage people to work from the local level up, and maybe because that's where I started. If you can demonstrate proof of concept in a variety of places that something works, it gets a whole lot easier to do it statewide and nationally.

Jonah Goldman

And at the risk of sounding like a broken record – but I'm from Washington so that just means I'm a message – if we start treating this like a policy issue and not as a political issue, then we can those, what seem like absurdly simple solutions. I mean, we have a problem where we have the average age of poll workers being seventy, and I think that we all know 18-year-olds who are poll workers, which means that there is someone on the other end of that spectrum averaging it out to seventy. [Laughter.]

So you have the average age of poll workers being seventy, so how do we do that? We try to get more people – we try to go to the places where there are young people. Schools are one of them. And there's a lot of creative things we can do, whether it's through pilot programs at the federal level, whether we do things like – and not just with students, but with other government workers trying to build in incentives, increasing public/private partnerships to try to make it more likely that big companies in certain locations are doing more to have poll workers there.

All of these things, people have talked about them. What we need to do is institutionalize them, and the way to do that is to start having this as a policy discussion like we did before. Public financing, I think, is such an enormous step from where we are now. But I think that the answer is, like we heard today at lunch – I was moved – it's all of you out there. We need to start demanding [this time] on both of _____.

Steve Rosenfeld

You know, when I was a reporter for NPR ten years ago and monitored radio before that, I did more stories on campaign finance reform and public financing than anybody in the country. And what happened at that time, there was a lot of energy to adopt it at the local level and then to get states to adopt it. And some of that state-level momentum was stymied.

And I think that having it – as the Secretary said – having it work in cities that are not entirely small towns, but are sophisticated places, I mean, it IS a long-term view, but it really shows, hey, this is nothing to be afraid of. Because you know what the resistance is: "Oh, my gosh – welfare for politicians." That's the bumpersticker. But it CAN be done, and lord knows, maybe we'll see some new energy in Congress.

I know we have to end. But we have 200 of these at the Alternet booth, so come by, all you guys. I'll just give you one for free since we don't want to ship them back to San Francisco.

[Applause.]

Becky Bond

All right, thank you so much.