As many as 100,000 independent voters in Los Angeles did not
-- and most likely will not -- have their ballots counted in
last week's Democratic presidential primary because of an unnecessarily
complex system, inadequately trained poll workers and little
effort by elections officials to notify voters of the proper
procedures, according to news reports and voting-rights activists.
In a system that seemed tailor made to fail, more than half
of the Decline to State voters who cast ballots last week in
Los Angeles County have been effectively disenfranchised. Unlike
every other county in California, LA County requires unaffiliated
voters to fill in an extra bubble on their ballot clarifying
whether they plan to vote in the Democratic or American Independent
Party primaries. (California's Republican party bars independent
voters from casting ballots in its primary.)
Counting the ballots would not change the outcome in LA County,
where Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by more than 160,000
votes, but that is not the point, say outraged voters who are
seething now that they've learned their exercise in democracy
was fruitless.
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"I was disenfranchised, and I am furious," wrote
independent Steve Katinsky in an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times.
"This nonpartisan registered voting disaster makes Florida
look like pikers in election screw-ups. To find out my vote
did not count was a sudden and unexpected shock and is completely
unacceptable."
Voting rights group the Courage Campaign has started a petition
urging LA County registrar Dean Logan to initiate a hand-count
of ballots. But elections officials say that may be impossible
because the same optical-scan ballot was used for Democratic
and American Independent primaries. As the Times explained:
In addition to being the only
county to require the extra party-identifying step, Los Angeles
County is the only one not to print candidates names directly
on the ballot, making a re-count virtually impossible.
"Logically we know that most of these ballots were Democratic,
because the number of American Independent Party voters is very
small," Secretary of State Debra Bowen told the Times.
"But in a democracy we don't guess what the voter's intent
was."
Although he insisted his office "takes the issue of voter
enfranchisement very seriously," Logan seemed to blame
the problems on the voters in a statement responding to the
complaints.
It is important to note
that while hundreds of thousands of voters across the state
encountered new voting systems this election, voters in Los
Angeles County were fortunate to be able to cast their ballots
using InkaVote Plus, which has been in place for several elections.
The manner in which cross over voting was presented in Los Angeles
County was no different than that of the last three statewide
primary elections (2002, 2004 and 2006). The voter instructions
provided in the sample ballot booklets, which were mailed to
all voters in the County, highlighted the steps to be taken
by nonpartisan voters when voting a cross over ballot. Likewise,
poll worker training materials and the actual vote recorder
page instructions were consistent with past practice. Additionally,
this office engaged in extensive voter outreach and education
focused on cross over voting.
That the system was used before
also shouldn't provide Logan much comfort or cover. The Sacramento
Bee observed in an editorial that only 40 percent of independent
voters' ballots were counted in those elections.
"It is outrageous that the county knew of this massive
disenfranchisement and did not make changes," the paper
said. "This calls for an investigation."
The instructions mailed to voters made passing reference to
the need to fill in the extra bubble at the bottom of the pagelong
document, but poll workers say they were not told of the special
instructions before last Tuesday's election, which featured
vastly higher turnout than any of the previous elections Logan
mentioned because of the intensely contested presidential race.
"No mention was ever given about the requirement to fill
in the dot for either party before choosing a particular candidate,"
Michael Nola, an LA county poll worker who attended two pre-election
training sessions told the Times.
By mid-afternoon on election day, officials finally got around
to informing him and other poll workers of the election requirement,
but by then he and countless other independent voters already
had cast their ballots, he said. "Both my wife and I lost
our votes by this needless oversight."
