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MA: Talk – A Poor Substitute For Integrity?

Don’t Count Your Ballots Up in Massachusetts. That Sort Of Thing Just Isn’t Done.

Jammed voting machine misses six ballots in close race. We say “Maybe, maybe not”.

Don’t Count Your Ballots Up in Massachusetts. That Sort Of Thing Just Isn’t Done.

Story in the Eagle-Tribune about Methuen, MA: Jammed voting machine misses six ballots in close race <read> We say “Maybe, maybe not”.

Here is the summary from the City Clerk Christine Touma-Conway:

“The integrity of the process is being proven by the fact that we’ve discovered this and are talking about it,” Touma-Conway said. “That’s why we have all these checks and double checks and triple checks.”

What exactly did they discover?

the number of voters checked in and out was six higher than the number of ballots counted by the AccuVote voting machine. That leads Touma-Conway to believe six votes weren’t counted.

That could be true, however, its also possible that 6 voters walked out without voting. Or perhaps an error was made in the check-in process. Did the machine jam and lose votes? We use the same machines in Connecticut and have instructions for election officials to handle jams such that votes are counted once and only once – it would be quite an exception if the same human error were made six times in the same polling place — yet it could happen. Here is what is reported:

The machine read 762 ballots, but 768 voters checked in and out at Precinct 7. The box containing the ballots is sealed, so officials don’t know for certain whether there are in fact 768 ballots in there, but Touma-Conway expects there is.

Voting machines regularly become jammed temporarily, resulting in one or two votes not being counted, but that usually doesn’t affect an election because the votes usually aren’t as close as the result between Kazanjian and Henrick. Plus, it’s rare for as many as six votes to go uncounted, Touma-Conway said.

Hum, perhaps they lose votes from jamming. MA has more experience with these machines, yet how do they know? Massachusetts does not have a post-election audit. But what does it matter if we lose six votes in an election? Should every voters vote really count?

This adds a new twist to the School Committee election saga, where incumbent Kenneth Henrick placed just five votes ahead of his friend and fellow incumbent George Kazanjian.

We often criticize Connecticut for having an inadequate recanvass law that falls short of a true recount, but at least we do an automatic recanvass when the election is close. Despite our criticism of the weaknesses and inefficiencies in our post-election audit law, we do have one. When questions arise situations similar to this one, the Secretary of the State’s office often refers the situations to the UConn VoTeR Center for research and actual factual answers.

Is A Democracy Index In Our Future?

The American Democracy Index Act (H.R.4033) seeks to improve election administration throughout the United States by ranking states on election performance and comparing best and worst practices.

Representative Steve Isreal announces bill to create a state by state Democracy Index <read>

The American Democracy Index Act (H.R.4033) seeks to improve election administration throughout the United States by ranking states on election performance and comparing best and worst practices…

The American Democracy Index Act requires that the Election Assistance Commission contract with an entity to collect voter data and publish the American Democracy Index for the federal election cycle of 2012. The American Democracy Index (ADI) will present voter and election administration data on a state-by-state basis in a manner designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of election administration practices. States will be ranked according to criteria established by an independent advisory board of election administration experts in consultation with the Election Assistance Commission. The legislation also establishes a pilot program for the 2010 federal election cycle to create an index that ranks localities within five states to measure the effectiveness of their election administration.

The concept is based on a proposal that Yale Law School Professor Heather Gerken wrote about in her book, The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It. She argues that a “Democracy Index” – a public ranking of election performances around the country – would encourage states to take real steps to make voting easier.

This sounds like a good idea, yet it depends – it depends on what data is collected and who gets to charcterize it. Our concern would be that the data might be too superficial to judge the quality of actual compliance with a standard.

Here is a like to Heather K. Gerken’s book, we need to add it to our reading list. <link>

Secretary of the State’s Letter To Senator Schumer RE: Premier, ES&S

“We are concerned that this transaction will unduly stifle competition across the country and for Connecticut in a number of significant ways.”

Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz and Deputy Secretary Lesley Mara have sent the following letter to Senator Schumer relative to the Premier acquisition by ES&S.

