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HomeMy WebLinkAboutCOMM. 131 Hecht, D - CA-12January 7, 2010 To: The Charter Commission RE: CA-12 ARTICLE XV- INITIATIVE OF AMENDMENTS OR REVISIONS OF THE CHARTER; Why requiring residence addresses is an unnecessary impediment to Petition Initiatives. Aloha Commissioner members- Please consider removing the requirement for residence addresses to qualify signatures on petition initiatives for charter amendments. This amendment was added to CA 12- Initiative of Amendments or Revisions the Charter on first reading. We request you return to the originally proposed language. This requirement represents an obstacle to a petition initiative drive. The right to use petition initiatives is a citizen's right to direct democracy and .the goal of a petition initiative is to get the measure on the ballot to let the people decide at the polls. Initiative petitions are a valuable check and balance on a non-responsive government. I don’t believe there has ever been a petition initiative drive in Hawaii county where there were enough valid signatures to place the question on the ballot. This time-consuming step is only undertaken when the government is non-responsive, as it was in case of the 2% for the Land Fund where we had to resort to a petition initiative drive, after the council voted no twice. This was a voter's mandate when 67% of voters approved the measure at the polls. The goal should be to validate signatures, not to invalidate signatures. This is a difficult process for the Clerk's office because their system uses social security numbers for access. The Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act of 1974,made it illegal to ask for full social security numbers. The clerk's office therefore has to manually go to each voter's file to validate his or her signature. There are three reasons, why the League of Women Voters felt residence addresses were unnecessary: 1. MANUAL REVIEW OF SIGNATURES: A residence address should be unnecessary information for the clerk to qualify voter's signatures because they need to verify information from the voter's file, which they access by the voter's name. All the information is there to qualify and validate a signature. 2. NO RESIDENCE ADDRESS: Many people do not know their address in rural areas because they use P.O. Boxes. These people are penalized from participating. 3. RESIDENCE ADDRESS NO MATCH- Voters signatures should not be invalidated because they left off the suffixes rd., st. or ave. This is an easy thing to verify when they go to the voter's folder. For example, signatures were invalidated because the person said 73-4786 Plumeria and left off the St., so this signature would be invalidated. A MANUAL REVIEW OF SIGNATURES must be done to verify each signature. Which means checking each folder for each voter who signed the petitions. This is necessary because their system is set up to be accessed by social security numbers. Since the Privacy Act was passed in 1974, it is illegal to ask for social security numbers. ON PAGE 6, number 13 of the Certificate of Insufficiency (attached) Clerk Kiriu states: " In the past, when social security numbers were required to be provided on a petition, the Office of the County Clerk used the social security numbers as the initial method of globally locating where the persons were registered to vote in the County of Hawaii. Without this precise locator now, the elector's name was used to manually search the general register." Therefore the Clerk's office, working with an antiquated system has to look up each voter's file to validate signatures where they have residence addresses, PO Box addresses, birthdates etc. NO RESIDENCE ADDRESS (use of PO Boxes): 500 signatures were invalidated because there is no residence address. (See "e" on page 7- Letter of Insufficiency). Over the 4 months that more than Charter Commission Letter Regarding CA-12- Revisions to the Charter 1 200 volunteers collected almost 10,000 signatures, we found that a surprising number of people do not know their residence address. They never use their residence address, because they live in rural areas, have no delivery by the postal service to their homes and go to the Post Office to get their mail. In the June 13, 2006 Letter from Clerk Kiriu to Debbie Hecht, (attached) on Page 2, #6 asks why signatures had no residence address. The answer was: "In these instances, the person did not provide a residence address or he/she provide a mailing address instead." In addition, each year the Clerk mails out the yellow cards to verify your voter's registration. If you use a PO Box, this yellow card is sent to the PO Box, since they have to go to the voter's file to verify information they HAVE this information to use to validate signatures. RESIDENCES ADDRESS NO MATCH: 1,578 signatures were invalidated because the residence address was no match, which is 18% of all of the signatures that were invalidated. (See page 10 on the Certificate of Insufficiency) When the Save Our Lands Citizens Committee asked the clerk to clarify why the residence address was no match, the clerk's answer on page 2 and 3 of the 6/13/06 letter to the committee stated: "There were several reasons why the residence address on the petition did not match the residence address provided on the Voter Registration Affidavit Form. This may have been caused by (1) a person moving and not re-registering with new residence address; (2) the house number was incorrect against the SVRS; (3) the suffix (Highway, Center, Court, Place, Street, Avenue) was omitted or did not match, provided there are more than one suffixes to an address; or (4) the street name was incorrect against the SVRS." In 2006, we needed to collect 4,846 valid signatures to get the measure on the ballot of whether or not to set aside 2% of property taxes each year. A bill to set aside property taxes to acquire land in Hawaii County had been proposed to the council twice and rejected twice. In 2006, according to the Clerk's office we collected 8,780 signatures (see Certificate of Insufficiency- page 10). We actually were told in the June 13, letter #1 (attached) that we could collect an additional 1,500 signatures but then the clerk's office and corporation counsel said they would not accept the additional signatures. Out of the 8,780 signatures only 3,982 were deemed valid- so that 45.4% of the signatures collected were invalidated. Out of the invalidated signatures, 2,078 or 23.6% of signatures were invalidated because there was no residence address or the address was incorrect. Please vote to delete this requirement for residence addresses to validate a citizen's signature. This requirement, coupled with the requirement for the number of signatures equal to 20% of the number of voters who voted in the last election (the highest requirement in the State of Hawaii), and requiring each petition be notarized, makes it nearly impossible to have a successful initiative petition drive. By making the requirements too difficult, you remove petition initiative as a tool to provide a check and balance on government. The goal of the petition initiative is to get the measure on the ballot to let the people decide. Please call with questions. Sincerely, Debbie Hecht, Coordinator, Save our Lands Citizens Committee P.O. Box 4148 Kailua- Kona, HI 96745 (808) 989-3222 hecht.deb@gmail.com Attachments: 1. Certificate of Insufficiency from County Clerk Connie Kiriu of July 2006 (which includes a copy of the petition that was used) 2. June 13, 2006- Letter of explanation from County Clerk Kiriu to Save Our Lands Citizens Committee RE: Certificate of Insufficiency (NOTE: This letter was sent after the first rounds of signatures were submitted, and before all signatures were turned in to the County.) Charter Commission Letter Regarding CA-12- Revisions to the Charter 2 CONSTANCE R. KIRIU County Clerk WILLIAM E. SMITH Deputy County Clerk County of Hawai‘i Office of the County Clerk 25 Aupuni Street Hilo, Hawaii 96720 Telephone: (808) 961-8255 Facsimile: (808) 961-8912 Hawai‘i County Is An Equal Opportunity Provider And Employer June 13, 2006 Ms. Debbie Hecht, Coordinator Save Our Land Citizen’s Committee PO Box 4148 Kailua-Kona, HI 96745 Dear Ms. Hecht and Committee Members: This is in response to your letter dated June 8, 2006, requesting answers to several questions posed about the Certificate of Insufficiency. We will answer your questions in the order given: 1. In your phone message you asked that we turn in the additional petitions on the 16th and again on the 19th. This would help your staff have time over the weekend to count signatures. Would petitions turned in on the 19th be reviewed quickly enough to meet the June 21st deadline that was set forth in your letter of March 29, 2006, so that you could submit a Letter of Sufficiency by June 23 to get on the Council agenda for the first reading of July 7th? We hope that, by turning the bulk of the signatures in on the 16th, we would have a jump start on the validation process over the weekend. If a small portion is turned in on the 19th, we would have already started with the validation. We view June 19th as the official submittal date. Our goal is to submit the Certificate to the Council on Monday, June 26, 2006. The Council Chair and the Finance Committee Chair have agreed to waive the Certificate and to allow submittal to the Council for its July 7, 2006, meeting. 2. We request to review the individual petitions with the rejected signatures so we could understand why each signature was deemed invalid. A copy of the petitions and the accompanying worksheets will be available when you come to the Elections Office at the Prince Kuhio Mall on Friday, June 16, 2006, at 3:00 p.m. June 13, 2006 Page 2 3. How long is the County required to keep the original petitions? The Office of the County Clerk retains the original petitions for five years according to its retention schedule. However, we currently have initiative petitions dating back to the 1980s. 4. What is the date of the list of registered voters that is being used to verify signatures? We use our computerized Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) to verify signatures. As soon as a Voter Registration Affidavit Form is received and audited, the information is input into the SVRS. The list is current and real time. Members of the Committee are concerned that some voters who registered as late as last fall are not listed on the voter list that we received from your office. How do you account for voters who registered to vote more recently? The list you received was run on January 27, 2006. Anyone who was properly registered to vote before that date should be on the list. Please have the person(s) who says he/she registered to vote last fall contact the Elections Division (961-8277). If a voter registered recently, we checked the petition signature date against the voter registration entry date in the SVRS. If the Voter Registration Affidavit Form information was entered after the signature date, the signature was invalid. 