Election workers sue over computer system

Published in the Asbury Park Press 11/11/04
By KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER

A group of county election officials in New Jersey are suing their state counterparts to block a centralized state voter registration computer system, which the county officials contend would illegally strip them of duties while risking statewide breakdowns and delays.

"We're not opposed to the statewide registration system. We support that," said Robert F. Giles, an executive supervisor with the Ocean County Board of Elections. "But what they're doing is taking the functionality of our offices out of the counties, and concentrating it at the state level."

State officials say a new registration system and centralized computer server will be the best way to ensure "an accurate, up-to-date and secure" voter registry as required by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act, said Lee Moore, a spokesman for the state Department of Law and Public Safety.

"This issue comes to a difference of opinion as to how the data should be handled," Moore said. "All the computer experts we have consulted have said the way we've written the RFP (request for proposals from computer contractors) and crafted the technical specifications is the best way to ensure the security of voter registrations."

In a lawsuit filed Oct. 25 in Superior Court in Mercer County, the New Jersey Association of Election Officials claims the planned registration system "violates numerous New Jersey statutes regulating voter registration and maintenance of voter records," and intrudes on the legislative authority already granted for many years to county election boards and supervisors.

State and county election officials had been discussing how to implement the Help America Vote Act, federal legislation that called for voting reforms in the wake of the 2000 balloting difficulties in Florida. With that law, Congress directed states to develop plans for central registration.

It's the outcome of that issue that has divided state and county officials, Giles said: "This part of the process has fallen on deaf ears."

In its invitation to bidders, state officials say they prefer to see registrations handled through a computer server in the United States, Giles said.

"But if it's in California, and it goes down, and I have to wait a day for a tech (technician) out there to take care of it . . . it boggles the mind," Giles said. "Let them be linked to the 21 servers in the counties by a T1 line."

A breakdown of a single state server would be critical in the days before an election, when county boards are scrambling to finalize voter rolls and get registration books printed for poll workers to use, he said.

Moore said the state's computer advisers have raised another issue: that a new system would function better with a single set of standards, rather than relying on servers each county has acquired by its own means over the years.

The dispute comes amid national debate over the use of touch-screen and electronic voting equipment, a trend encouraged by the Help America Vote Act but questioned by activists who contend voting systems lack adequate safeguards against breakdown or hacker sabotage.

Before the Nov. 2 election, some New Jersey activists went to court, in an unsuccessful attempt to force the use of more paper-record backups in counties using electronic machines.

But Frank Askin, a Rutgers University law professor and director of the university's Constitutional Law Clinic that assisted those activists, said there's good arguments in favor of a central state voter computer list.

"Eventually, I think it's important that the state take over voter registry," Askin said. "Once you have a centralized administration, it will be much easier to get provisional ballots," the paper forms used by voters who for various reasons are not listed in polling place registers, he said.

"One of the biggest disenfranchisements is when people move from county to county, and then find they can't vote because they haven't changed their registration," Askin said.