October 26, 2009

The Honorable Charles Schumer
Chairman
Committee on Rules and Administration
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

RE: Sale of Diebold’s voting machine business, Premier Election Solutions, Inc. to Election Systems & Software Inc.

Dear Senator Schumer:

Thank you for the opportunity to share our concerns with you and the Committee regarding the sale of Premier Election Solutions, Inc. (“Premier”) to Election Systems and Software, Inc. (“ES&S”). We greatly appreciate your leadership in this important area and your recognition that this country’s election systems must be rigorously safeguarded.

We are concerned that this transaction will unduly stifle competition across the country and for Connecticut in a number of significant ways. First, for those states looking for new machines, there will be fewer vendors from which to choose, potentially driving up the cost of purchasing new machines and giving the states less leverage in demanding high standards of quality, especially with respect to transparency and security issues.

Second, once machines are purchased, this transaction can negatively affect the quality of ongoing service contracts with the states, contracts that include ongoing preventive maintenance of the machines and other services. Since ES&S offers a product that competes with the Premier product purchased by Connecticut, it seems unlikely that ES&S will dedicate sufficient resources and development energies to the extent necessary to support two distinct products. It seems much more likely that ES&S will devote the majority of its resources to its own present product line to the detriment of those customer states across the country that currently use the Premier product.

Finally, as ES&S positions itself to dominate the voting machine sales and service industry, it also assumes unfair control of the pace and quality of innovation down the road. In short, if ES&S is “the only game in town,” then the lack of outside competition may also impact future product innovation in this industry.

By way of background, the State of Connecticut entered into a contract with Diebold (now Premier) in June, 2006 for the acquisition of optical scan voting machines to replace the state’s lever voting machines. That contract included the purchase of equipment and accessories, training, on-site support during the first use of the equipment, programming of memory cards and ongoing maintenance. Our contract expires on December 31, 2026.

We conducted our first statewide use of the new equipment in November, 2007 and completed the largest single use of the new voting machines during the historic Presidential election last November. While that portion of the contract relating to the purchase and delivery of the equipment has been implemented, we have a strong interest in maintaining quality, ongoing service and maintenance of the product we have purchased for the seventeen (17) years that remain on our contract.

One provision in Connecticut’s contract with Premier requires Premier: (1) to address security vulnerabilities identified in a report by the University of California at Berkeley specifically entitled: “Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter,”and (2) to provide Connecticut with any upgrade(s) addressing those vulnerabilities at no additional cost. Those upgrades were supposed to have been provided within one year and that deadline has now passed. Although Premier has received EAC certification for a new version of its product that it may claim addresses the issues contained in the subject report, the upgrades have not been offered to Connecticut for review. Now that ES&S has acquired Premier, we are concerned that ES&S may not dedicate the technical and other resources necessary to fulfill this provision in a timely way.

At the same time we chose optical scan voting machines in 2006, we also entered into a contract with IVS, LLC to provide one accessible voting machine at each polling place in the state. The “Vote-By-Phone” system uses a special telephone at each polling place to allow voters to cast their ballots. We specifically entered into a year-to-year arrangement for this product because it was, and remains, our goal to find a more permanent solution. Ultimately, we want a ballot that can be fed into the optical scan voting machine – the vote-by-phone ballots look different and must be hand counted separately. While the vote-by-phone system is especially helpful for persons who are sight-impaired or blind, we hope that a future technology can accommodate even more disabilities, including providing sip-and-puff options, foot pedals and other features to expand the usefulness and accessibility of the machines.

In anticipating a future Request for Proposal for accessible voting machines, both ES&S and Premier have traditionally offered ballot marking devices that might meet the state’s business requirements. It was also our understanding that Premier was conducting its own research and technical development to offer a new product that might be even more attractive to customers. With the acquisition of Premier by ES&S, one vendor is lost to this process and it seems likely that Premier’s innovation and research into any new product will be lost as well. This transaction will result in fewer vendors participating in the RFP process in Connecticut, with the attendant consequence that the state will have less leverage in negotiating for the best possible price. Further, as previously mentioned, this dynamic may stifle the innovation that could lead to more efficient machines.

