Fels, MSNBC to monitor Election Day

The first nationwide real-time voter observation system will track obstructions at the polls on Election Day and attempt to help individuals resolve problems as they occur.

If voters encounter an obstacle, the program offers a toll-free telephone number that will record their complaint and automatically forward it to a local election officer for possible redress, as part of a system known as MyVote1. The results will be broadcast continuously on MSNBC from Philadelphia's Constitution Center.

The program is a collaboration among Penn's Fels Institute of Government, two electoral reform groups -- one Democratic and one Republican -- and VoterLink Data Systems, which has produced an election-tracking system known as the InfoVoter Technologies Election Incident Monitor.

An electronic electoral map of the country will track where complaints are coming from. As the day progresses, a group of political experts and Fels students will forward recordings originating from battleground states to MSNBC broadcasters, which they say will form the basis of some of their Election Day coverage.

"We can see what actually goes on on Election Day," VoterLink President Ken Smuckler said.

The program has never been tested on such a large scale, but organizers hope this year's results will provide a standard for future elections.

"I hope we'll be able to develop a baseline of activity to make [the] electoral system better and more interactive in elections to come," Smuckler said. "I hope this gives voters insight into [the] election."

Development of the project began after the chaos of the 2000 election in which many individuals complained that they were unable to cast a vote or that their votes went uncounted.

"In the wake of the 2000 election, it was discovered that there were a lot of flaws in the U.S. electoral system," Fels Executive Director Chris Patusky said, adding that the federal and state governments have often deferred to municipalities for election regulation.

The flaws Patusky described range from misconduct on the part of local government officials to incorrect use of electronic voting machines -- which do not leave a paper trail, making a physical recount impossible.

The federal government intervened after the previous election, with the Help America Vote Act. The act is a bipartisan agreement aimed at tightening the electoral system by replacing punch ballots with electronic voting machines and forcing states to compile a database of registered voters, among other measures. But critics say the government has underfunded the act, and it is questionable whether states have implemented the reforms.

"The problem is that HAVA has caused more problems than it has solved," Law professor Nathan Persily said. He noted that many states had received waivers on the database requirement, and there was plenty of room for confusion with provisional ballots, absentee ballots and the voting machines themselves.

"We need a transparent system where everyone who is registered knows where they're registered and how to vote," he said. He predicted that, in the coming election, "we're going to see different problems that are potentially just as bad" as in 2000.

MyVote1, however, could help document these issues and empirically prove their existence, while also acting as a barrier against possible wrongdoing, assuming that individuals call the hotline.

"It will hopefully inoculate against any kind of bad behavior," Democratic political analyst Larry Ceisler said. "In certain places, people play games with elections and with voters. They tell people they can't vote."

The Election Day activity is only the first part of the initiative. The second phase is to establish a database of the recordings to identify key trouble spots and issues.

"We're going to use this database to diagnose the health of the U.S. electoral system," Patusky said. "We're going to be able to look at those places with more complaints than less."

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