• It's not the 2000 recount, but voting snafus and disputes still plague Florida

    By Tom Curry, NBC News national affairs writer

    Florida’s struggle to quickly report a winner of the 2012 presidential election has again made it the target of criticism that brought to mind the 2000 recount.

    The presidency doesn’t hang in the ballot, as it did 12 years ago during the recount between George W. Bush and Al Gore, but that hasn’t saved the Sunshine State from scrutiny.

    NBC's Chuck Todd discusses how Florida may be used as a model for the rest of the country to show how changes in demographics, particularly an influx of Hispanic voters in key counties, affected the outcome of the election.

    On Thursday in Florida, absentee ballots are still being counted in three populous counties. (Under state law, counties have until Saturday to report their total vote, including absentee ballots.)

    Here are the snarls and wrinkles in Florida -- some of which, of course, were not unique to the state this year:

    A reduction in the number days on which Floridians could vote early
    This was changed from 14 days to 8 days, even though the number of early voting hours (96) remained static. The state legislature and Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, enacted this change, which sparked furious criticism by Florida Democrats.

    “The lay of the land had changed and we needed to change with it if we were going to win. To that end we instituted a very aggressive program to both increase the number of absentee ballot requests by Democrats and the number of absentee ballot returns. And we were extraordinarily successful,” said David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party.

    Litigation over voting hours
    The Florida Democratic Party filed a lawsuit last Sunday to ensure that in-person absentee voting was offered on Sunday and Monday in three predominantly Democratic counties: Broward County, Miami-Dade County, and Palm Beach County.

    In their filing with the federal district court in Miami, the Democrats complained about  “the prohibitively long lines at certain early voting sites within these counties. These extraordinary lines ... have required voters to stand in line for many hours to exercise their right to vote -- and in some cases have deterred or prevented voters from casting their ballots ... The lines and delays at certain early voting sites in these counties were substantially longer than elsewhere in the state.”

     “That lawsuit more than anything else drew a considerable amount of attention to that (in-person absentee voting) process,” said Chris Cate, a spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner. “I think it caused lot more people -- rather than go to their precinct -- to go vote absentee at the (county) supervisor’s office. When you’re counting these absentees, it’s a much more extensive process because you’re having to go through and make sure the person who’s voting absentee has not already voted and you have to look at the signature and do a signature match with the signature that’s on file ... .”

    MSNBC's Thomas Roberts talks to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., about why Florida's Electoral College votes still haven't been allocated days after the election.

    University of South Florida political scientist Susan MacManus, an expert on Florida politics, agreed with that analysis. “That extra volume was really unusual but it came as a clarion call by Democrats who felt that early voting hours had not been extended enough.” This resulted in long waiting times before Election Day at some county supervisors’ offices for in-person absentee voting. 

    A reduction in the number of voting locations on Election Day
    It is increasingly difficult for county voting supervisors to find suitable voting locations, MacManus said, because many places are not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act “and a lot of places are worried about liability. Schools are now out for the most part” -- school administrators are concerned about the potential presence on Election Day on school property of sexual predators among the voting population.

    This was one factor that led to delays on Election Day in some places.

    The Palm Beach Post reported on the afternoon of Election Day that a pregnant woman and her husband stood in line at a voting location in West Palm Beach “for more than two hours before she passed out and was escorted to the hospital by ambulance. The woman, witnesses say, was overwhelmed by the crowd and humidity.”

    The sheer length of the Florida ballot itself, with 11 constitutional provisions for voters to mull over
    “It was going to take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to vote and the amendments were part of the reason,” MacManus said. “There were 11 amendments and they were very wordy. I think the longest one was 700 words. Normally if citizen petitions put an amendment on the ballot, the ballot summary is limited to 75 words. But because all 11 of these were placed on the ballot by the Florida legislature they were unlimited in the number of words they could use. People knew about them (before they voted) and a lot of people prepared, but the bottom line is: it still took a while to get through this ballot.” 

    The lengthy counting of absentee ballots after Election Day
    Cate said the increase in the number of absentee ballots in this election was a “very significant” reason for the prolonged tallying process.

    It’s vital to put the balloting in its full political context. In no state is voting ever going to be a purely neutral mathematical exercise of tallying up numbers. But in a state that both Republicans and Democrats desperately tried to win, and a state Republicans did win in 2010 – giving control of the legislature, the governor’s office and the choice of chief elections official to the Republicans -- everything about voting tends to become highly politicized. 

