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February 12, 2008
Around 49,500 Votes Will Not Be Counted
It's better news than yesterday's estimate of 100,000 votes not to be counted. In a LA Times article today, acting County Registrar, Dean Logan, was very honest and straightforward about the situation that took place last Tuesday: "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," he told the Times.
The lost votes are said to be too few within the margin to affect the outcome of the Democratic primary. According to LAist's Super Tuesday Map, 658,937 (55%) votes went to Hillary and 496,192 (41%) went to Obama.
However, even if the there was a potential need to recount, the Times reports that Logan "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." Not only that, some who intended to vote Democratic were sent to Republican booths. It was also noted that training of poll workers was not consistent as some locations had a high rate of nonpartisan ballots that did not make the cut.
It's sobering to hear Logan so transparent about the issues that occurred last Tuesday. Mistakes were admitted and that's the first step to correcting a problem. The next election that the LA County Registrar will be administrating will be on June 3rd.
Previously on LAist: Apparently, The Only Thing More Difficult Than Building A Subway To The Beach Is Casting A Vote
Photo by idcross via Flickr
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I got this e-mail yesterday from The Courage Campaign, just in case anyone here would like to sign it.
Dear JRB,
We warned Los Angeles County about the impending trouble with the "double bubble." Now, the Sacramento Bee editorial board is calling it "a major voting disaster." And there is speculation that the outcome could change how many delegates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama receive in California.
94,500. That's roughly how many people in Los Angeles County voted for Obama and Clinton on Super Tuesday, only to see their votes rejected by the now infamous -- and fatally flawed -- "double bubble" ballot.
Here's the bad news: Despite a record-breaking turnout of 189,000 voters registered as "Decline-to-State" (DTS), Dean Logan, L.A.'s Registrar of Voters, is still refusing to physically hand-count these ballots, effectively disenfranchising 94,500 -- at least HALF -- of DTS voters because they didn't fill in an extra, redundant bubble before voting for President.
Time is running out to change Dean Logan's mind. Nearly 20,000 people have signed our "Count Every Vote" petition. Have you? Please sign it now and forward it to your friends immediately, so we can deliver as many signatures as possible directly to Dean Logan:
http://www.couragecampaign.org/CountEveryVote
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Disenfranchisement. Pure and simple.
And I'm pretty sure 50k could affect the delegate count.
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The flaw in The Courage Campaign's argument is that the so-called "double-bubble" was a redundant step. I don't believe that's true. Nonpartisan voters were to be given nonpartisan ballots, the differentiation being which booth they went to vote in: "Dem" or "AI". Depending on the booth, both AI and Dem candidates overlapped the same bubble numbers across that NP ballot. For example, "Obama" and "insert AI candidate name here" could both have been on generic line #8. The only way to suss out which party/candidate that vote should have gone to would be to look to whether the voter marked the "Dem" or "AI" bubble at the start of the ballot.
There is no way to correctly and fairly identify voter intention on nonpartisan ballots where the voter did not first mark that initial party bubble. So I don't believe there's any way these ballots can be counted (outside of the nonpartisan prop votes, of course). This group of votes was disenfranchised by the design of the ballot itself, not any later decision-making.
Of course, none of that changes the fact that the NP voting process was indeed unnecessarily confusing for voters & pollworkers alike and should be completely revised before the next primary.
Imagine what the fallout would be like if the margin on the Dem race had been tighter.
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I don't follow your reasoning Reg.
A person can write in "Mickey Mouse" and have his/her vote counted. So yes, the "double bubble" deal is not only redundant, but it's a totally bogus reason to throw out someone's vote.
Ballots don't need to be this complicated. I think we need to find out why they are.
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I wasn't "reasoning" the issue, but stating facts on how the balloting/voting process worked for NP's and why the insufficiently marked NP ballots can't & won't be counted.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending the ballot-design or process used in any way - it really is an embarassing mark on the democratic process for LA County.
ps - sure, a person could have written "Mickey Mouse" in the write-in section but it would not have been counted in the end: Mickey Mouse wasn't one of the final 19 qualified candidates on the official write-in list. :)