I’ve long been registered as a non-partisan voter.As such, I’m used to the indignities and disenfranchisements
that accompany opting out of the two-party system – those two parties may or
may not decide to invite you to participate in their voting games, particularly
during primary season.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I received my Los Angeles County voter
information pamphlet in the mail and learned that while the Republicans, in fine conservative
form, weren’t interested in us non-partisan types (of which there are nearly
800,000 – or nearly 1 in 5 of all voters—in LA County alone), the Democrats
were more than happy to open their big tent.
How cool is that, I thought. Especially in this particular
election, when the Clinton/Obama split has galvanized so many voters.
Especially on this historically enormous and unifying voting day, when so many of us are
voting all at once across the nation, and a ballot in a California presidential
primary feels – for once-- like it might actually hold some sway.
I followed the instructions on my voter information mailer
and told the lovely volunteer at my polling place that I wanted to vote in the
Democratic presidential primary. She directed me to a voting booth that was
labeled “DEM.” I cast my ballot, got my “I voted” sticker and left with a skip
in my step: I’d done my civic duty and actually got to vote for somebody I
think will be a decent president (certainly an improvement on what we’ve got
now).
Then I turned on the radio, and learned that DTS voters
(that’s “Decline To State”) in Los Angeles County needed to take one little extra step in order for
their votes to count: They had to stamp a circle marked “Democrat” on their
ballots. Otherwise the vote-counting machine would simply dump the ballot, without
indicating that anything went wrong.
What?
I searched my memory: where was this circle? I don’t
remember seeing it or being offered that option. I didn’t fill it in. My vote
won’t count. (for more details on this outrage, see The California Majority: http://www.camajorityreport.com/index.php?module=articles&func=display&ptid=9&aid=2724)
Is there any feeling worse than knowing you've had the power to vote
ripped out of your hands?
No, according to the California Majority Report.
http://www.camajorityreport.com/index.php?module=articles&func=display&ptid=9&aid=2724)
Bubble trouble on the ballot
A complicated system and confusing ballot may have spoiled the vote for many independents.
By Richard L. Hasen
February 7, 2008
Election administrators have a tough job. They need to pull off a massive voting and vote-counting effort in a short time frame with a limited budget and a slew of underpaid poll workers. Some hiccups are inevitable. At my polling place Tuesday morning, for example, the machine that scans ballots for errors wasn't working; a technician was "on the way." A poll worker simply put my ballot and others in an envelope, and I left with the confidence that it would be properly handled and eventually counted.
Still, some problems can be avoided with a little common sense. And the "bubble trouble" fiasco in Los Angeles County -- which led many independent voters to cast ballots that may not be counted in the Democratic primary -- is simply inexcusable.
Here's the issue. In California, each political party decides whether independent voters -- technically called "decline to state" voters -- can cast ballots in its primary. The Democratic Party and the American Independent Party allow that.
This caused minor confusion up and down the state as election officials tried to sort out which primary ballot, if any, to give to decline-to-state voters. But a problem specific to Los Angeles was much more serious. For their votes in the Democratic or American Independent primary to count, decline-to-state voters here had to fill in a bubble at the top of the ballot indicating which primary they were voting in. A voter who failed to fill in that bubble -- such as a decline-to-stater choosing Barack Obama -- would not have had his or her presidential vote counted. Only votes on local and state propositions would be recorded.
The printed instructions on the ballot (as well as the registrar's website) were confusing and unfamiliar. They directed "nonpartisan voters" to fill in the extra bubble. Did decline-to-state voters know they were also "nonpartisan?" Moreover, some independent-minded decline-to-state voters intending to vote in the Democratic primary could have ruined their ballots by indicating they were voting "American Independent."
Paul Drugan, executive assistant with the L.A. County registrar-recorder's office, told The Times that the instructions were clear and voters were educated about the problem, but he acknowledged that his office foresaw the problem months ago.
Now lawyers are dealing with the registrar-recorder's office and the secretary of state, demanding that decline-to-state ballots get another look and that every effort be made to count ballots for voters who skipped the extra bubble. While those votes won't change the statewide results, some Democratic delegates are chosen based on the winner of each congressional district. That decline-to-state voters -- suspected to heavily support Obama -- could affect the delegate count is not beyond the realm of possibility. It'll probably be days before the registrar gets a clear picture of how many ballots we're talking about.
