News

First Commissioners' Meeting of 2009

02/04/2009

Philadelphia's three City Commissioners and their department heads met today in their first official meeting of 2009. Below are notes from this meeting:

New (slower) SURE system

The Department of State launched a new database for processing Voter Registration forms named, appropriately – E.L.V.S. The new system is similar to S.U.R.E. (the old system) but, was developed largely in-house so as not to spend another $20 million on a 3rd rate system. E.L.V.S., however has problems of its own. Bob Lee reported that the City has been unable to scan new registrations, export statistics or print data, and the system is about as slow as S.U.R.E. was 4 years ago (which is apparently very slow). The benefit of E.L.V.S. is that the State employed developers who are responsible for fixing it and have been working through many of these problems with the City. 

Voter Registration

Since the November 2008 Election 55,000 voters have been knocked off of the Philadelphia rolls due to inactivity and not responding to Address Verification Notices. This brings the total number of registered voters down to around 1,069,000 and brings the total number of division over 1,200 voters to approximately 22. This number is approximate because the City has not been able to export statistics on current voter registration numbers since the implementation of E.L.V.S.

Redistricting Divisions

Democratic 5th Ward Leader Michael Boyle, Committeeman Glen Hing (of the Chinatown polling place) and Michael Meehan were present at the meeting to support the idea of waiting until after the Primary to split the 3 divisions in the 5th ward. Plans for splitting these divisions would break them into 3 divisions each, creating 6 new divisions. Boyle, Hing and Meehan all agreed that they didn’t have enough time to recruit Election Boards, Committeepeople and notify voters before May’s election. The Commissioners voted in favor of waiting until after the Primary to split these divisions.

Stephanie Singer,Democratic 8th Ward Leader has asked the commissioners to split the 8th ward 19th division. The Commissioners will be submitting a petition for this split to the court this week. Singer also has asked that the Commissioners consolidate two divisions which are in the same apartment complex at Parkway House. If these two are consolidated the total number of registered voters at that location would be just over 1,000 (based on November 2008 numbers).

Watchers’ Certificates

The Commissioners’ plan to add a line to the Watchers’ Certificates that says “This certificate authorizes the individual to watch in any ward in Philadelphia.” This will clarify, for Polling Place Officials, the law on Watchers and make sure that minority party watchers are granted access polling places on Election Day.

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