As you may or may not know, South DaCola broke the story on Pat Powers involvement with a consulting business while serving as the SOS’s Chief of Operations. Stan left these comments today on my site;
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How do over 1,000 votes disappear?
After Tuesday’s primary, the Secretary of State’s Office reported about 6,100 votes were cast. But later on, the auditor reported that just more than 5,500 votes were cast. And after Thursday’s recount, the official count was around 4,400.
I suppose I could go on another rant about the incompetence of Jason Gant, but why keep beating a dead horse? How do these many ballots going missing? Or the bigger question, were ballots overcounted?
Some say the only thing that will satisfy them is a re-vote. Candidates have ten days after the election day to file a petition for a re-vote.
This should not have to be the case. Why should they inconvenance voters if these ballots exist, not to mention the tax payer money it will cost because of this incompetence? And the bigger question is how could they be off by that much? The AG’s office needs to do an investigation into election fraud (either intentional or accidental). It is blatantly obvious someone in the Davison county auditor’s office either screwed up accidentally or on purpose. This episode better end with someone in handcuffs.
I have a few tidbits I wanted to share, so I thought I would just throw it all into one post.
MUSICAL PRECINCTS
I sent this email out today to the entire SF school board, Minnehaha county commission, SF City Council, city clerk, county auditor and mayor. I have already gotten two responses that are very positive;
Normally I do not email my elected officials, especially the entire city council, the county commission, the school board, the mayor, the city clerk and the county auditor all at once, but I did a recent post about the ‘musical precincts’ this city continues to play with elections and the mass confusion it has on voters. It’s time you all sat down in a room and figured out a standard already, this has gone on long enough!
As soon as most of them get back to me about it, I will do an indepth post about it.
LATE FILINGS
Ellis blogged about the supposed investigations the SOS’ office is going to conduct AFTER the election (yeah, that makes a lot of sense);
Secretary of State Jason Gant said his office will begin investigating a number of campaign finance violations as soon as Tuesday’s primary is concluded.
“We will begin investigating Wednesday morning,†he said while touring a polling place at Hawthorne Elementary in Sioux Falls.
Some groups have not filed required campaign finance reports, even though they’ve sent out flyers. Other committees have sent out illegal mailings that do not include the appropriate disclaimers.
“Tomorrow we are full steam ahead on working out those issues,†he said. “If they are not filing, we’re going to find out.â€
I have often thought instead of fining late filings (of candidates) they should just leave their names off of the ballot. If you file late, you lose your opportunity to run. To heck with silly fines, if you can’t follow the rules you don’t get to play the game. As for the PAC’s I think you should revoke their status.
ARE EMAIL’S OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS PUBLIC RECORD
Ellis also blogged today about his battle with city hall over public records from an administration of ‘one of the most transparent’ mayor’s ever 
“The law includes data, data fields and e-mail in its definition of public records, and it lets citizens bring their own devices to a government agency to make electronic copies. Georgia thus joins a growing number of states that explicitly open electronic communication to and from government officials to the public.â€
I’ve written before about how backward South Dakota’s open record laws are. Many states make emails among government officials public records. South Dakota is also the rare state in which police reports aren’t available to the public. Oh, and mugshots.
As for data fields, I’ve been fighting to get the names of data fields used by the city of Sioux Falls in a database since December.
Ellis makes a good point. Why can’t we see emails? It would put rumors to rest about how involved the mayor is in local politics and his supposed quest for higher office. As for the data fields, I know what this is about, but I will let Ellis break this story, that is if he gets the data.
I had a legislative candidate point out to me last night that the SOS’s website is a mess when it comes to searching candidate financial reports. No surprise, the state isn’t big on functionality with their websites. I had an IT person look at it and give me their 2-Cents:
So much for Powers being an expert web designer. We call this an eye candy site. It will blind you with glitz and no function. Lots of blinking, 1990’s moving lists to nowhere, unlabeled icons, text headers not linking to anything and no ergonomics.  Wow what a mess. Two things come directly to mind as I look:
1.       Sdsos.gov/elections/default.aspx is the elections page.
a.       The scrolling ‘2012 Candidate Filings’ box is not in any sort order, is annoying and does not link to anything useful.
b.      Links on the page are to ‘stuff’ with no explanations leaving you to guess what they are presenting.