It never should have come to this. As we learned from the Florida 2000 butterfly ballot and more recent snafus, bad ballot design causes serious problems. Rather than try to educate voters about a complicated system, it is better to design a simpler system. Such a system would have prepared ballots that were pre-marked "Democratic" or "American Independent" so that decline-to-state voters would not have had to go through this potentially disenfranchising hassle. In San Francisco and Riverside counties, decline-to-state voters who asked for them simply got Democratic or American Independent Party ballots.
At the very least, the instructions should have been much clearer. There was no reason to use terminology, such as "nonpartisan," that didn't match that of the voter registration forms. And something has to be done so that independent-minded voters don't get confused by the American Independent Party label.
Poll workers are the first line of defense against ballot mistakes, and they should have been trained to be on the lookout for this problem. If the system is too complicated for poll workers to learn in their 90-minute training, it is too complicated for voters.
Let's hope the county does a better job in June and November. Designing a ballot that lets people cast a vote that actually counts needs to be a top priority. Running elections is a tough business, but it is not rocket science.
Richard L. Hasen is a professor specializing in election law at Loyola Law School.
An estimated 49,500 primary nonpartisan ballots are marked wrong, due to design and poll instruction problems.
By Richard C. Paddock
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 12, 2008
An estimated 49,500 votes were cast incorrectly in Los Angeles County by nonpartisan voters in the presidential primaries and cannot be counted because the voters' intentions are unclear, acting Registrar Dean Logan said Monday.
The mismarked ballots were the result of a confusing ballot design and poor education of poll workers and the public, Logan said. That left many decline-to-state voters unaware of the need to fill in a bubble indicating whether they were voting in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primary.
The Republican Party did not allow nonpartisans to vote in its primary.
"Unfortunately we are not in a position to count those votes because of the limitations of the system and the ballot layout itself," Logan said.
"We want voters to know that we hear loud and clear that this ballot layout is confusing and we need to identify a less confusing method for crossover voting for future primaries."
Logan released a report of the Feb. 5 voting based on a manual survey of nonpartisan ballots cast in 1% of the county's precincts.
It found that 26% tried to vote in one of the two party primaries but neglected to mark a party bubble on the ballot. Although their votes in the presidential race cannot be tabulated, their votes on the propositions will count.
About 50% of the voters successfully cast crossover ballots, and 24% of the independents intended to vote nonpartisan, the survey found.
Logan said the lost votes would not affect the outcome of the presidential races or the allocation of Democratic Party delegates by congressional district because in each case the margins were too large.
Logan, who took over Jan. 4, said the survey also showed that the training of poll workers was uneven. In some precincts, the voting went smoothly and independents who wished to cross over marked their ballots properly. But in other precincts a high percentage of nonpartisan voters cast ballots incorrectly.
Logan said the number of votes that could not be counted was significantly less than the 100,000 votes he earlier had feared were marked incorrectly.
But despite his hope that the ballots could be counted, he said he had now concluded that the ballot design made it impossible to determine voters' intent. One problem is that ballots do not contain the names of any of the candidates and some of the same ballot positions were used for both Democratic Party candidates and American Independent Party candidates.
Adding to the confusion of overlapping ballots, Logan said, some nonpartisan voters were incorrectly directed to Republican Party polling booths and marked presidential candidates in that primary.
Logan said he understood the anger and frustration that many voters have expressed over the ballot confusion.
"Any time a vote is not counted because of an administrative burden it is significant," he said.
Voter advocates challenged Logan's decision and said he should examine each nonpartisan ballot.
"Mr. Logan and the county have at their disposal the means to count the votes and ascertain voter intent in nearly all cases," said Rick Jacobs, chairman of the Courage Campaign. "Anything short of that is unacceptable disenfranchisement of L.A. County voters."
From the Los Angeles Times:
February 18, 2008
L.A. County ballot design went unnoticed for six years
Before troubles were spotted in the Feb. 5 primary, the double-bubble system left nonpartisan votes uncounted in '02, '04, and '06, election officials say.
By Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Six years ago, Los Angeles County began using a ballot for nonpartisan voters that had a little-noticed design flaw. Confusion over how to mark the ballot, critics say, caused tens of thousands of votes to go uncounted in three elections between 2002 and 2006.
