Want to make voting easier? Here are six ways to do it


Want to make voting easier? Here are six ways to do it

jsonline.com December 19, 2018

When they passed limits on early voting in the recent lame duck session, Republican legislators and Gov. Scott Walker claimed it was a matter of simple fairness: Every community should operate under the same two-week limit, they argued.

Buf fair or not, these new rules may limit the number of people who vote, especially in the state’s population centers. Milwaukee and Madison offered six weeks of pre-election day voting this fall, and the number of early voters surged.

Neil Albrecht, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission, believes the new restrictions, which are being challenged in court, will have a greater impact on the city’s poor and marginalized.

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“The loss of voting opportunities, like extended early voting, will have a much greater impact on communities of color than other city residents,” he wrote in an email. In a 2016 decision, a federal judge concluded an earlier limit imposed on early voting in the state did just that.

There also could be longer lines at the polls. After the Florida legislature cut early voting days in 2012, an Orlando Sentinel investigation revealed that more than 200,000 people gave up in frustration because of long lines attributed to curtailing early voting, a complicated ballot and heavy turnout in that year’s presidential election.

What if instead of looking for ways to limit voting, lawmakers at all levels of government did everything possible to make voting easier? What would that look like?

Here are six ways lawmakers could promote this most basic of American rights.

Allow automatic registration
Universal registration of all eligible Americans would add 50 million new voters to the rolls and improve accuracy and security of elections, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University argues.

Here’s how it works:

When eligible votes give information to state agencies (such as the Department of Motor Vehicles), they are automatically signed up to vote unless they ask not to be. That information is then transferred electronically to election officials. Citizens remain registered even if they move within their state, and online registration is allowed. Voters can still register or update their information at their polling places.

Fifteen states (including Illinois and Michigan) and the District of Columbia have adopted this approach. California and Oregon were the first to do so, and the results so far have been encouraging. New registration quadrupled initially in Oregon after that state allowed voters to register through the DMV beginning in early 2016; overall the state's registration rate climbed10 percentage points. In the 2016 election, almost 100,000 of votes cast were by people who registered automatically.


Poll worker Dawn-Marie Metz, checks voters identification at the Hart Park Senior Center in Wauwatosa. Voter ID was required for all those wanting to vote. Citizens cast their vote for the midterm election.
Photo by: (Photo: Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Stop restricting the vote
For years, politicians on the political right, have claimed that voter fraud is such a problem that it needed to be stamped out through tough voter ID laws.

In truth, there has been a microscopically small amount of fraud.

President Donald Trump could provide no evidence for his dubious claim that “millions” voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. And his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity could find no evidence of widespread fraud. Trump disbanded the commission earlier this year before it could issue a final report. A comprehensive 2007 study by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, found it is more likely that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

Voter ID laws have been found to disproportionately affect people of color and the elderly, but their impact on turnout is less clear. In his 2017 analysis of a group of studies, researcher Benjamin Highton found that only “a small number of studies have employed suitable research designs and generally find modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws.”

But Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, believes strict voter ID laws like Wisconsin’s (which she termed an “outlier”) do tamp down voting.

There is little doubt about what politicians think. Republicans tend to support the laws. Democrats resist them.

Another concern is aggressive purging of voter rolls, particularly in the wake of a June Supreme Court decision upholding Ohio’s purge. The arguments are similar to those posed regarding voter ID: Republicans claim widespread fraud and say purges are a solution. Democrats say Republicans want to suppress the vote.

Again: The evidence shows there is almost zero voter fraud of any kind.

Make Election Day a national holiday or move it to the weekend
Although turnout during the recent midterm elections was higher than normal in Wisconsin, that’s not always the case. In fact, nationwide, the U.S. has some of the lowest voter turnout in the industrialized world. So why not follow the lead of other modern democracies and make Election Day a holiday or move it to a weekend so that people aren’t forced to squeeze voting into their busy work-week schedules?


Vice President Al Gore talks with reporters outside of his residence at the United States Naval Observatory Nov. 28, 2000, amid an ongoing recount of votes in Florida. The U.S. Supreme Court would eventually halt that recount, handing the election to George W. Bush.
Photo by: (Photo: RICK BOWMER, Associated Press)
The National Commission on Election Reform, formed in the wake of the divisive 2000 presidential election, recommended this idea to President George W. Bush who had just defeated Sen. Al Gore after the U.S. Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, handing the election to Bush. The recommendations of the commission, chaired by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, were heartily endorsed by Bush but then abandoned by Congress.

