Update: Al Franken is the confirmed winner of the Senate race in Minnesota

CNN reported Sunday that a state election board in Minnesota will declare Al Franken the winner in the thus-far undecided U.S. Senate race. An announcement from the board is expected today. And Senate Dems are trying to seat him as early as tomorrow.

Word is that Franken’s opponent, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman, will challenge the verdict. And Republican leaders in the Senate are pledging a fight:

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has pledged a GOP filibuster if the Democrat-controlled Senate attempts to seat Franken before all legal battles play out and before Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, can co-sign the secretary of state’s certificate.

The ongoing dispute ensures further uncertainty in the Senate roster, as Blago-appointed Roland Burris attempts to take over Obama’s Illinois seat. Whether or not Dems will make good on their promise not to seat him remains to be seen.

The disputes over each senate seat stem from different circumstances. In the case of Minnesota, a long and drawn-out recount has at different points put each of the candidates in the lead, usually by no more than a few hundred votes. In the case of Illinois, an allegedly corrupt governor has invoked anger in his party by exercising his power to appoint the replacement for the junior senator from Illinois, who left for a better job.

But both situations are cause for serious voter concern. We keep hearing that consumer confidence is just as important as more concrete financial indicators (performance of the S&P 500, for example) in determining the health of our economy. I believe that the same is true of voter confidence in our electoral process. We can partially assess the health of our voting processes by looking at concrete problems with voter registration, electronic voting, etc. But to get a real grasp on how well our elections, and therefore, our democracy, are working, we need to look at whether or not citizens believe that our elections work.

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After producing the film Election Day and witnessing the hard work and commitment of pollworkers around the country, I was inspired to work as a pollworker myself. So in the mid-term election of 2006, my friend Anayansi and I got up at the crack of dawn to serve as election officials in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We had been through a rather pathetic 2-hour training at the board of elections a couple weeks earlier. (If you passed the open-book exam at the end, you got a $30 bonus. If not, no problem! Go ahead and work the polls anyway!)

One piece of information that clearly did not sink in with most pollworkers was the nature of a provisional ballot. The biggest problem we had during the day was people whose names were not on the voter list. In some cases, they had been voting at that site for many years, and we presumed it was a database error. In other cases, we had to help them figure out if they were at the correct precinct, which sometimes they weren’t. In other cases, they were newly-registered voters and it was unclear if their registration had even been processed. If the voter’s name was not on the list, had moved within New York City, had a missing or wrong signature, or did not have the required ID, the voter had two options: vote on a provisional (aka affidavit) ballot or march down to the local board of elections office to obtain a court order to vote on an election machine.

This second option was rarely presented to voters. Instead, they were often assured, “An affidavit ballot is the exact same as voting on the machine; it will be counted.” But the pollworker doesn’t know that. It is the board of elections office that will later determine if that provisional/affidavit ballot is valid. And it will be days or weeks after Election Day, after the vote is final, when the voter has no recourse.

In their article on voting pitfalls in Rolling Stone, Bobby Kennedy and Greg Palast wrote:

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The upside of the chaos of the last two presidential elections has been an increase in mainstream public attention to the problems with our electoral system. The fact that Time Magazine has made the topic the subject of its cover article a week before the election is evidence of this growing attention.

Time’s list is spot-on if you ask me. It’s one of the most concise summaries of the biggest potential electoral problems of 2008. It’s not comprehensive, of course, but hits on most of the biggies.

The two problems on the list that are the biggest concern to me:

The Database Dilemma
The introduction of statewide voter databases has made it possible for voters to be disenfranchised en masse, due to typos and data entry errors. Registration records are required to be matched against other state data, such as driver’s licenses. If the match is not perfect, the voter could be erroneously struck from the rolls.

In Wisconsin, an August check of a new voter-registration database against other state records turned up a 22% match-failure rate. Around the time four of the six former judges who oversee state elections could not be matched with state driver’s license data, the board decided to suspend any database purges of new registrants. But database-matching continues elsewhere. In Florida, nearly 9,000 new registrants have been flagged through the state’s “No Match, No Vote” law. (Their votes will not be counted unless they prove their identity to a state worker in the coming weeks.)

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Last night I was chatting with some friends about the recent conviction of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens on seven counts of violating ethics charges. All counts are felony charges. In Alaska, a felon is not allowed to cast a ballot. So I started to wonder, will Ted Stevens, in his determination to continue his campaign for re-election despite the conviction, even be allowed to vote for himself?

