Nutter panel: Voting problems could have been avoided
The Nutter administration weighed in Wednesday with an analysis of last November's election problems, saying better management by the city commissioners would have reduced confusion and likely spared some voters from having to use provisional paper ballots.
The Nutter administration weighed in Wednesday with an analysis of last November's election problems, saying better management by the city commissioners would have reduced confusion and likely spared some voters from having to use provisional paper ballots.
While its numbers varied from earlier studies by the City Controller's Office and the city commissioners themselves, the broad conclusions were similar.
A record 27,000 people who showed up at the polls were not allowed to vote on machines because their names could not be found on registered-voter lists. In more than half those cases, the voters went to the wrong polling places or were not legally registered to vote.
Smaller but significant problems added to the provisional-ballot totals. A still-unexplained glitch in the state's voter-registration system left close to 5,000 late-registering voters off the supplemental lists that were distributed to polling places, and more than 600 voters who turned 18 in 2012 were left off the lists because someone forgot to run a computer program to recognize they had reached voting age.
Several thousand voters had to fill out provisional ballots when polling-place workers were apparently unable to find their names in poll books or supplemental lists, probably because they looked in the wrong place.
The mayor's fact-finding panel, led by Managing Director Richard Negrin, concluded that the three city commissioners, elected every four years to run city elections, could have alleviated some of the problems through "better managing of time, resources, and personnel."
It criticized the training materials for the city's 6,500 poll workers, and suggested that better management would reduce perennial backlogs in processing new voter registrations, typically turned in by the thousands in a deluge at the end of the voter-registration period.
"We don't think this is a resource problem," said panel member Terry Gillen, citing a comparison of election costs that had Philadelphia, with 1.03 million registered voters, spending more than $8 million on its election, compared with Allegheny County, with 924,000 registered voters, spending $5 million and Montgomery County, with 554,000 voters, spending $2 million.
Timothy Dowling, a civil service employee who supervises Philadelphia's new-voter registrations, said resources were a significant problem last year, when a Commonwealth Court judge ordered 20 staff members to drop their voter-registration work and spend two weeks helping examine signatures in a statewide ballot dispute.
"That two-week period crushed us, but we were under a court order," Dowling said. "Does the mayor expect us to ignore a court order?"
The three elected commissioners - Anthony Clark, Al Schmidt, and Stephanie Singer - declined to cooperate with the administration's study, complaining that they had not been consulted on its scope or methodology.
Singer said Wednesday that she welcomed anyone's suggestions for improvement but thought the framework of the administration report was "blatantly political." Schmidt said the commissioners had already implemented some of its recommendations in advance of the May primary election, including improved training materials for poll workers and a process to check the accuracy of poll books.