Thank you again for conducting a thorough review of this transaction and its impact on election systems across the country. It is imperative that competition be maintained to provide optimal opportunities for states to purchase voting machines that are cost-effective and machines that ensure transparency, auditability, security and accuracy. A more concentrated voting machine industry jeopardizes such competition and places states at a disadvantage in fulfilling their responsibilities to the voters they serve.

Please do not hesitate to contact this office if we can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Susan Bysiewicz
Secretary of the State

Lesley D. Mara
Deputy Secretary of the State

Earlier coverage of the acquisition <here> <here>

Statisticians, Political Scientists, Election Officials, and Advocates Recommendations to NIST

“We strongly recommend that the next version of the VVSG support auditing election outcomes by facilitating small-batch reporting in standardized electronic reporting formats, and usable voter-verifiable cast vote records.”

Last weekend I participated in a working meeting in Alexandria, VA to design pragmatic post-election audits. One result was a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST) making suggestions for the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines which they are in the process of updating. I am one of two participants and endorsers from Connecticut <Letter>

Overview

Two key goals of vote tabulation audits are

-To verify that the election outcomes implied by the reported vote totals are correct, and
-To provide data for process improvement: specifically, to identify and quantify various causes of discrepancies between voter intentions and the originally reported vote totals.

Difficulty in obtaining subtotals of the machine tallies to compare with manually-derived totals from small batches of ballots is a major problem. Efficient vote tabulation audits require – in addition to software-independent audit trails – timely, comprehensive, detailed, standardized, machine-readable subtotals of the votes as recorded by the vote tabulation systems. For greatest efficiency, individual ballot interpretations should be available to support emerging methods that audit at the ballot level (that is, batches of size 1) without breaching confidentiality.

Future VVSGs should contain audit-related requirements for all voting systems, designed in consultation with experts in election auditing, to ensure that the next generation of voting systems facilitate election audits.

Key areas for standards include:

-Usability of the paper record
-Comprehensive reporting of all important data elements
-Small-batch or individual ballot reporting capability
-Machine-readable, standard election result reporting formats, with support for standardized identification of contests and candidates, –that facilitate aggregation for electoral contests spanning multiple jurisdictions
-Machine-readable, standard audit result reporting formats, including audit units selected and discrepancies found

…

Voting systems should make it easy to create detailed reports with subtotals by contest, by ballot batch, by precinct, or by scanner or tabulation machine.

One common, standardized data format is needed for reporting audit results, as well as initial election results. Implementation details are outside the scope of this letter; election auditing experts should participate in specifying these requirements.

In summary, we strongly recommend that the next version of the VVSG support auditing election outcomes by facilitating small-batch reporting in standardized electronic reporting formats, and usable voter-verifiable cast vote records.

One a personal note, it was great to meet in person several political scientists, officials and advocates whom I’ve know only from frequent email and conference call presentations; see again, those I have met previously; and meet several additional scientists, advocates, and officials dedicated to election integrity.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on Citizens United v. FEC

the Court would have to ignore several time-honored principles that have served for the past two centuries to preserve the public’s respect for and acceptance of its decisions…At the oral argument last month, one justice seemed to suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for a tobacco company to try to defeat a candidate who wants to regulate tobacco, and to use its shareholders’ money to do so.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on Citizens United v. FEC <read>

The principles involved and the consequences of the case:

while I have disagreed with many Supreme Court decisions, I have great respect for that institution and for the men and women who serve on the Court. But this step would be so damaging to our democracy and is so unwarranted and unnecessary that I must speak out. That is why Senator McCain and I have come to the floor today.

To overrule the Austin decision in this case, the Court would have to ignore several time-honored principles that have served for the past two centuries to preserve the public’s respect for and acceptance of its decisions. First, it is a basic tenet of constitutional law that the Court will not decide a case on constitutional grounds unless absolutely necessary, and that it if there is no choice but to reach a constitutional issue, the Court will decide the case as narrowly as possible…

The second principle is known as stare decisis, meaning that the Court respects its precedents and overrules them only in the most unusual of cases. Chief Justice John Roberts, whom many believe to be the swing justice in this case, made grand promises of what he called “judicial modesty,” when he came before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005. Respect for precedent was a key component of the approach that he asked us to believe he possessed…