I came across this great post on Huffington Post by Shayana Kadidal, which breaks down the specifics of the Alaska law to try to figure out whether or not Stevens will be entering a voting booth on Tuesday. As of yesterday, according to the AP, the jury was still out. But two hours ago, Slate posted this story, reporting that:

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ACORN released a video today defending its voter registration activities and unveiling the GOP’s agenda in linking Obama to the voter registration activities. The video, produced by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films, does not deny that there have been false registrations, but explains that false registrations do not lead to false voting.

takepart and find your voting info!

In a rejection of GOP disenfranchisement tactics, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of greater voter access for Ohio voters today. As I mentioned previously on this blog, the efforts by various states to match new registrations against state databases has been fraught with technological problems. Republican operatives have been waging a campaign in Ohio to take advantage of the glitches in the system to try to challenge every newly registered voter whose name doesn’t exactly match state records.

The GOP was requesting that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner turn over the lists of all voters whose registration did not exactly match state records. Their intention was to challenge all of these voters at the polls, thereby requiring them to cast provisional ballots. However, the failure to match is a widespread problem that rarely has to do with voter fraud. As the New York Times points out:

In one audit of match failures in 2004 by New York City election officials, more than 80 percent of the failures were found to have resulted from errors by government officials; most of the remaining failures were because of immaterial discrepancies between the two records.

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While it remains my dream that problems with voter registration, pollworker training, and statewide voter databases be eliminated in every state, I must admit that I’d most prefer that they first be dealt with in swing states. I know, I know swing states get all the attention. The red state voter in Kansas and the blue state voter in California are no less important than the swing state voter in Ohio. And electoral reform should be done for its own sake, not just when it’s convenient for our candidate, right? Right.

Yet, the worst outcome of a troubled electoral process would be if the will of the people was subverted and the aforementioned problems thwarted voter intent. Which is why we ought to pay special attention to problems in the states where the vote will be close.

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Election Day might bring another nasty surprise to foreclosure victims. More than a million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure in the last two years. And if they haven’t updated their address in their voter registration records, they could face a hard time at the polls. This New York Times article lays out what one can imagine is a highly typical scenario:

Todd Haupt, a home builder, lost his home in Josephville, Mo., to foreclosure last year, and said he had since become much more interested in politics. But asked whether he had remembered to update his voter registration information when he moved into his parents’ home in St. Charles, Mo., Mr. Haupt, 33, paused silently. Is that required? he said. I had no idea.

I’ve moved three times in the past two years, he added. Keeping my voter registration information was not top on my mind because I figured it was all set already.

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Early voting began in Ohio today with a twist. Between now and October 6th, the state’s deadline for registering to vote in the general election, any voter can walk into an early voting site, complete their voter registration, and then cast a ballot. All in the same day. It’s kind of an EDR* special offer. Limited! For a short time only! Enjoy the progressive electoral policy enjoyed by voters in eight states across the country! An Ohio judge upheld the practice yesterday, making way for a week in which scores of homeless people and students intend to take advantage of the opportunity. Republicans opposed the policy, which was the work of Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. But they still encouraged Republican voters to get out there and cast their McCain/Palin ballots early.

takepart Contact your local election office to find out the registration deadline, and whether or not your state has early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.

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The most recent addition to the ever-growing list of election pitfalls that rate high on the disenfranchisement potential chart was reported on in Wired last week. Statewide, centralized voter-registration databases mandated by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002 are debuting in a number of states in November and they are far from ready for prime time. Prior to HAVA, each county or election district maintained its own voter list and there was no communication between districts.

“States were supposed to consolidate their lists by Jan. 1, 2004, but most got an extension to 2006. Creating a statewide system that interfaces with multiple county registration databases built by different companies proved to be difficult. About a dozen states missed the 2006 deadline, and four were sued by the Justice Department.” [Wired]

Voter registration lists have been the source of numerous problems at the polls in recent elections. Attempts to clean up lists in Florida in 2000 led to the infamous purging of thousands of voters who shared names with ex-felons from the rolls. And it was the high incidence of voters not finding their names on lists when they arrived at the polls that led to the mandate for provisional ballots (also via HAVA), which have arguably created a whole new category of problems.

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