Super Tuesday Redo: Half of Uncounted Votes Get Respect
The Daily Breeze has the low-down on the latest from Super Tuesday's ugly non-partisan voting mishap where nearly 50,000 votes went uncounted because of a tricky "double bubble" on ballots. Los Angeles County registrar Dean Logan has announced more than 50% of uncounted votes will be counted. Here are the technical details:
The omission of the additional mark did not affect ballots cast purely for state propositions.Of the estimated 200,000 nonpartisan voters, 50 percent voted correctly and 25 percent didn't pick a presidential candidate, leaving 25 percent who had voted for a presidential candidate incorrectly.
Because the Democratic ballot included eight choices and the American Independent ballot only three, they did not overlap for slots 11 through 15 -- notably including the slots for Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Therefore, any ballots marked on slots 11 through 15 can reasonably be inferred to have been cast for a Democratic candidate and will be counted, Logan said.In the case of ballots marked on slots 8 through 10, the county Registrar-Recorder's office will determine whether they were cast in a precinct in which all of the nonpartisan voters cast ballots for either the American Independent or the Democratic party by using rosters in which that information was recorded.
If all of the ballots in a precinct were cast for a single party, it won't matter whether voters specified which party's candidate they were choosing. [Daily Breeze]
Critics of the County Registrar after the Super Tuesday incident are coming around. Rick Jacobs, founder of the Courage Campaign, who was critical of the election mess was heard praising them for coming clean and restoring public confidence this morning in front of the County Board of Supervisors.
Photo by idcross via Flickr