We’ve been voting on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November since it became the law of the land in 1845. The idea then was to help a nation of farmers get to the polls without interfering with either the Sabbath on Sunday or market day, which was traditionally on Wednesdays.

But would making Election Day a national holiday or moving it to the weekend make a difference in turnout? The evidence isn’t clear. A 2012 Government Accountability Office report predicted little effect on turnout. Nations that allow weekend voting do tend to have higher turnout than the U.S., but it’s not necessarily because of weekend voting.

Weiser isn’t a fan. She’d rather see extended hours for early voting, including weekends.

“The flexibility of early voting provides for a range of different life experiences,” she said. “I think it accomplishes the same goal.” She also favors requiring companies to give workers time off to vote.

Make it easier for people convicted of crimes to vote after serving their sentences
In Wisconsin, voting rights are not restored for felons until the sentence is completed — including prison, extended supervision, probation and parole. Other states restore voting rights earlier in the process. In Michigan, for example, people can vote immediately upon release from prison.

Make sure that all polling places have enough poll workers and voting machines
If polling places don’t have enough resources, lines build and people give up, said Jonathan Brater, counsel for Brennan's Democracy Program. This problem tends to occur more often in poorer communities, often communities of color, Weiser said.

Another concern Weiser raised: making sure that election materials are available in the predominant language spoken in a precinct. Based on research she has seen, “It’s one of the single greatest contributors to the increased likelihood of voting."

Take registration to the people
The Milwaukee Election Commission opened voter registration kiosks around town including at Milwaukee Public Library branches and Milwaukee Health Department clinics. It also included registration information in water bills and provided materials to nonpartisan groups such as Safe & Sound and put materials in brochure racks at businesses and nonprofits. The commission also participated in roundtables with nonpartisan groups working to get out the vote.

The result?

“We believe these largely registration-related outreach efforts increased voter participation but also reduced same-day registration,” Albrecht said. He said city voting increased from 208,415 in the 2014 midterms to 216,545 this year and same-day registration fell from 41,389 to 39,758.

David D. Haynes is editor of the Journal Sentinel's Ideas Lab, which examines best practices for solving the region's problems. He has nearly 40 years' experience as a reporter and editor including 25 years at the Journal Sentinel in a variety of roles. He has a special interest in economic development in the region and the role that private-public partnerships can play to solve social problems. Email: david.haynes@jrn.com. Twitter: @DavidDHaynes

How I reported this story
Interviewed:

Wendy Weiser, director, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Jonathan Brater, counsel, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Neil Albrecht, executive director, City of Milwaukee Election Commission (via email).

Reviewed:

"The Truth About Voter Fraud," 2007, Justin Levitt

"One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections," 2017.

"Voter Fraud is Not a Persistent Problem," 2016.

"To Assure Pride and Confidence in the Electoral Process" by the National Commission on Election Reform, 2001.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/columnists/david-haynes/2018/12/19/want-make-voting-easier-here-six-ways-do/2343486002/

Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics

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Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics

by Scott Shane and Alan Blinder, nytimes.com, 12-9-18

An Alabama resident waved to passing cars while holding a Doug Jones sign outside the candidates’ headquarters last year.

As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.

The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore. But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.

One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

Mr. Morgan said in an interview that the Russian botnet ruse “does not ring a bell,” adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report. He said he saw the project as “a small experiment” designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election.

Mr. Morgan said he could not account for the claims in the report that the project sought to “enrage and energize Democrats” and “depress turnout” among Republicans, partly by emphasizing accusations that Mr. Moore had pursued teenage girls when he was a prosecutor in his 30s.

“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kind of campaigns operated,” said Mr. Morgan. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have almost no impact.”

The project had a budget of just $100,000, in a race that cost approximately $51 million, including the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission records.

But however modest, the influence effort in Alabama may be a sign of things to come. Campaign veterans in both parties fear the Russian example may set off a race to the bottom, in which candidates choose social media manipulation because they fear their opponents will.

“Some will do whatever it takes to win,” said Dan Bayens, a Kentucky-based Republican consultant. “You’ve got Russia, which showed folks how to do it, you’ve got consultants willing to engage in this type of behavior and political leaders who apparently find it futile to stop it.”

There is no evidence that Mr. Jones sanctioned or was even aware of the social media project. Joe Trippi, a seasoned Democratic operative who served as a top adviser to the Jones campaign, said he had noticed the Russian bot swarm suddenly following Mr. Moore on Twitter. But he said it was impossible that a $100,000 operation had an impact on the race.

