November 4-10, 2004

city beat

Party Lines

con trackers: Ken Smukler (left) and Harry Cook man the phones at the Constitution Center. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Yeah, Bush sucks. But at least this time, we have a record of polling place shenanigans.

by Mike Newall

It's over. Dubya won. But how'd he pull it off exactly? Was it a clean victory? Or did shenanigans, mess-ups and mechanical glitches put him over the top? Well, the National Constitution Center may have the answers.

On Election Day, the Constitution Center hosted MYVOTE1, a new national voter resource hotline that fielded nearly 90,000 phone calls from disgruntled voters across the country on Tuesday. Unlike past election hotlines, each individual call was recorded and filed into a databank.

"This has never been done before," says Christopher Patusky, executive director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a co-sponsor of the project. "The beauty and genius of this idea is how obvious it is."

counting votes: A polling-place worker at the library at 52nd and Chestnut streets keeps a watchful eye on the booths. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

The hotline was co-sponsored by the Pennsylvania based InfoVoter Technologies, NBC News, the Fels Institute and a handful of other election watchdog groups. For a week prior to Tuesday's election, NBC News had been advertising the number on local and national affiliates. Thousands of callers inquired about polling locations, absentee ballots or yet-to-arrive voter-registration cards days before the polls even opened.

Upon reaching the hotline's automated system a caller would record a complaint and, after dialing their zip codes, be transferred to their local election officials.

From 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday, about 50 student volunteers manned computers set up in the Citizens' Café wing of the Constitution Center, overlooking Independence Mall. There, they logged complaints into an immediately accessible data bank, allowing analysts to track developing voting irregularities in real time.

Press briefings were held by the hour. By noon, the hotline was averaging roughly 5,000 calls an hour and had already discovered severe voter registration problems in Allegheny County.

"Many never received their voter registration cards," said Ken Smukler, president of InfoVoter Technologies, at the 1 p.m. briefing. "They don't know where to vote or even if they can."

Smukler said that Pennsylvania callers reported widespread problems with registration, perhaps due to the fact that, although mandated by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, Pennsylvania has yet to implement a uniform statewide voter-registration system.

MSNBC, which broadcasted live from the Constitution Center and coordinated their election coverage around incoming complaints, immediately sent reporting teams to Allegheny County and other parts of Pennsylvania experiencing voter-registration difficulties. Polls in the problem areas were eventually kept open past usual closing time to deal with the issues.

"This is an excellent reporting tool for us," said Jeff Gralnick, an executive producer at NBC News and someone who has been covering elections since 1960. "If this system existed in 2000, the hanging chads, the butterfly ballots, the whole situation in Florida would have been known and handled way earlier in the game."

But as successful as the hotline was in drawing Election Day attention to voting trouble spots, the Fels Institute's Patusky says the hotline's data bank will be just as vital in the long run.

"In 2000, everyone tried go back after the fact and recreate what went wrong. But there was no record," he says. "Now, we have a contemporaneous body of evidence of what happened on Election Day. We'll be able to use this information to find out which voter machines are a problem, which registration systems don't work, whether or not minority districts faced a disproportionate amount of problems. It will help us better reform our electoral process."

MYVOTE1 released a set of initial findings the morning after the election.

By the end of the day, 6,076 calls would come from Allegheny County, more than any other county in the nation. Philadelphia County was fifth with nearly 4,000 calls. The hotline recived no phone calls concerning Matt Drudge's early morning Election Day report about Republican poll-watchers in South Philadelphia finding nearly 2,000 votes being planted on voting machines. (City officials quickly issued a press release stating that the allegations had no merit.)

As a state, Pennsylvania ranked second only to New York with over 22,000 total calls. The top complaints in Pennsylvania and across the nation dealt with absentee ballots, registration problems and polling access.

Ohio registered 4 percent of the hotline's total calls. Ohio callers complained of feeling threatened or coerced at the polls more than other states. According to Patusky, the claims of coercion were not high enough to change the ultimate outcome in Ohio.

"The main problem in Ohio, as it was in Pennsylvania and across the country, seemed to be shortcoming in the registration process," he says. "They can't be corrected for yesterday's election but they can be corrected for future elections."

The University of Pennsylvania will lead a more comprehensive study of the hotline's data bank to be completed in the next few months.

Richard Stengel, president and CEO of the Constitution Center, envisions setting up a permanent archive at the center where visitors could access the findings of this year's study and any future studies conducted by MYVOTE1. "It would be an invaulable resource," he says. "For visitors, for students, for anyone."