2.       C.A.S.H. System <https://sdsos.gov/campaignfinance/default.aspx> was found to be the campaign / reporting link.
a.       Web standards for access links are not used, you have to figure out how to find the link to get to process you are looking for.
b.      Donation Search, try putting in a district number, such as 10. The list of districts displays up, not down. This may seem minor but it does not make the search process very ergonomic.
c.       Did a search for all donations in District 10, the presentation is not smooth and as you continue to use the system you get fewer results until you realize the ‘Clear’ search button must be clicked between searches to clear fields.
d.      Bouncing between fields is cumbersome
e.      Try screen scraping results with your mouse to highlight, it will not collect all data.
I guess they are ‘working on it’. Rumor has it they are manually typing in the paper filings instead of scanning them. That leaves room for inaccuracy. The biggest problem with this site is that NOT all of the filings are up yet.
Look at Minnesota’s site, very searchable.
We are only a few days away from the primaries and not all of the reports are up yet. This is unfortunate.
Here is something to consider as you get ready to vote for your favorite candidates in this year’s primary and general elections.  This appears to be what Gant and PP are in the process of doing here in South Dakota. Sunday’s Argus had this Gant comment:
“I’m going to continue to be active in my after-hours life in politics,” Gant said. “During work, I’m going to be very active in making sure our elections and corporations and other aspects of the office are running according to law.”
My question is, whose ‘law’? Reminds me of Catherine Harris, SOS of FL in 2000 and Ken Blackwell, SOS of Ohio in 2004. How did it work out for us? American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is deep into this issue of restricting the people’s right to petition our government, select our representatives and air our grievances.
Well let’s look at what ALEC run Secretary of State (SOS) offices in many states of America, including South Dakota, are doing with their many rule changes to election monitoring and control. Here is a summary of what we are and will see, then experience:
12.   Create diversions, when final tabulations of votes are not done in private, the election supervisors will modify records during diversion
If the above does not work:
Just consider this past year’s Wisconsin recall election problems.
Many of the ALEC controlled SOS offices in the United States have attempted to accomplish the above steps slowly over years, so the changes are not seen so suddenly. It must usually be a gradual implementation process. The problem South Dakota has this year, is the internal Republican fight boiling under the surface since the days of GOP Karl Mundt, GOP Frank Farrar and Democrat Dick Kniep. The citizens of South Dakota are seeing the state GOP ready to eat their own in the “to the death†fight between the TeaBaggers, west-east river and the establishment power holders. The Democrats did this to themselves in 1974 when Kniep ran for his third term against Bill Dougherty. The two major factions of the state GOP are now in a full assault to finally remove their opponents at any cost.
Look at the race between Tea conservative Ernie Otten against incumbent Republican Senator Gene Abdallah as an example. This is the classic fight happening within the GOP and is happening throughout the state this year. The SOS office is going to be key to who the winners are, whether intended or ‘accidental’.
The decades old GOP fight is happening right before our eyes this year. In the half dozen times it has happened in the SD history, the Democratic Party was ready with solid candidates to take advantage of the situations. When will the current Democratic Party and it’s officeholders actually back real Democrats? This year there is no active, positive South Dakota Democratic Party to make use of this situation.
The current Democratic Party operatives have turned over their party to cute email, social networking and the Obama For America efforts. Very little grassroots or door to door efforts. No Democratic Party comments about the political activities of the SOS office have been seen. What is the Democratic Party afraid of? Where are they? What is the downside of publicizing potential Election Fraud? Why are the out of office populace letting themselves be accused of Voter Fraud by the perpetrators of Election Fraud?
l3wis