Task force seeks earlier primary in presidential years
By Alison Hawkes, For the Herald-Standard
04/22/2005
    
HARRISBURG - The state's primary election should be moved from May to early March in presidential years to give Pennsylvania greater weight in national elections, according to a task force convened by Gov. Ed Rendell to broadly review the state's election law.

The task force also recommends that the state allow voters to file absentee ballots for any reason whatsoever by fax or electronically. And state lawmakers should look into whether electronic and other voting machines need a paper trail to prevent election fraud or glitches from erroneously influencing the outcome of elections, the task force concluded.

But the group backed away from any changes to the winner-take-all Electoral College system for presidential elections, and it also ruled out allowing people to register to vote on Election Day. The task force was almost split down the middle on those two issues.

The group settled on its final recommendations Thursday. A formal report will go to the governor and lawmakers May 12.

"Some of the recommendations are drastic on the way things should be done. Others give further clarification, and others we decided are issues that don't need much change," Secretary of State Pedro Cortes said at the close of what was the last meeting of the 13-member group. "This comes from [the governor's] strong belief and commitment to not only making the process fair, but in a way that invites greater participation by voters."

The group included Cortes, public advocacy organizations, election officials, former judges and one lawmaker appointed by House Republicans, Rep. Gene DiGirolamo (R-Bucks). They met for three months to comb through all sorts of suggestions on changing how Pennsylvania votes, in light of the national acrimony over hair-splittingly close elections and this state's own trouble spots in 2004.

Pennsylvania had seven of the 50 counties nationwide with the highest number of voter complaints in the 2004 November election, according to a tally by NBC News and the public advocacy group Common Cause, which also participated in the task force. Allegheny County ranked number one in the nation (5,976 complaints), followed further down in the tally by more than 1,000 complaints each in Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, Westmoreland and Chester.

Further details on the complaints were not available since Common Cause hasn't analyzed all the data from calls to the 800-MYVOTE1 hotline.

"This is a very timely event of this task force," said Pennsylvania Common Cause Executive Director Barry Kauffman.

Cortes said the November election was fair and problems stemmed mainly from the stress imposed by record-breaking turnout and the use of provisional ballots for the first time, which allows a voter whose name doesn't appear on the voting roster to submit a paper vote to be checked and tallied later by election officials.

Still, the task force called for no major changes to provisional ballots. Instead, it focused largely on overhauling absentee voting, in particular to prevent a repeat of last year's uproar when absentee ballots going overseas to the military were mailed out with the name of presidential contender Ralph Nader, before the courts removed his name from the ballot.

The task force recommended that Pennsylvania courts must decide cases involving ballot nominations no later than one week before the date when absentee ballots must be sent overseas.

DiGirolamo said he thinks that one, and other "common sense" suggestions will get a lot of support from the Legislature. The recommendation to move the primary date forward will also be heavily debated, he predicted: "That's the one issue I think will come to the forefront."

Supporters say an earlier primary will make Pennsylvania more relevant in a presidential election. Detractors, namely election officials, are worried about having enough time between the November election and early March to prepare, DiGirolamo said.

By January 2006, Pennsylvania counties must implement key provisions of the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), including upgrading voting machines and replacing lever and punch-card machines with electronic technology. That change concerns Kauffman and others, who believe that without paper ballots verifying electronic votes, elections could be open to fraud or undetected glitches.

It was an issue that the task force didn't have time to fully review, so they punted it on to lawmakers, Kauffman said.

"I'm disappointed," he said, noting problems with electronic voting in other states. "With the deadlines coming up on HAVA, with tens of millions of dollars coming from the feds for voting machines ... we're aware of more and more problems,"

Pennsylvania barred Greene, Beaver and Mercer counties earlier this month from using UniLect Patriot electronic voting machines because they apparently contributed to an undercount in the November election. On Friday, state officials will decide whether to re-certify the machines for use in the spring primary.