The V.I. Election System faces troubles inside and out—as citizens threaten the lives of board members, meetings degenerate into arguments, and the federal government threatens to sue the territory if the Senate fails to act on needed changes in the V.I. Code.
Rupert Ross, chairman of the St. Croix District Board of Elections and the Joint Board of Elections, called a Thursday morning press conference to discuss many of the challenges facing the system, including the highly charged meetings that have made accomplishing anything difficult.
But even before the press conference began, Ross clashed with board member Adelbert Bryan, who asked for copies of the documents Ross prepared for the news media and tried initially to talk over the chairman. Ross icily maintained that, "This is my press conference and these [the documents] are for the press. If you want to talk, schedule your own press conference."
Bryan then settled back and took notes. He later dismissed the entire proceeding as "a buncha lies."
The press conference, held in the Elections System conference room on St. Croix, included the following.
• Security – Police were present at Wednesday’s meeting of the Joint Board of Elections at the request of Ross, who said he was responding to comments from other board members that they didn’t feel safe.
Board member Dodson James said members of the audience at Wednesday’s meeting had explicitly threatened the lives of at least two board members in very graphic terms. Ross said the confrontational atmosphere at recent meetings had made stenographers and attorneys too uncomfortable to stay.
After the press conference, Bryan responded disdainfully to the police presence, tapping the table and claiming, "No police can touch me while I’m sitting here."
• MOVE Act and federal pressure – The Military and Overseas Voters Empowerment Act (MOVE), approved by Congress in 2009, puts elections from all U.S. jurisdictions on a timetable that allows military personnel and other U.S. citizens aboard to vote on federal races in their local elections in a timely manner. The deadline for supplying ballots for the general election comes before the deadline for V.I. officials to certify the results of the primary election.
The territory dodged a bullet in 2010, Elections Supervisor John Abramson said, because the primary for delegate to Congress was uncontested. But in August of that year, when it was not yet clear whether there would be a race, Abramson said federal officials had threatened to sue the territory. They could have sought a temporary restraining order against the territory’s general election, and that threat still stands for next year’s election.
If the territory does not change the election timetable as laid out in the V.I. Code, it will have to seek a waiver from federal officials, who would then file suit, Abramson said. He added that it’s not a simple a matter of changing the date of the primary. Every step in the election process then has to be recalculated, he said. Each Senate president since 2009 has been apprised of the situation, he added, but so far there has been no movement to remedy the situation.
Ross said he has scheduled meetings with lawmakers to urge them to act.
• Paper ballots. After the 2010 election, in which voters were not given the choice of using paper ballots because of the wording of V.I. law, the Senate earlier this year approved a measure allowing paper ballots as an official voting instrument. But just saying paper ballots are legal isn’t enough, Ross said. If there are gong to be paper ballots, they need to be designed, written and printed, there needs to be ballot boxes to receive them, there needs to be processes in place for counting them and additional election workers on hand to do the counting, and a whole range of other issues.
All of that will mean additional expenditures not currently included in the proposed 2012 budget for the Election System, he said.
• Election reform – Election reform isn’t one or two issues – a choice between two types of voting machines or ballots – Abramson said. It is a whole range of issues covering every aspect of elections.
In the past years, proposals for election reform would already have been presented to lawmakers, but because of the fracture in the board a proposal has just been presented to board members, who under the circumstances Wednesday refused to approve it. Ross, as chairman, took the proposal in hand and will present it later this month to the board’s executive committee for further action.
The difficulty is that Bryan, as chairman of the reform committee, did not present the plan. Bryan has been arguing with the board for compensation for attending a meeting that was deemed not an official meeting and has refused to submit his committee’s report until compensated.
In minutes of the May 11 joint board meeting (documents provided by Ross,) Bryan is quoted as saying, "You just voted not to pay me and other people who attended. So until ah you decide that you going to pay me for any meeting that I hold, me ain’t telling ah you nothing. Find it out yourself."
At Wednesday’s joint meeting Bryan’s report for the election reform committee was a tally of who had attended committee meetings. It was while Bryan was absent from the meeting that another committee member, Wilma Monsanto, gave the joint board a list of proposed changes to the V.I. Code that, if enacted would make the changes necessary for use of paper ballots, allow the Elections System to hire its own lawyer instead of using the V.I. attorney general, and allow same-day voter registration, so that qualified voters could register and vote on election day.
Several board members said Wednesday afternoon was the first time they had seen the complete proposal and were not willing to approve it without having time to read it and discuss it.
After the press conference Bryan called that a lie, saying it had been available at the St. John joint board meeting.
Bryan also said he was not concerned with how he was portrayed in the news, because his supporters know him and back him regardless.
"The media didn’t make me, and the media can’t break me," he said.