At the time, election officials knew that some votes were not being counted but saw no need to make changes. After all, the missing votes went unnoticed in the three primary elections and no one complained.
That all changed with the Feb. 5 presidential primary.
Just before election day, a grass-roots advocacy group called the Courage Campaign realized that the ballot was defective because it required nonpartisans wanting to vote in a party primary to mark an extra bubble designating which party they were choosing.
On Feb. 4, the organization warned the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder's office that many voters could easily miss the party bubble and that many votes could go uncounted.
The group also charged that the ballot design violated state law by requiring some voters to take an extra step not required of others.
After the election, a vote survey conducted by acting Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan found that about 50,000 nonpartisan crossover votes were not counted, sparking outrage among voters across the county.
Some have likened it to the 2000 Florida debacle of butterfly ballots and hanging chads.
"Our contention is that the ballot design is illegal, and that it is illegal not to count the votes," said Rick Jacobs, chairman of the Courage Campaign and former chairman of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign in California.
The ballot problem affected only those people who chose not to affiliate with a political party when they registered to vote. These voters, whom California places in a category called "decline to state," were allowed to vote in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries Feb. 5, but not in the Republican Party primary.
In Los Angeles County, decline-to-state voters who wanted to vote for a Democratic or American Independent presidential candidate needed to vote in a polling booth designated for that party.
Once in the polling booth and given an ink stamp, they were required to fill in the circle indicating which of the two party primaries they were voting in.
But many people found the system confusing. Also, many poll workers didn't understand it, and so were unable to advise voters as to what they were supposed to do.
Logan, who took office Jan. 4, acknowledges that the ballot created confusion among voters and says the county will abandon the double-bubble design and have a new ballot design in time for the June primary. It is unclear what the additional cost would be.
Logan also is investigating whether any of the 50,000 votes can be counted.
"It's not a good ballot style," Logan said. "It is difficult to discuss this without sounding defensive, but I want this fixed more than anyone."
Some voters believe the uncounted votes might favor Sen. Barack Obama over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary.
But Logan and Democratic Party officials say the margins in the race are so large that the votes are not likely to affect the statewide outcome or the county allocation of delegates.
Los Angeles County, the only county in the state to use this ballot design, first adopted it for the March 2002 primary. Keeping costs down was a major factor in the decision, Logan said, as was a desire to minimize the number of different ballots and keep things simple for poll workers.
For election officials, running an election in Los Angeles County is a daunting logistical exercise.
With nearly 4 million registered voters in 4,379 precincts, the county is the largest single voting district in the nation.
The Feb. 5 election alone cost the county about $30 million.
Election officials say that a primary is the most complex kind of election. The number of political parties -- six on Feb. 5 -- means a multiplicity of ballots. Crossover voting that allows nonpartisans to vote in certain party primaries can make organizing the vote even more complicated.
"Election officials will tell you they despise these elections," said former L.A. County Registrar Conny McCormack, who retired in January, a month before the vote. "Voters don't understand them, and poll workers don't understand them."
There are other peculiarities about L.A. County's election system that set it apart.
It is the only county in California to use the InkaVote Plus system, in which voters darken bubbles on their ballot with a special InkaVote pen.
The names of the candidates are listed in the "vote recorder" book in the polling booth but are not printed on the ballot itself. The ballot contains only numbers representing the candidates and the bubbles where voters mark their choices.
For a nonpartisan voter, the choice of polling booth determines which candidates are listed. Further complicating matters, the nonpartisan ballot uses the same set of bubbles for candidates running in different parties. In the Feb. 5 election, bubbles 8, 9 and 10 were used to represent candidates from both the Democratic Party and the American Independent Party. The overlapping bubbles now make it even harder to count the disqualified ballots, election officials say.
McCormack picked this ballot style for the 2002 primary after the state began allowing a modified form of crossover voting in which nonpartisans could vote in some primary contests but not in others, depending on what the parties themselves wanted.
To handle the new variations, McCormack decided to lump all the nonpartisan options together on one ballot and add the requirement that nonpartisans mark a bubble indicating which primary they were voting in. Not printing separate ballots for nonpartisans in each race cut the ballot variations by nearly half, saving money and making it easier on poll workers who hand them out.
McCormack said that for L.A. County to switch to a system that would allow the names of the candidates to be printed on each ballot would require a complete overhaul of the county's election system.