5. What is the amount of time after the Elections office receives the Wiki Wiki registration form until the voter is actually a registered voter in your files? What is the last date you will accept voter registration forms and allow someone to vote in the upcoming November election? It takes not more than one week to perform the intake and audit process. The last day to register for the General Election is October 9, 2006, at 4:30 p.m. 6. The Notice of Insufficiency stated that 229 signatures had no residence address. Please clarify which signatures had addresses that were deemed invalid and why. In these instances, the person did not provide a residence address or he/she provided a mailing address instead (e.g., P.O. Box). 7. The Notice of Insufficiency stated that 517 signatures had residence address no match. Please clarify which signatures had addresses that were deemed invalid and why. June 13, 2006 Page 3 There are several reasons why the residence address on the petition did not match the residence address provided on the Voter Registration Affidavit Form (Statewide Voter Registration System). This may have been caused by (1) a person moving and not re-registering with new residence address; (2) the house number was incorrect against the SVRS; (3) the suffix (Highway, Center, Court, Place, Street, Avenue) was omitted or did not match, provided there are more than one suffixes to an address; or (4) the street name was incorrect against the SVRS. 8. The Notice of Insufficiency stated that 26 signatures were not Hawaii County. Is your office using a statewide list? How do these signatures differ from “people not registered to vote”? Does that mean that they were registered elsewhere? We are on a computerized and networked Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS). The names of people who were not registered to vote could not be found on the SVRS. If the names were located on the SVRS, but were registered under one of the other three counties (Oahu, Kauai and Maui), they were coded as “NHC”. 9. You stated that 2 signatures had no printed name. Volunteers have asked, if the person printed their name in the wrong box, then signed in the other box, would this make the signature invalid? If the printed name and signature were reversed, the signature was deemed valid. 10. The Notice of Insufficiency stated that there were 332 signatures with no signature date. Please clarify which signatures had no signature date and clarify if your office has deemed signatures to be invalid because the month and day were stated, but there was no year stated. If the day, month, year or combination thereof, was missing, the signature was deemed incomplete and invalid. 11. The Notice of Insufficiency stated that there were 26 Prior signature dates. What does that mean? Prior Signature Date (PSD) means that 26 people signed the petition prior to the Voter Registration Affidavit Form being received and entered into the SVRS. 12. The Notice of Insufficiency stated that there were 20 duplicate signatures. Did they have the same address? Several people called me after they received their yellow voter registration cards and said that they wrote their address incorrectly, and I told them to sign again. If they did so, would their signature be invalid because they signed twice? June 13, 2006 Page 4 Signatures are considered a duplicate when all information provided is the same. If someone re-signed the petition, only the signature with the incorrect information would be invalidated. 13. The number of signatures missing is of course self-explanatory. 14. Often a husband and wife would sign the petition one after the other and just use the common ditto sign (“ “) under the address or date. Would this render the following signature invalid? Yes. The elector is expected to enter his/her complete information. We appreciate the hard work and long hours the Committee and its volunteers are putting into making this petition drive successful. The information you required on the petition was exact as we had requested. In fact, the four digit social security numbers and date of birth also helped to validate some voters. While ballot access is a democratic principle we uphold, like nomination and party petitions, we try to be fair and consistent when applying the validation procedures. Hopefully, the voters you ask to sign the petition will be serious and diligent about their commitment to the initiative. When signatures were illegible or hard to decipher, attempts were made several times by more than one person to locate the voter in the SVRS. When the residence address was close, but did not match, we looked up the original Voter Registration Affidavit Form on microfilm to make sure it was not our inputting error. Hopefully, this helps you instruct signature gatherers to assure that information provided on the petition is complete and accurate. Should you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact me. Sincerely, Constance R. Kiriu County Clerk xc: Elections Administrator Pat Nakamoto Corporation Counsel Lincoln Ashida