For Law Day, elections expert tells NALS about challenges voters face

 By Cynthia Price?
Legal News

Michigan, formerly a leader in election policy, seems now to be resting on its laurels and has fallen behind, according to Sharon Dolente of the Michigan Election Coalition (MEC). 


Dolente was speaking at the Law Day Luncheon sponsored by NALS, “the association for legal professionals,” of West Michigan, last Thursday. It took place about a week later than the official May 1 Law Day, but Dolente remained true to the nationally-declared theme, “American Democracy and the Rule of Law: Why Every Vote Matters.”


Coincidentally, the Law Day speaker for the Grand Rapids Bar Association luncheon, Jocelyn Benson, is an active MEC member through her Wayne State University Michigan Center for Election Law, and in 2012 released a report about the primary elections jointly with MEC.


Though Dolente is a full-time Director, the MEC is exactly what it says it is, a coalition. A sampling of member organizations includes, in addition to the above: ACLU of Michigan, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Engage Michigan, Grand Rapids PROACTIVE, Lawyers’ Committee for Citizens Rights Under the Law, League of Women Voters Michigan, Michigan Campaign Finance Network, Michigan Election Reform Alliance, Project Vote, Publius, and the Sierra Club.

 The MEC’s goal is to improve election administration and increase access to voting through voter education, voter protection, research and analysis, advocacy, and even occasionally litigation. The coalition, taking its cue from these objectives, also addresses money in politics and redistricting reform.

 But the main goal of the coalition itself is to give all these wonderful active partners a chance to interact with each other. According to Dolente in a later interview, “The idea is to bring together people who already do this work, so they can think strategically about how to align what they do.”

 Though MEC currently has no website of its own, Dolente — who started as director in January of this year — says that is coming soon.

 An attorney, Dolente says the path to her current position was fairly straightforward. “I had done this work on election cycles, on campaign cycles, because the biggest elections and therefore the biggest problems happen every four years. But I realized that we weren’t going to solve those problems if I was only working on it one year out of every four. We need to ensure that the system is working every year, not just election years.”

 After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in women’s studies, and receiving her J.D./MPP in Law and Public Policy from the University of Michigan Law School, Dolente practiced law at Gurewitz and Raven and the Law Office of Deborah L. Gordons, as a litigator.

 But her passion for voting equity led her to be the Voter Protection Director for Organizing for America - Michigan in 2012; she was then a Fellows’ Experience Manager at Wayne State University immediately before her current position.

 Dolente told the audience of approximately 30 at the NALS luncheon that Michigan used to be a model for other states in terms of election innovation. “We have this awesome history,” she said. “We were the Motor Voter state before the Feds adopted it as the ideal, we were the poster child for it.” She explained that this refers to the ability to register to vote at the same time as getting a driver’s license. “We also were innovative in our Qualified Voter File, the voter registration database, being consolidated statewide. We had that well before other states. But unfortunately that was over two decades ago.”


The results? If measured in terms of voter wait times, Michigan ranked 44th in the nation in 2012, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts report. Though the average wait was 22 minutes, that wait reflects that some people did not have to wait in line at all, while others waited many hours.

 Anecdotal evidence indicates that urban voters have the longest waits, as much as four or five hours, and preliminary analysis of a survey by the MEC seems to back that up. The coalition will release all of the data from a post-election survey soon, but one of the main questions MEC seeks to resolve with those data is whether long wait times actually made people give up without voting.

 Surveys and research are not the only ways MEC addresses problems with the election systems. When the Michigan legislature proposed a bill that required voters to reaffirm their citizenship at the time of voting (even though voters already have to declare they are citizens at the time of voting), MEC organized members to speak in Lansing against such legislation.

 That bill passed, and Gov. Snyder vetoed it. Then Secretary of State Ruth Johnson put a “citizenship check box” on the ballot anyway, contending that it was under her jurisdiction to compose the ballot. MEC joined a host of others who successfully sued to have the check box removed.

 At the luncheon, Dolente expressed her opinion about why all of this matters. “Any voting system that makes it extraordinarily difficult for some members of society to cast their ballot is undemocratic,” she stated. “Such a system undermines the goal of an engaged citizenry, and dampens participation in the political process, which skews public policy to undemocratic results. The value of each person’s vote is not equal if some voters have to wait hours to cast their ballots, or are prevented from voting totally. The vote may not reflect the will of all the people.”

Though a recent report from the Presidential Commission on Election Administration(found at https://www.supportthevoter.gov/files/2014/01/Amer-Voting-Exper-final-draft-01-09-14-508.pdf)  states, ³No citizen citizen should have towait more than 30 minutes to vote,² wait time is not the sole measureof fairness in access to voting. The commission report and othernational groups looking at potential problems recommend the following changes:

• Online registration, particularly appealing to younger voters, should be allowed by law;

•  The legislature should adopt early in-person voting, which many other states have, no-excuse absentee voting, and voting by mail;

• Legislators should consider ³super-precincts² where people from a variety of different smaller jurisdictions could vote;

• Election administrators should improve election planning by visiting polling places and following good design principles. Dolente pointed out that the presidential commission report actually brought in queuing experts from the private sector to recommend best practices;

• Election planning should be transparent and accountable.

Of these, a majority of MEC members support two for the State of Michigan: on-line registration and no-excuse absentee voting. These two recommendations are also supported by Michigan's Director of the Bureau of Elections Chris Thomas, who served on the national Presidential Commission, and Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson.

A task force convened by Grand Rapids Mayor Heartwell, which included a lot of attorneys in its ranks, made similar recommendations to the Presidential Commission, and discussed early voting at length while declaring that legislative fixes were outside its scope.

 

––––––––––––––––––––
 Subscribe to the Legal News!
 http://legalnews.com/Home/Subscription
Full access to public notices, articles, columns, archives, statistics, calendar and more
Day Pass Only $4.95!
One-County $80/year
Three-County & Full Pass also available