Talk about a jolt to the legal system. It’s hard to imagine a bigger jolt than to strike down laws in over 20 states and a federal law that has been the cornerstone of the nation’s campaign finance system for 100 years. The settled expectations that would be upset by this decision are enormous. And subsequent developments surely have not shown that the Austin decision is unworkable. Indeed, the Court relied on it as recently as 2003 in the McConnell case and even cited it in the Wisconsin Right to Life decision just two years ago, written by none other than Chief Justice Roberts. To be sure, there are justices on the Court who dissented from the Austin decision when it came down and continue to do so today. But if stare decisis means anything, a precedent on which so many state legislatures and the American people have relied should not be cast aside simply because a few new justices have arrived on the Court.

Third, the courts decide cases only on a full evidentiary record so that all sides have a chance to put forward their best arguments and the court can be confident that it is making a decision based on the best information available. In this case, precisely because the Supreme Court reached out to pose a broad constitutional question that had not been raised below, there is no record whatsoever to which the Court can turn. None. And the question here demands a complete record because the legal standard under prevailing First Amendment law is whether the statute is designed to address a compelling state interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that result…

Does the Supreme Court really believe that the First Amendment requires the American people to accept a system where banks and investment firms, having just taken our country into its worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, can spend millions upon millions of dollars of ads directly advocating the defeat of those candidates who didn’t vote to bail them out or want to prevent future economic disaster by imposing strict new financial services regulations?…

At the oral argument last month, one justice seemed to suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for a tobacco company to try to defeat a candidate who wants to regulate tobacco, and to use its shareholders’ money to do so. This is the system that the Supreme Court may bequeath to this country if it doesn’t turn back. Some will say that corporate interests already have too much power

Open Source Voting Software Released

Open source has great potential to facilitate voting integrity and independence from sole source voting equipment/software vendors and outsourcing of elections. This particular project is comprehensive including voter registration capabilities and has interest from major players.

Wired Article: Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released <read>

Not actually the first, yet a significant development. From the Wired article:

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes…

Miller said the foundation wasn’t looking to put voting system companies out of business but to assume the heavy burden and costs of research and development to create a trustworthy system that will meet the needs of election officials for reliability and the needs of the voting public for accessibility, transparency, security and integrity.

Open source has great potential to facilitate voting integrity and independence from sole source equipment/software vendors and outsourcing of elections. This particular project is comprehensive including voter registration capabilities and has interest from major players:

The foundation has elicited help from academics and election officials from eight states as well as voter advocacy groups, such as Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters, to guide developers in building the system. Technology bigwigs such as Oracle, Sun and IBM have also approached the group to help with the project…

The foundation already has California, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington interested in adopting the system and is in talks with 11 other states. Florida, which has been racked by voting machine problems since the 2000 presidential debacle, has also expressed interest, as has Georgia, which uses machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) statewide.

Other coverage:

InformationWeek Blog: Can Open Source Software Save Democracy? <read> A good overview and summary of the business challenges for vendors. This is why we are skeptical that left on their own high quality proprietary solutions will be developed:

But the solutions aren’t necessarily obvious: only electronic voting machines are truly accessible to all voters, technicians do need reset buttons, wireless features are needed to report results in a timely manner, and a paper audit trail doesn’t ensure that votes are counted properly unless you can determine which (the electronic or paper) reflects actual voter intent.

The problems are compounded because there’s little profit margin in voting machines (which are paid for by cash-strapped local governments) and thus little incentive for voting machine vendors to invest a great deal in R&D.

And surprisingly, at least to me, from the John Birch Society: Open Source Election Software Revealed <read>

Through a collaborative effort between state and local elections officials and technology experts, the group aims to create federally certified voting software that will restore trust and transparency in elections by allowing anyone to inspect the code. Proprietary voting systems used in recent elections have come under fire for secrecy, unreliability and a host of other problems.

Soldiers to Choose Risking Democracy on Electronic Voting

The purpose of the secret ballot is not primarily to protect the voter of the ballot, but to protect all voters, and to protect our Democracy.

