Newark

After Sandy, Advocacy Group Calls for New Emergency Voting Rules in New Jersey

Measures that New Jersey put in place to increase voting access after Superstorm Sandy were illegal, insecure and confusing, and are evidence that the state needs standing rules for future disasters, a voting rights advocacy said in a report Thursday.

The Constitutional Rights Clinic at the Rutgers School of Law in Newark used open records requests to get communications between state and local election officials, which showed deep confusion about the emergency voting procedures.

Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie, called the report "junk" and said that despite some flaws, the state did manage to open access to voting to people hit by the state's worst natural disaster ever. He noted that the American Civil Liberties Union's New Jersey branch has praised the Christie administration for its efforts on that front. He also said that there have not been complaints from voters or lawsuits resulting from the decisions the administration made.

"This is the worst kind of Monday morning quarterbacking," Drewniak said Thursday of the report. "All it did was cite everything we supposedly did wrong."

The administration has sent county election officials guidelines for emergencies that affect voting. But those plans do not address every situation the advocates say should be planned for.

Sandy struck the state a week before the 2012 general election. Secretary of State Kim Guadagno, who also serves as New Jersey's lieutenant governor, put out a series of orders leading up to the election, when President Barack Obama's re-election was at the top of the ticket. Among them was a provision allowing those displaced by the storm to vote by fax or email. The flood of online ballots overwhelmed email servers in some counties.

Penny Venetis, the co-director of the clinic, complained about the procedures as they were evolving, saying the intent to give voters access to the polls was admirable but that the methods created problems — though there are not any examples of election outcomes being changed because of the problems.

Among the problems, the clinic's researchers found that Camden County allowed emergency workers to cast ballots electronically — an apparent violation of Guadagno's orders to allow that kind of voting only for residents displaced by the storm.

The report also reveals frustration among county election offices who said that state officials were not doing enough to answer questions about the emergency procedures.

"To report and/or issue a directive and not to entertain questions or discussion is an absence of leadership and direction. It is quite literally shameful," Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi told state Election Director Robert Giles in an email Nov. 1, 2012.

The researchers also gave examples of hacking and other problems with online voting elsewhere and said that the method is not secure enough to use.

The report says that fax and email ballots lack security and should not be a part of the emergency voting methods the legal clinic says the state should adopt.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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