To accommodate all the candidates' names, the ballots would have to be much larger. Printing costs would soar. New warehouses would be needed for the millions of bigger ballots.
A changeover also would have also required purchasing new, slower machines to tabulate the vote, she said.
"To make that kind of change, I am not saying it's impossible, but the cost would skyrocket," she said. "You would need more staff and buildings. The counting would be slowed. It would be a whole new paradigm for everybody."
After the 2002 primary, Logan said, the county never examined the nonpartisan ballots to see how many crossover voters neglected to mark the extra bubble.
Similarly, no effort was made after the 2004 and 2006 primaries to determine how well the system had worked.
Logan declined to estimate how many votes were lost in the three earlier primaries.
But based on the registrar's finding that about 25% of nonpartisan voters missed the party bubble Feb. 5, Jacobs of the Courage Campaign estimated that 80,000 voters were disenfranchised in the earlier elections.
Jacobs and other critics say that election officials should have foreseen problems with the ballot for the Feb. 5 primary. McCormack disagrees.
"This is an unfortunate, unanticipated result," she said. "No one could have predicted this."
The problem with the ballot came to light on the Friday before election day when a Courage Campaign lawyer noticed the double-bubble requirement and began questioning whether it could cause votes to go uncounted.
The following Monday, the group delivered a letter to Logan urging him to publicize the existence of the bubble and educate poll workers.
On election day, word spread among nonpartisan voters that they were required to mark the extra bubble.
That afternoon, the Obama campaign began calling supporters and telling them of the requirement.
But by then, many voters had already cast their votes improperly.
At first, election officials blamed voters for not reading the instructions carefully.
Paul Drugan, Logan's executive assistant, said election officials had foreseen the problem months earlier and had been educating voters about the requirement. He dismissed the concerns of anxious voters who were worried that their ballots would not count.
"Is it a perfect system?" he asked. "No, it is not. Elections are an imperfect beast."
Since then, the registrar's office has become more contrite.
Logan said the ballot design makes it difficult to determine voters' intent but that his office is investigating ways to count the disqualified votes.
He acknowledged that many of the county's 28,000 poll workers, who are paid $80 to $120, were not adequately taught about the bubble during their 90-minute training sessions and did not know enough to inform voters properly.
"We can look back now and say it should have been emphasized more," he acknowledged.
Secretary of State Debra Bowen advised Logan last week to check the roster books of every precinct to see how many voters requested Democratic or American Independent ballots.
If all the requests in a precinct were for ballots in one party, it would be possible to count the votes there, she said.
On Friday, the Courage Campaign presented the registrar's office with nearly 32,000 signatures collected over the last week via an online petition, demanding that Logan "count every vote."
County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the Board of Supervisors was never told that the double-bubble design had disenfranchised voters in past primaries but has now directed Logan not to use it again.
"In a close election it could have influenced the outcome of the election, and it could have affected the nominee," Yaroslavsky said. "We have enough of a perception problem with our elections systems around the country without exacerbating them with this. People want their votes counted. They want all their votes counted."
richard.paddock @latimes.com
Problem fixed, according to this LA Times article:
Most double-bubble votes now counted
L.A. County says it has been able to determine voter intent on about 48,500 presidential primary ballots that weren't tallied because party preference was not indicated.
By Jean-Paul Renaud, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 5, 2008
Los Angeles County elections officials said Tuesday they have been able to count most of the Feb. 5 presidential primary ballots that had been set aside because some voters found them confusing.
Acting Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan had said that about 50,000 votes were not counted after independent voters failed to mark a bubble indicating they wanted to vote in the Democratic or American Independent party primaries.
Over the weekend, an additional 10,000 absentee and provisional ballots were processed, Logan said during an appearance before the county Board of Supervisors.
Election workers were able to determine voter intent on about 48,500 of the ballots, roughly 80%. Those votes were added to the final tally sent to the California secretary of state. The additional votes did not change the outcome of any race.
The message to the public, Logan said, should be clear: "We're going to do whatever we can legally to make sure your vote is counted."
Supervisors had ordered a redesign of the ballot, which elections activists said confused voters by asking that they fill in not only a bubble next to their candidate's name but also a bubble declaring their intention to vote in a party race.
Logan also reported a voter turnout Feb. 5 of more than 55% of the county's nearly 4 million registered voters. In the 2004 primary, 37.5% of voters cast ballots.