Mr. Trippi said he was nonetheless disturbed by the stealth operation. “I think the big danger is somebody in this cycle uses the dark arts of bots and social networks and it works,” he said. “Then we’re in real trouble.”

Despite its small size, the Alabama project brought together some prominent names in the world of political technology. The funding came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has sought to help Democrats catch up with Republicans in their use of online technology.

The money passed through American Engagement Technologies, run by Mikey Dickerson, the founding director of the United States Digital Service, which was created during the Obama administration to try to upgrade the federal government’s use of technology. Sara K. Hudson, a former Justice Department fellow now with Investing in Us, a tech finance company partly funded by Mr. Hoffman, worked on the project, along with Mr. Morgan.

A close collaborator of Mr. Hoffman, Dmitri Mehlhorn, the founder of Investing in Us, said in a statement that “our purpose in investing in politics and civic engagement is to strengthen American democracy” and that while they do not “micromanage” the projects they fund, they are not aware of having financed projects that have used deception. Mr. Dickerson declined to comment and Ms. Hudson did not respond to queries.

The Alabama project got started as Democrats were coming to grips with the Russians’ weaponizing of social media to undermine the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and promote Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Morgan reached out at the time to Renée DiResta, who would later join New Knowledge and was lead author of the report on Russian social media operations released this week.

“I know there were people who believed the Democrats needed to fight fire with fire,” Ms. DiResta said, adding that she disagreed. “It was absolutely chatter going around the party.”

But she said Mr. Morgan simply asked her for suggestions of online tactics worth testing. “My understanding was that they were going to investigate to what extent they could grow audiences for Facebook pages using sensational news,” she said.

Mr. Morgan confirmed that the project created a generic page to draw conservative Alabamians — he said he couldn’t remember its name — and that Mac Watson, one of multiple write-in candidates, contacted the page. “But we didn’t do anything on his behalf,” he said.

The report, however, says the Facebook page agreed to “boost” Mr. Watson’s campaign and stayed in regular touch with him, and was “treated as an advisor and the go-to media contact for the write-in candidate.’’ The report claims the page got him interviews with The Montgomery Advertiser and The Washington Post.

Mr. Watson, who runs a patio supply company in Auburn, Ala., confirmed that he got some assistance from a Facebook page whose operators seemed determined to stay in the shadows.

Of dozens of conservative Alabamian-oriented pages on Facebook that he wrote to, only one replied. “You are in a particularly interesting position and from what we have read of your politics, we would be inclined to endorse you,” the unnamed operator of the page wrote. After Mr. Watson answered a single question about abortion rights as a sort of test, the page offered an endorsement, though no money.

“They never spent one red dime as far as I know on anything I did — they just kind of told their 400 followers, ‘Hey, vote for this guy,’” Mr. Watson said.

Mr. Watson never spoke with the page’s author or authors by phone, and they declined a request for meeting. But he did notice something unusual: his Twitter followers suddenly ballooned from about 100 to about 10,000. The Facebook page’s operators asked Mr. Watson whether he trusted anyone to set up a super PAC that could receive funding and offered advice on how to sharpen his appeal to disenchanted Republican voters.

Shortly before the election, the page sent him a message, wishing him luck.

The report does not say whether the project purchased the Russian bot Twitter accounts that suddenly began to follow Mr. Moore. But it takes credit for “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal” and points to stories on the phenomenon in the mainstream media. “Roy Moore flooded with fake Russian Twitter followers,” reported The New York Post.

Inside the Moore campaign, officials began to worry about online interference.

“We did have suspicions that something odd was going on,” said Rich Hobson, Mr. Moore’s campaign manager. Mr. Hobson said that although he did not recall any hard evidence of interference, the campaign complained to Facebook about potential chicanery.

“Any and all of these things could make a difference,” Mr. Hobson said. “It’s definitely frustrating, and we still kick ourselves that Judge Moore didn’t win.”

When Election Day came, Mr. Jones became the first Alabama Democrat elected to the Senate in a quarter of a century, defeating Mr. Moore by 21,924 votes in a race that drew more than 22,800 write-in votes. More than 1.3 million ballots were cast over all.

Many of the write-in votes went to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Condoleezza Rice — an Alabama native and former secretary of state — certain popular football coaches and Jesus Christ. Mr. Watson drew just a few hundred votes.

Mr. Watson noticed one other oddity. The day after the vote, the Facebook page that had taken such an interest in him had vanished.

“It was a group that, like, honest to God, next day was gone,” said Mr. Watson.

“It was weird,” he said. “The whole thing was weird.”

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