For more than 16 percent of every 24-hour period, the cameras monitoring the ballot counting at the Anchorage Election Center at Ship Creek go dark to the public on YouTube.
That problem of a three- to four-hour gap in the livestream was laid out in detail by a member of the public on Wednesday night at the Anchorage Assembly. The only Assembly member who appeared to care was Eagle River Assemblywoman Jamie Allard.
Terina DeSautel Clark, who testified for three minutes, also said that no one is supposed to be in the building after 5 pm, but a person was observed between 5:40-5:45 pm inside the building on March 21, as observable by the livestream camera. This, she said, causes concern.
The problem is that, according to the Municipal Clerk, YouTube puts a 12-hour limit on livestreams that can be run continuously. After election workers leave every day at 5 pm, they push the button to restart the livestream of cameras in the Election Center. But they don’t return to work until 8 am the next day, when they restart the livestream, after the cameras stop recording at about 5 am. That
In addition, there is no live footage of what is going on inside the Election Center on the weekends because no one is in the building to keep the livestream going.
To see how the livestream works, check out this link.
And yet that one person was observed on camera after hours, Clark said. That person had a backpack on. It could have been a worker from the upstairs offices, or it could have been someone else, but the problem identified by clark shows that there are people in the building after hours, and at least three hours of every weekday and all weekend the public cannot monitor the security of the ballot-counting area.
Insecure mail-in elections prompted the campaign of Mayor Dave Bronson to park a recreational vehicle outside the election office last May, just so campaign volunteers could keep an eye on the building. They identified numerous problems with processes; at one point a car pulled up and blank ballots were loaded into the building without explanation.
Clark pointed out that that on March 19 and 20 there is no video footage posted, while on March 16, only 18 hours and 40 minutes of footage is available. On March 14 and 15, 20 hours of footage was posted on both days.
In the final days of December, the Anchorage Assembly passed an ordinance that gives the Municipal Clerk vast powers to decide who can be inside the ballot counting facility. That, combined with the lack of transparency due to the limitations of the livestream, bring into question how well the Municipal Clerk is able to manage the mail-in-only elections.
The 2022 Anchorage election is under way, with ballots now starting to trickle into the Election Center at Ship Creek, where there are dramatically fewer observers than there were for last year’s mayoral election. The new rules in place, requested by the Clerk and passed by the Anchorage Assembly’s leftist majority, make it much more difficult for citizens to become observers. Read more here:
