League of Women Voters of Maryland

October 2007 (Lu Pierson, LWVMD president, attended an October hearing of the Senate’s Education, Health and Environmental Committee’s subcommittee on Ethics and Election Law. The topic was “Election Administration and False or Misleading Political speech.” Presenters were from the State Board of Elections, local Boards of Elections and staff of the Department of Legislative Services. Here’s her report.) The Subcommittee Chair, Sen. Roy Dyson (D – District 29) was the only Senator in attendance. Del. Sandy Rosenberg (D – 41st District) was also present. Linda Lamone, State Election Director, gave a briefing about current projects in her department. She first implored the committee chairman not to pass any legislation in the 2008 session that would require any changes to election procedures. She noted that revised election judges training manuals have already been published, and training by local Election Boards is anticipated to start within the next six to eight weeks. Limone said the State Board of Elections (SBE) has identified and contracted with a local printer to print absentee and provisional ballots, which should reduce the problems associated with timely dissemination of absentee ballots in the 2006 elections. She noted that fully one-third of local Elections Directors are new in their positions since the last election, and almost half of them will be conducting their first presidential elections in 2008. Senator Dyson said he has been hearing about understaffing from local Election Boards. Responding that this is an ongoing situation, Limone said she understands that most local Election Directors are meeting regularly with their county elected officials to stress the importance of fully funding local election boards. Lamone spoke very highly of the electronic poll books (EPB), noting that not only do they make election day run more smoothly and reduce line wait time for voters, they are also very useful in providing post election data. They experimented in the recent Baltimore City primary with estimating turnout figures based on EPB real time data. Using the data about who had voted by 11 am, they estimated that 28.5% of voters would participate in the election. The final figure was about 29%. Frederick County Election Director Stuart Harvey reinforced the positive reactions that election officials, judges and voters have to the EPBs, and suggested that no matter what voting machines are in use by the state, the EPBs are invaluable. Lamone shared exciting news about SBE having applied for and been awarded a grant by the Pew Charitable Trust for research and development of comprehensive post election audit procedures. They will be working with the University of Michigan on this project. SBE expects to have a final report under the grant by October, 2008, in time to test the developed procedures after the 2008 General Election. She reported that SBE staff, in conjunction with several local elections directors, has recently completed a state plan for election judge recruitment. Katie Brown, Deputy Election Director for Baltimore County, discussed the successful program the county has adopted in which they contract with the University of Baltimore to provide all training for election judges. She reported that the improvements to the State Voter Registration Database are going well. She said that out of 3,000,000 registered voters in the database, they have been able to reduce the number of duplicate registrations to less than 100. Lamone said that SBE staff is in the process of preparing a Request for Information relating to the development and implementation of a web-based campaign finance report filing system. She said that SBE has applied for $155,000 in federal funds to do a complete polling place accessibility assessment and to upgrade the accessibility attributes of their website. An Overview of the Regulation of False or Misleading Political Speech Joshua E. Loh, of the Intergovernmental Matters and Public Administration Workgroup in the Office of Policy Analysis, gave a presentation entitled “An Overview of the Regulation of False or Misleading Political Speech.” and distributed a report by that name. The report is not yet available electronically. The report provides an overview of both federal and state approaches to the regulation of political speech. There is also a section in the report dealing with “robo-calls.” Delegate Rosenberg (he and Senator Gladden introduced into the 2007 General Assembly cross-filed legislation dealing with false and misleading political speech), asked Mr. Loh whether he had reviewed that introduced legislation and the related Attorney General’s letter. Mr. Loh said that he had, but that he felt, based upon what has been happening in other states’ courts, that the Attorney General may have been somewhat generous in his interpretation of what would be constitutionally acceptable in this area. Mr. Loh noted that it is impossible to predict just how any particular court would rule on such issues.