In a letter to the NC State Board of Elections, the Federal Voting Assistance Program has recommended that individual soldiers be left to determine the viability of returning their votes by email. Thanks to N.C. Voter for this story <read>

Until secure electronic transmission of voted ballots has been established, we recommend that States allow voters to return static copies of voted ballots through available electronic means. However, the decision to send a voted ballot by unsecure electronic means must rest with the individual voter based on the voter’s desire to cast his or her vote electronically or to ensure the secrecy of their ballot.

We see some problems with this.

Very few soldiers are in a position to assess the security of sending their votes over the internet. Its unlikely many are computer scientists or security experts, unlikely that many are in a position to evaluate the network they use or would have an opportunity to consider the Technologists’ Statement On Internet Voting
Even the risky, questionable amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill only includes the possibility of pilot programs.
Finally, the purpose of the secret ballot is not primarily to protect the voter of the ballot, but to protect all voters, and to protect our Democracy. Its not just my loss if my vote is lost or changed its everyone’s.

TIME: Galbraith: How the Afghan Election Was Rigged

“Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it is impossible to untangle.”

We are lucky to hear from Mr. Gailbrath. Had he not been fired, he might have continued to keep quiet

Time article, How the Afghan Election Was Rigged <read> by Peter W. Galbraith, formerly deputy special representative of the Secretary-General of the U.N. in Afghanistan

No one will ever know how Afghans voted in their country’s presidential elections on Aug. 20, 2009. Seven weeks after the polling, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is still trying to separate fraudulent tallies from ballots. In some provinces, many more votes were counted than were cast. E.U. election monitors characterize 1.5 million votes as suspect, which would include up to one-third of the votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it is impossible to untangle.

Afghanistan’s fraudulent elections complicate President Obama’s job as he weighs a recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal, his top commander there, to send as many as 40,000 additional troops to support a beefed-up counterinsurgency strategy. But for that strategy to work, the U.S. needs a credible Afghan partner, which Afghanistan’s elections now seem unlikely to produce…

We are lucky to hear from Mr. Gailbrath. Had he not been fired, he might have continued to keep quiet:

Unfortunately, I am unable to provide reassuring answers. Over the past four months, I served as the deputy head of the U.N. mission in Kabul and had a firsthand view of the fraud that plagued Afghanistan’s presidential vote. Each time I proposed actions to deal with it, Kai Eide, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, overruled me. Like any good subordinate, I respected my boss’s decision, but in private, I told him I thought he was making a mistake in downplaying the fraud. When the press learned of our disagreement (through no fault of ours), U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon removed me from my post.

I recommend reading the entire article, it is not that long. This so called ‘election’ shows an unbelievable disregard for integrity, a very thinly disguised fraud, and a superficial image of democracy.

We can have high degree of certainty that the Afghan elections were not credible. How much worse is this than the uncertainty we often have in our own elections? We need effective monitoring and reporting of all elections. Without effective monitoring and auditing we cannot have confidence in the leaders of our own democracy.

Verified Voting Statement on the Acquisition of Premier Election Solutions

“it raises greater concerns about the security, transparency and cost of elections and creates a profound anti-competitive effect in the shrinking marketplace for voting systems…We can also expect to see substantial increase in vendor control over key contract provisions.”

Update: 12/27/2009 Gainesville editorial: Bad Business <read> For once Florida is leading toward voting integrity:

Corporate mergers can be good for business. But if mergers lead to less competition and innovation, they are not necessarily good for consumers.

This is especially true when the “consumers” are voters and the product voting machines.

Case in point is the recent purchase of Diebold Inc. by Election Systems & Software. The result is that a single company will now make the voting machines used by 92 percent of Florida voters … and by two-thirds of the nation’s voters.

“Each of Florida’s 67 counties must negotiate its own contract with the vendor,” says Dan McCrea, president of Florida Voters Foundation. “With no competition, Florida counties and taxpayers are over a barrel.”

The good news is that state Attorney General Bill McCollum announced ths week that he will conduct an anti-trust investigation of the merger. Given Florida’s embarrassing showing in the 2000 presidential election, the last thing this state needs is to become a captive market for a single voting machine vendor.

