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Election Returns Story in the Daily News
Submitted by Dan U-A on Thu, 07/03/2008 - 8:01am.
Our effort to bring the City Commissioners into the 21st Century has hit the Daily News:
Philadelphia taxpayers have spent $20 million over the last five years to upgrade the city's voting machinery, permitting a rapid, computerized vote count on election night.
But the general public has little to show for it.
On election night, there's no public access to the vote count. News organizations pay hundreds of dollars to the city to see voting returns on a password-protected Internet site. But dozens of political VIPs get election-night access for free.
The three city commissioners, in charge of the city election machinery, have been providing free Internet passwords to a group of public officials, political-party bigwigs and others with the right connections.
On the night of the April 22 primary election, they got to see unofficial, ward-by-ward returns - information that the city commissioners still have not posted on their public Web site, more than two months after the election.
State Sen. Vincent Fumo got 10 free passwords - at least twice as many as he needed, according to his office. Councilman Jim Kenney got five and attorney Kevin Greenberg, who represents the commissioners in a federal voting-rights case, got six.
John Dougherty, the electricians union leader who ran to replace Fumo in the Senate, got one free password, and the union's political director, Bobby Henon, got two.
And the Commissioners tell us, that jeez, its hard to put these things online:
"It's not as easy as it sounds," said Deputy City Commissioner Renee Tartaglione, daughter of commissioners' chairwoman, Margaret Tartaglione.
She said that the city's vote-counting equipment, manufactured by Danaher Controls, allows Internet access to no more than 150 people at once, requiring the city to limit the number of passwords it provides.
"That's a really, really goofy excuse," replied Urevick-Ackelsberg. "You could pay a [tech-savvy] kid $12 an hour to come up with a fix to that limit, just taking those results and spitting them out onto a public Web site."
150 passwords. Ten Passwords for Fumo, none for you... That is the thing: Not only is it a goofy excuse, it sort of misses the point. Because if you are looking for a section of law that says 'ol Vince and Co. should have super duper special access to our elections, keep looking, because it doesn't exist.
As the article notes, Jim Kenney has a bunch of those passwords, too. To his credit, Jim has been the only person in office to try and help us. I sent my first request to a million different politicians, and most people didn't bother to respond. He did, within a day. His office talked to Marge and Co., and found out about the magical 150 number. And he offered to get us whatever numbers we needed. While his offer of help was most appreciated, seeing election returns really should not have to fall under a constituent service.
We will have more later today, including the letter the Commissioner's Office sent me (where they would not even tell me how much they charge), and the magical list of passwords they gave out. We will also have a way that anyone who is interested in this can help force their hand. In fact, members of Philly for Change started that process just last night.
Nutter Ain't Lying
By the way, in case anyone wanted to know, according to the list, every Mayoral candidate had a password, except for Michael Nutter. Whether that is from not being given one, being refused, not asking, whatever, it is the truth.
In any case, we will have a bunch more updates soon, including that magical list of people with passwords.
Keep up the good work
This really is the core of the issue:
While I don't know for certain about what a 12 year old can accomplish in a day, I am pretty certain the amounts that various news sources have been charged individually for passwords that time out in a day they likely could have funded upgrading the computer system dozens of times over in just the last two years alone. Which leads in turn to the question of where the money goes to if it doesn't end up in the official budget for the Commissioner's office or in the city's general revenue. Where does it go?
And of course the obvious issue that if people considering running for office (as opposed to people who are already incumbents and party insiders) are forced to go pick up paper results in person then its possible to keep closer tabs on who's considering running. It also makes it much harder for outside groups to double check individual polling places results against the official results for potential fraud.
And of course I urge everyone to write in requesting your own password (and explanation for the undemocratic policy) as many of us at PFC did last night.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Love the "goofy" quote:
I'm hoping next time you make the DN, you can slip in calling someone a "card."
Nice work
Keep digging and pushing. Maybe someone in our shop will want to push this story too. As I learned from a sage at the Daily News, just because a story has been told already, doesn't mean you don't keep telling it until something changes.
I also agree with your point about this not being a constituent service. This is just one of HUNDREDS of things that shouldn't be a constituent service. Hopefully the services that are controlled directly by the mayor will no longer depend on councilmanic intervention.