    Asked whether Detzner has recommend any changes in voting procedures based on what the state experienced in the past few weeks, Cate said, “Not yet, but we’re going to be taking a hard look at this election and see where we can make improvements and find efficiencies. We want to make sure that as many voters as possible are able to vote, and in an efficient process. I don’t think that anybody thinks that waiting in line until midnight is an efficient process.”

     

  • Will Election Day be a 'perfect storm?' Four nightmare scenarios for what could go wrong

    By 2 p.m. on Monday all of Ohio's early voters had cast their ballots, with some people showing up in below-freezing temperatures to secure their place in line. NBC's John Yang reports from Cincinnati, Ohio.

    By Michael Isikoff, NBC News

    With more than 90 million Americans expected to cast their ballots on Tuesday, election officials across the country are bracing for what some  fear will be a “perfect storm” of Election Day problems that could result in tense confrontations at polling stations and a rush to the courthouse to file legal challenges. 

    The list of actual and potential problems is unusually long this year, ranging from concerns about machine failures to confusion over new rules governing voter ID and provisional ballots.

    Another big wild card: the impact of groups such as “True the Vote,” a Tea Party off-shoot, that is vowing to swarm polling places with an army of hundreds of thousands of  “citizen” poll watchers to look for fraud and challenge ineligible voters.

    It’s a threat that civil rights groups are vowing to fight with their own rival armies of poll watchers -- to “monitor the monitors,” says one activist.

    In Florida, voters cried out in frustration as polling stations became overwhelmed, and the Democratic Party had sued to extend early voting after some people were stuck on lines for hours trying to meet Saturday's deadline. NBC's Michael Isikoff reports.

    “Our election system has probably never been under as much strain as it is right now -- anything that can go wrong, probably will go wrong,” said Victoria Bassetti, a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel and the author of the new book, “Electoral Dysfunction: A Survival Manual for American Voters.”

    Bassetti notes that the camps backing both President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney have “pre-positioned their legal assets” by deploying thousands of volunteer lawyers to battleground states in order to challenge decisions by election supervisors, in court if necessary.

    In Florida, the litigation is already heating up. On Sunday, the Florida Democratic Party filed emergency lawsuits to extend early voting -- challenging  GOP governor Rick Scott’s refusal to do so -- after some voters were stuck in lines for up to six hours trying to meet Saturday’s deadline for early ballots. When the Miami Dade election office reopened to allow in-person absentee balloting, and then temporarily shut it down, frustrated voters started shouting, “Let Us Vote! Let Us Vote!”--  stirred up by a man wearing an Obama campaign tee shirt.

    It could be a preview of what happens Tuesday. “We can expect lots of yelling and screaming- and lawsuits,” said Bassetti.

    The upshot is that, if the voting is as close as some (but not all) polls suggest, the winner of the presidential election may not be known for days, if not weeks, after Election Day. “We’re going to be  in sudden death overtime,” predicts John Fund, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and the co-author of “Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.”

    To be sure, disputes about voting are hardly new -- and some of the potential problems most frequently cited by advocates on both sides of the political fence could prove to be overblown.

    But experts interviewed by NBC News identified a number of so-called “nightmare scenarios” that could complicate the counting of returns on Tuesday.

    Here’s a look at four of those scenarios:

    1) The national vote count for president is thrown into doubt because of the impact of Hurricane Sandy.

    The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast appears likely to hold down vote totals in the region. In New Jersey, hundreds of polling stations may be without power -- late last week nearly half of the 240 locations in Hudson County were out of commission and officials are scrambling to find alternatives.

    On Saturday, Gov. Chris Christie’s administration announced that it will allow voters to download ballots off a state Website and return them by e-mail -- a system that some experts have warned could lead to tampering by hackers. (A voting group called the Verified Voting Foundation has repeatedly warned about the security risks from Internet voting.) 

    On Thursday, the state’s lieutenant governor, Kim Guardagno, said the state will deploy Defense Department trucks with “Vote Here” signs, protected by National Guard members. But that plan prompted concerns among some Democrats that military trucks could intimidate voters, especially in minority neighborhoods, and there were signs over the weekend that officials may be backing away from it.  

