The Iowa Caucuses were such a disaster that the Associated Press still hasn’t named a winner. But Super Tuesday could be worse.
In California, new to the Super Tuesday lineup this year, most voters will vote on new machines, in different locations than other years, and at a different time of year — March instead of June.
“I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that nothing crazy happens,” says Joan Hardie of the League of Women Voters in Glendale/Burbank.
In Los Angeles County, where 3 million people are expected to vote on Tuesday, most of the regular neighborhood polling places won’t be open this year as voters are being routed to “vote centers.” There are 970 vote centers, but only some of them are open for the full 11 days of the voting period, which began Feb. 22. Others don’t open until Feb. 29. Voters with no party affiliation, called NPPs (no party preference), can vote in the Democratic primary, but only if they request a Democratic “crossover” ballot.
All of this is new in California this year, rolled out after passage of a state law intended to make voting more convenient.
“I think we have a lot of concerns because we don’t want another Iowa,” says Richard Sherman, chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County. He said he was “alarmed” when propositions were left off the sample ballots in some towns.
“We want as many people to vote as possible, but I don’t know if they’re ready for prime time,” he added.
The new voting machines in Los Angeles County are touch-screen tablets that display the ballot in 13 languages and spit out a paper ballot when the person is done making selections.
But the city of Beverly Hills is suing the county, saying the new system “contains a severe ballot design flaw” as the tablets were programmed to display the names of only four candidates on the first page, making voters tap a button labeled “More” to see the remaining candidates. There are 20 candidates for president listed on the Democratic ballot in California this year, even though only eight are still in the race.
Sanders leads in California by 17 points in the latest poll, with Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden coming in second and third, respectively.
Sanders himself warned last week that low voting by independents (NPPs) shows California’s new rules could be “locking out” young and minority voters.
And it’s not just California. In North Carolina, another Super Tuesday state, a state appeals court just struck down a law requiring voters show ID, saying it appeared to be intended to discourage African Americans from voting. This follows a 2018 federal indictment of 19 foreigners for voting in the 2016 presidential election in the Tarheel State and a Board of Elections audit that showed 508 people illegally voted in the 2016 election, most of them convicted felons.
In addition, North Carolina, like California, has same-day voter registration, and no reliable way of checking to verify that the addresses people give to election officials are correct.
The Voter Integrity Project found in 2014 that there were 739,041 people on the voter rolls in North Carolina who are “missing” – that is, they no longer lived at the address that was listed for them.
“Any such registrations can be used to harvest illegal votes. How many local elections could be swayed by a thousand harvested votes,” asked Voter Integrity Project founder Jay DeLancy in a Fayetteville Observer op-ed.
Virginia’s voter ID law is also in jeopardy. The state legislature, which swung to full Democratic control in 2019, just passed a bill that would repeal Virginia’s voter ID requirement. Democratic Governor Ralph Northam has pledged to sign it into law.
Once it becomes law, Virginia voters who show up at a polling place without any ID can still vote, but must first sign an affidavit promising that they are who they say they are. It’s essentially an honor system.
A 2017 study by the non-profit Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) showed 7,474 votes have been cast since 2012 in Virginia by people eventually canceled as noncitizens.
In Texas, James O’Keefe and Project Veritas caught a poll worker on video in 2018 telling a voter that her boyfriend, who she said was a DACA “Dreamer” and not a citizen, could vote as long as he was registered and had his ID. “We got a lot of ’em,” one poll worker said of non-citizen voters.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation, and in preliminary checks against driver’s license records found 95,000 people on the state’s voter rolls who appeared to be non-citizens, 58,000 of whom had voted in an election. The ACLU argued that many of these voters had been naturalized since getting a driver’s license and eventually the state dropped the effort altogether, leaving tens of thousands of potential non-citizens on the rolls.
“Any Super Tuesday chaos will be a result of years of efforts by groups trying to ‘make it easier to vote,'” said PILF President J. Christian Adams. “When you decentralize election sites, when you drag them out over days, when you run them on apps, you create chaos. Interest groups should stop trying to fundamentally transform our election process.”
