Karen Osborne, director of elections for Maricopa County, is known as one of the most knowledgeable and articulate experts on the ins and outs of voting in Arizona. She joined the county Election Department in 1991, and has held her present job since 1995. Prior to that, Ms. Osborne served as Arizona’s assistant secretary of state from 1978 to 1991. She was interviewed by Arizona Capitol Times in her office on Aug. 3.

What are some of the challenges you’re facing and how are you dealing with them?

The biggest challenge is growth — growth in the population and growth of the number of registered voters. We’re at 1.6 million voters, and we have grown by 200,000 since 2002. And it keeps growing every day. One of the hardest things is to find polling places. The law says they have to permit electioneering. When the law was passed in 2004, we actually lost about 40 polling places. They didn’t want the signs pounded into the ground. They’re willing to allow us to use their property, but they don’t want electioneering. Some of those are churches and homeowners associations. In 2004, we had 95 percent of our polling places close at a reasonable time, but in our really high growth areas we had long lines. So we’re splitting precincts, we’ll probably add 75 precincts. That means we have to find 75 more polling places.

What else are you doing to meet this challenge?

We’re going to embrace a plan of having mega-voting centers. That’s a new concept for us. We’re trying to find five locations that are large enough to have 100 parking spaces. We see very large buildings that have been vacant for several years, and that’s what we are looking to rent for early voting for the primaries and the general next year. Our goal is for people who have moved to come into these centers, change their address, and vote so the line doesn’t get longer at the polling place. We had 64,000 provisional ballots last year, mostly because people had moved.

Where are the major growth areas in the county?

Ahwatukee, Anthem, Queen Creek, Gilbert and Chandler. We look at the plat maps for new developments, and we go to those developers and ask them how many homes will be occupied on Election Day so we can try to get ahead of the development.

How has the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 been working in Arizona?

It has many facets to it, not the least of which is a push toward providing access for the disabled to vote. The Secretary of State’s Office is working toward an RFP for machinery that will allow us to have access for the disabled to vote in each of the polling places. It will probably be some sort of touch-screen voting.

Is that for 2006?

Yes, and it’s mandatory. Which means we need to make the selection of the product and train the polling place workers how to set it up and how to use it.

So we’re talking abut the machines, not necessarily access to the polling place, right?

We have been working on access to the polling places for many years. If we have a location that is not handicap accessible, we take ramps. We have very few places, mostly in rural places, where the building is accessible, but they have a gravel parking lot.

How do you combat that?

We try to provide as much information to citizens in those areas — do they want to vote by mail? We can take the ballot out to the car if they can’t come in. Sunflower and Tortilla Flats are ones that come to mind. The county is really diverse. Three hours from my office is the Hickiwan precinct in the very southernmost part of Maricopa County. Actually, you have to go to Pinal County and up through Pima County to get to it. It’s a Native American village of about 80 people.

How much HAVA money is coming in from the federal government?

I believe the secretary of state has $40 million to take care of the requirement for a statewide registration system, so that all counties are connected, and for the purchase of voting machines for the disabled as well as the replacement of all punch card machines in Arizona. Maricopa County has no punch card machines. It will be one registration system so that when you enter a voter’s name, the information will come back to see if that person is a duplicate in another county. HAVA requires a statewide database.

Do we have much of a problem of voter fraud in Maricopa County?

I can tell you that we have such a minimal amount of anything that you could label as voter fraud that it is very reassuring. We take any complaint seriously and we investigate it fully, and rarely do we find anything other than an anecdotal story that can’t be substantiated at the end. When we do, we turn those issues and all the information over to the County Attorney’s Office.

I received a report on how all-mail voting is going in Oregon. What is your view on how all-mail voting would work in Maricopa County, what problems would you see?

All mail voting is the most secure of any type of voting because we match every signature on the envelope to the signature in the voter file. There’s a bar code on every envelope that we are able to scan electronically and it pulls up the signature of the voter and you can match that directly. People can’t get two ballots and vote twice, and it is the most secure and the most cost effective of any voting method.

How long have we been doing voting by mail?

Previously with absentee voting you had to have a reason, you had to be over 65 and had to live 25 miles from the polling place and there were a number of other things, and your signature had to be authenticated by a notary or a precinct committee person. Now you don’t need a reason, because you want to literally change the Election Day to something that works for you. The responsibility for verifying the signature shifted to the county recorder, and we were able to do that. The proof is in the pudding. We went from 30,000 in 1990 to 567,000 in 2004, as it became more available and more well-known. More than 50 percent voted that way

How would you know if somebody was coerced at home to vote for somebody?

You don’t. That is one of the inherent issues of voting, whether you’re at the poll or the kitchen table. Are you going to allow somebody to intimidate you to vote how they want you to?

Do you see at any time Arizona going to all-mail voting.

In an all-mail election, whether it be a city or a school district or whoever, we do a mailing for them. You do a lot of work ahead of time to make sure everybody is at that address. Election ballots cannot be forwarded. The post office cannot forward them. The mail ballots go out to their homes, they vote and send them back. If they make a mistake, they can come in to whatever entity it is and get another ballot. It relieves you of finding polling places and the expense of funding polling place workers and training them. When we have an election we have to find 7,700 polling place workers.

What does that cost?

About $1 million. Workers have to set it up the day before, then be at the polling place by 5:30 a.m., keep it open until 7 p.m., and when they get cleaned up it’s 8 or later, and we pay them a whopping $85.

No overtime?

No overtime. Maricopa County is fourth largest election agency in the United States. We look at other best practices on how to attract workers and get them trained. Mrs. Helen Purcell [County Recorder] has asked the Legislature for a pilot program to have 16-year-olds work in polling places, to get them interested in the process, write essays and possibly compete for a scholarship donated by corporations and labor unions. It’s working in Missouri and Florida.

Do you see the day when Arizona might be a strictly by-mail state?

I
don’t think so. We may be able to get approval from the Legislature if it’s an issue-only election, and something that is countywide. The perfect all-mail election would have been light rail and our hospital district. It changes how you campaign. In the old days, a candidate wanted to peak right before Election Day. Now, that peak is 33 days before the election.

Any specific challenges you’re facing because of new laws?

Two things. One is a new provision for how people gather signatures. Voters must be registered in the district the day they sign the nomination petition. In the past, you could be registered anyplace in the county. That takes us into Prop. 200, which has two issues. The registration issue is proving citizenship before you register to vote. The other side is identification at the polls. We’re all waiting to see how the rules at the polling places turn out. The real test of patience will be trying to get 7,700 polling place workers to be able to embrace what ID is and what it isn’t.

How would you compare your duties and responsibilities at the county and state levels?

What’s really unusual is that every once I awhile I’ll get into the very deepest part of the minutia here, and I’ll ask who in the world made that rule. And they’ll say, “Somebody named Karen Osborne when she was in the Secretary of State’s Office.” —