Finally, while the mayor's office is technically correct regarding their official relationship to the City Commissioner's office and while we don't know what he's been doing behind the scenes to rectify the situation, the "they are independently elected therefore no authority over them" excuse just rubs me the wrong way for some reason. It's an excuse that mayor's have used for years whenever they are confronted with problems at the DA's Office, the BRT, the Fairmount Park Commission, SEPTA, etc. Thanks for the lesson in the flow chart of government authority. What we really want to know is that the mayor is on top of all of this with whatever "soft power" he can muster.
I will say
The tidbit of Nutter being the only mayoral candidate not to have a password seems to tell a story unto itself about how "business" is conducted in local elections in this town.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Grumble, grumble
Three possible scenarios for the number "150":
1. The Election Commission asked for the number to be limited so that they could control the flow of info. How do they expect anyone who knows anything about the net or databases to believe that there is some structural reason in the architecture of the system that limits it to 150 web users? If so, I can only believe that they asked for the number to be limited. If so, the citizens certainly paid for that, because it's harder to close info off than to make it open. Your tax dollars at work.
2. The Election Commission has no idea what it's doing. Maybe it really does, somehow, have a structural limit of 150. If that's the case, we dropped $20 mill on a crappy, crappy system and the commission didn't know enough about this whole Internet thing to manage the purchase of the contract.
3. Commission staff are making the number up.
The information should be posted on-line, in its entirety, as soon as its been validated. That should happen with 24 to 48 hours of the count ending, I would think. Easily. If they want to keep their system closed then, fine...
like Dan said,
Suck the data out and put it up in a different format.
---
This Too Will Pass, for the guts in your cerebrum.
School District posts 260+ budgets online within a week
We were successful in getting the School District to post online the individual budgets of every single school in the city - 260+ - within a week of distribution to school principals. It was the best way for parents to access information. If the District can do it, then the Election Commission has no excuse. Great work Dan, PFC and YPP!
for what it's worth
for what it's worth, they said that the limit is in having 150 users *at once*, which might actually be a weak way of describing bandwidth issues, rather than the total number of users that the system can have. perhaps they could thus constrain the logins on election night (when demand would be much higher) but then give out a public password for viewing the eventual finalized totals (even without involving a 12-year-old).
who knows. this is a crazy town at times.
keep up the good fight, Dan!
acm
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead
So how do Absentee Ballots get counted/reported?
Dan,
I'm so glad to hear that an "ordinary" person will have access to these results! (Although you're not ordinary by any stretch of the imagination to have accomplished this!)
So when you do see the live results, maybe you can answer I question I've always had, but never trusted the answer to: Do Absentee Ballots really get counted, or only if someone demands a re-count? I'll bet they don't show up on the "live" results, even though any official that you ask always says that they are definitely counted.
Keep up the good work!
Its been my understanding
that Absentee ballots and provisional ballots get counted regardless but that in races that aren't close noone really questions whether they were correctly filled out, etc. if its not a closely challenged election. But when the election is close enough for absentee ballots or provisional ballots to tip the election then either side will challenge questionable ballots so a lot more will get tossed out in the process. Its the process of challenging that stretches on for weeks, not that they don't count them under normal election condiditons. Basically a lot of potentially questionabale absentee and provisional ballots are given the "benefit of the doubt" on elections that are not close enough to make a difference.
This came up in the very, very close city council run off between Jack Kelly and David Oh BTW. Team Oh questioned specifically some absentee ballots filled out by some residents in a home for elderly vets who quite possibly were not capable of filling out the ballots themselves. In fact they found a few of the vets that claimed that they never voted for anyone, that someone else must have voted for them. The counter explanation was that someone who supported Jack Kelly had gotten the vets to fill out the ballots but that the vets were simply too senile to remember if they had voted or not a mere few weeks earlier - which was hardly the most reassuring explanation. In other words - no illegal vote fraud just badgering of mentally incompetent war vets by political operatives.
The absentee ballots from this one vet's home still would not have tipped the election one way or the other on their own but because it was such a close election it came under closer scrutiny, indicating that perhaps some of these same seniors had been "voting" in several previous elections also.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.