Update: 12/19/2009 New York Post: U.S. opens probe of Diebold unit sale -report <read>

he U.S. Department of Justice and 14 states have opened investigations into the sale of Diebold Inc’s (DBD.N) voting machines business to Election Systems & Software that could lead to the unwinding of the September sale, the New York Post said on Saturday.

Update: 11/2/2009: Secretary Bysiewicz letter to Senator Schumer <read>

Update: 10/29/2009 New York Times Editorial: Trust, Antitrust and Your Vote <read>

The interests of voters should be part of this lawsuit. The Justice Department and state attorneys general should consider formally joining the suit, so they can argue that the combination of Election Systems & Software and Diebold would make the voting experience worse and reduce the reliability of election results. The Justice Department’s antitrust division could also make its own attempt to block the sale. The enormous market share that the newly combined company would control should by itself set off anticompetitive alarms.

Since the 2000 presidential election, the public has rightfully been skeptical about how elections are run. We fear that if any one voting machine maker is allowed to dominate the market, there will be even greater reasons to worry about the nation’s flawed voting system.

*********

Our friends at VerifiedVoting have released a statement articulating concerns with the acquistion of Premier Election Solutions by ES&S <read>

The recently announced acquisition of Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) by its largest competitor, Election Services & Software (ES&S), requires close scrutiny, as it raises greater concerns about the security, transparency and cost of elections and creates a profound anti-competitive effect in the shrinking marketplace for voting systems…

Without competitive alternatives, a post-merger ES&S has jurisdictions over a barrel when it comes to renewing or negotiating new contracts. We can expect higher costs for ongoing services as well as future procurement of voting equipment and support services including ballot programming, printing, equipment maintenance and supplies.

We can also expect to see substantial increase in vendor control over key contract provisions. Contracts between election jurisdictions and voting system vendors have been demonstrated in some instances to present significant barriers to election transparency. Contracts may limit jurisdictions’ access to source code, or restrict their ability to conduct independent evaluations of voting systems performance and security. There are even two known cases of a contract between a county and ES&S containing a provision that stipulated that the terms of the contract itself were confidential. Lacking the negotiating leverage that robust competition provides, counties could face pressures to accept contracts that do not provide sufficient transparency.

The merger will make a risky, expensive situation worse. Connecticut, like most jurisdictions, uses a single vendor for equipment and maintenance. We are also dependent on a single source, our distributor LHS Associates, for memory card programming. A single more dominant vendor portends additional problems. Its quite possible that the optical scanners we own, the AccuVote-OS will be discontinued. Its less likely that there will be a soluntion to our memory card problems. For more on the dangers of outsourcing our elections see the Voters Unite Report and our associated coverage.

A Candidate’s View – Early Voting, Vote-By-Mail

A candidate’s view from FL, where early voting has changed the campaign calendar, increased cost, and perhaps reduced voter knowledge along with costing some voters their votes.

As CTVotersCount readers know, we are concerned with the integrity issues associated with early voting and vote-by-mail including no excuse absentee voting. We are also concerned with the costs of early voting.

Now we have a candidate’s view from FL, where early voting has changed the campaign calendar, increased cost, and perhaps reduced voter knowledge along with costing some voters their votes: <read>

Instead of campaigns intensifying as Election Day nears, candidates have geared up to reach thousands of people voting well in advance of the polls opening. Ballots started hitting the mail on Sept. 18, and more than 57,600 have been sent.

Already, more than 5,980 people have voted by mail in the general election.

“It feels like we’re in the middle of Election Day each day,” said Kathleen Ford, who is running for mayor against Bill Foster…

It doesn’t just affect strategy. It affects the bottom line of campaigns. Being able to effectively reach mail voters makes the campaign more expensive, Ford and Foster said…

Some civic groups have yet to endorse candidates. Community forums and debates are still on tap.

Danner said he somewhat questions the early start to voting, particularly as someone who was out of the public eye without a primary race.

But returning mail ballots later doesn’t necessarily mean better voting.

Of the 701 ballots that arrived too late to be counted in the Sept. 1 primary, 70 percent came from people who received them within four weeks of the election, Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark said.

The ballots take the place of early voting sites, because the city and Clark decided it would be less costly.

Some of our earlier posts: