Hurricane Sandy has led to voting turmoil for a large swath of the East Coast. This is the first time in memory that a major storm struck so close to Election Day, and some ballots may be lost amid the wreckage. But it could have been worse, at least in my home state. “If the hurricane had hit today as opposed to last Monday, you would have no way to vote in the 2012 election,” Thad Hall, an associate professor of political science at the University of Utah, said yesterday, when I told him that I’m registered to vote in New Jersey. “And New York would have gone Republican.”
Fortunately, New Jersey had a bit of time, at least, to come up with emergency plans for Election Day after Sandy hit. On Saturday, Kim Guadagno, the lieutenant governor, signed a directive announcing that “any voter who has been displaced from their primary residence because of Hurricane Sandy is hereby designated as an ‘overseas voter;’ ” as such, they may send in their ballots by e-mail or fax. This is an unprecedented gesture, one that reveals a generous impulse to grant voters virtual access to the polls in a moment of crisis—if not, necessarily a great concern for meticulousness. And not everything is going smoothly.
On Monday evening, in response to concerns that the procedure she’d outlined wouldn’t pass statutory muster, Guadagno clarified that voters must send in the original copies of their ballots. This satisfied legal experts, but solidified an extra layer of difficulty for those who are struggling to get their votes counted. In the span of only a couple of days, the state’s election officials have tossed a line and seen it tangled, unavoidably, in the mess of hurricane recovery and national politics.
I tried to make use of the e-mail voting system. (In the front yard of the house I grew up in—and only recently left—storm winds peeled up a tree from the earth with a swatch of grass beneath it; the power line was pinned down like a knocked-out fighter.) The state’s directive instructed displaced voters to contact their county clerk about requesting an e-mail ballot. I went to the clerk’s Web site, downloaded the application, and printed out two pages, which I filled in, scanned, and submitted by e-mail. It bounced back. I tried again, and once more the message failed. It took three tries to get through to the clerk’s office by phone. “Oh, you can just go online to our Web site to find the ballot and fax it in,” I was told. I was confused.
“But the New Jersey state Web site says that you need to send an application to vote by mail.”
I looked again at the county clerk’s Web site to see if I had missed something. “I don’t see the ballot there,” I said.
“Oh, well, I’m sure what you sent will go through. We’re just very backed up.”
The woman on the other end of the line whispered something to a colleague, and, finally, got back on to suggest that I try to fax my application. A couple hours later, I received an e-mail with my ballot, and began, as instructed, to print the thick stack of paper. Unfortunately, the voting forms were for a different town.
“I’m concerned this would be invalid,” I said when I called back the clerk’s office.
“Yes, it would. Hold on, give me a minute—send it back. Well, give me your e-mail address.”
I spelled it out.
“O.K., I’ll send you another one. Don’t do anything with the one you have, because it doesn’t pertain to you.”
An emergency would throw any bureaucratic office for a loop—not to mention one where staffers are preoccupied by flooding in their basements. A deputy clerk told me, “We’ve been doing nothing but this all day, dealing with problems with the email ballots.” Yet she did not know how most of the voters who were without electricity, or stuck in shelters, could be expected to find a computer, get on the Internet, print, and send faxes.
By 4:30 P.M. yesterday, the deadline by which I was told I could expect to receive the correct ballot, it hadn’t arrived in my inbox. This realization came with the resignation that I should take the bus home—by way of a particularly clogged and chaotic Port Authority—and cast my vote in person.
David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and the founder of the Verified Voting Foundation, which has the aim of “safeguarding elections in the digital age,” was more than happy to wave me off to my polling place. “E-mail is a system where there generally isn’t any encryption. It isn’t necessarily reliable,” he said. “It gets lost all the time. It’s like sending your vote on a postcard that you handed off to a chain of other people to get to the desired destination. And it goes through a number of intermediate hops.”
Alaska, where the population is more dispersed, is offering e-mail balloting for the first time this year for all absentee voters; this was planned for, but it still poses some security and privacy risks. In New Jersey, where there is no on-site early voting, the state is less prepared to process an influx of electronic ballots. (On Saturday, though, Governor Chris Christie ordered county clerks to open their offices to provide a head start to the polls.)
Before I set out on my trek to reach the voting booth, I asked for the advice of a friend working on his PhD in political science. He warned, bluntly, “It could get ugly.”
When I arrived at the polling station, I spotted my name in the check-in book, marked with a sticker that read “mail-in voter.” I plead my case but was barred from the voting booth, and instructed to fill out a provisional ballot. “I hope you don’t have to deal with many more problems like mine,” I said, thanking the polling staffer.
“Oh, we will,” he replied. “You’re not even the first this morning.”