    “Obviously, this is uncharted water for us -- getting hit with this at this late date just before a huge election,” said Michael Harper, the clerk of elections in New Jersey’s Hudson County, during a tour of damaged and flooded polling stations on Saturday.

    While the hardest hit states like New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut are all considered reliably Democratic and safely in the Obama column, the aftermath of the hurricane could affect the president’s total national vote counts -- and raise questions about his mandate or even legitimacy if he loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College (just as some Democrats questioned President George W. Bush’s legitimacy after he lost the popular vote in 2000.)

    2) A large number of provisional ballots makes the Electoral College winner impossible to determine on election night.

    The situation appears most acute in Ohio, a crucial battleground, where some experts have warned about a counting disaster stemming from what are expected to be as many as 200,000 provisional ballots.

    The background: in an effort to impose uniformity, GOP Secretary  of State Jon Husted over the summer directed that absentee ballot applications be mailed out to all of the state’s 6.9 million registered voters -- regardless of whether they had asked for them or not.

    About 1.3 million voters filled out those applications and received absentee ballots in the mail. But as of this weekend, 238,678 voters who got absentee ballots had not returned them. If those voters don’t return their ballots by mail by tomorrow and try to go to the polls on Tuesday instead, they along with others whose eligibility could be questioned or who show up at the wrong polling station, will have to cast provisional ballots to make sure they haven’t vote twice.  And under Ohio law, those ballots can’t even be counted until Nov. 16, ten days after Election Day.

    “There’s a realistic chance that we will not know which candidate won the presidential election in Ohio because of the existence of provisional ballots, that we will be in overtime,” said Edward Foley, an election law expert and professor of law at Ohio State University.

    The issue intensified on Friday when Husted issued a new directive that puts the burden on voters, rather than poll workers, to properly fill out a form recording what ID was presented for provisional ballots -- and instructing election boards to throw out provisional ballots if the forms are incomplete or contain any mistakes. The directive has triggered a last minute law suit by voting rights groups, increasing the likelihood of disputes over the counting of provisional ballots in a pivotal battleground state.

    3) Disputes over ballot printing errors, machine errors and a lack of paper trail could bog down the counting in other battleground states.

    This problem has already arisen in Florida. About 27,000 absentee ballots in Palm Beach County, Florida -- famous for its “butterfly” ballots and hanging chads during the 2000 Florida recount -- can’t be read by voting machines because of a printing error. This forced election officials last week to begin the arduous process of hand-copying those ballots in order to feed them into the machines -- while lawyers from both sides looked on, raising challenges.

    An exasperated Susan Bucher, the county’s election supervisor, was caught on camera admonishing lawyers over what she termed “frivolous” objections and threatening to eject them.

    But questions about machine failures are far broader than that. Last week, lawyers for the Republican National Committee wrote letters to attorneys general in six states asking for investigations after receiving reports that some voters had complained that machines had recorded their votes for Mitt Romney as being for Obama.

    Moreover, sixteen states -- including Virginia and Pennsylvania -- rely to some extent on touch screen voting machines that leave no paper trail that can be verified during a recount.

    Two voting experts warned on Saturday “we risk catastrophe” if recounts are required in Virginia and Pennsylvania “because most of their votes will be cast on paperless voting machines that are impossible to recount.” 

    4) Legions of citizen poll watchers on both sides create confusion and even chaos at some polling stations.

    “True the Vote,” the Texas-based Tea Party inspired group, has launched an aggressive national effort to root out vote fraud, providing  training videos and  computer software (that contain data on property records and death indexes) to help volunteers identify ineligible voters who show up at the polls on Tuesday.

    Hans Von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commissioner who serves as one of the group’s advisers, defends the effort, telling NBC News that in a close election “any bogus vote” needs to be stopped. “Anytime you have a close election, a small amount of fraud could make the difference.”

    But voting rights groups say “True the Vote” and its affiliates threaten to intimidate legitimate voters -- a prospect they aim to combat with their own battalions of citizen poll watchers on Tuesday.

    Judith Browne Dianas, co-director of the “Advancement Project,” a civil rights group, says her organization has lined up thousands of lawyers and poll watchers in 20 key states to look for “suspicious activity” by True the Vote and its affiliates. “We will also be watching the poll watchers making sure they aren’t acting as bullies,” she says.