(full disclosure: I work for Courage

It’s time to celebrate a victory for democracy!  

Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters has agreed to count every possible ballot effected by the “double bubble trouble”.  He is following the suggestions made by the Courage Campaign and Secretary of State Debra Bowen.  Today he testified in front of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors about the steps he will be taking to tabulate the vote in advance of the 28 day certification deadline.  He also sent a letter to Secretary Bowen (pdf here).

Thank you to the more than 32,000 people who signed the petition to Logan, those who donated and everybody else that helped make this possible.  While it is unlikely that any delegate counts will be effected, that was never the point.  We live in a democracy where every vote should be counted.  That was in danger of not happening in Los Angeles County.

Much more over the flip including Rick Jacob’s statement after testifying and details about how this count will be conducted.

The Courage Campaign applauds Acting Registrar Dean Logan’s solution to the ‘double bubble’ issue in Los Angeles County.

Clearly, the winners in today’s announcement are, first and foremost, the voters of Los Angeles County who can maintain their confidence in the electoral process and in knowing that their vote will be counted.

Also, through the concerted efforts of the Courage Campaign, concerned citizens and organizations, strong Board leadership, and a Registrar willing to listen and do what it takes to ensure that every vote counts, Los Angeles County has, today, avoided the serious and demoralizing problems confronted by election jurisdictions elsewhere throughout the country.

Mr. Logan has arrived at the solution the Courage Campaign has advocated since the day after the election. The Courage Campaign has consistently demanded that all votes be tallied so that we know how many DTS voters tried to vote for president and then that every ballot be counted where voter intent can be ascertained. Mr. Logan is using the method suggested by the Courage Campaign and many of our friends in the election protection community. We will monitor the counting to assure that it is carried out in a timely manner.

In addition to 32,776 Courage Campaign members who signed a petition to Mr. Logan, we thank County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky for his leadership on this issue as well as the ever vigilant Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

This is a complete victory for people-powered politics and a sign that the people of this state will only accept transparency in the election process.

We look forward to working with the County, the Secretary of State and our friends in the election protection community to assure that this never happens again. Mr. Logan has promised to change the ballot design and the Courage Campaign will follow through and ensure that it is completed in time for the June primary election.”

As for the mechanics of how this will work, check out the letter for specific details.  They will be resetting the machines to do the count.  Not every vote will be counted and here is why from the AP.

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.

That is the difference between the 100k figure and the 50k figure that we talked about a few weeks ago.  The estimations were established from a 1% canvass of the vote, so these are not hard numbers.

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.

This is exactly what the Secretary of State requested happen, which the Courage Campaign supported.  There is no way to count all of these votes, given the overlap of the other party’s candidates.  It just further emphasizes how poorly designed this ballot was and why we need to make sure this never happens again.  Voter intent will be determined as much as possible and that is all we have been asking for all along.

Needless to say I am very happy.  And thanks again to everyone who helped make this possible.

full disclosure: I work for Courage

It’s time to celebrate!  The Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan has agreed to count every possible vote effected by the “double bubble trouble”.  Logan will be following the suggestions of the Courage Campaign and the Secretary of State Debra Bowen to count the votes prior to the 28 day certification deadline.  Logan sent a letter (pdf) to Secretary Bowen to that effect and also testified in front of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this morning, as did Rick Jacobs.

Delegate allocations are unlikely to change, but that was not the point.  Every vote in this country should be counted.  Thanks to the over 32,000 people who signed the Courage Campaign petition, our lawyers who dogged the registrar and many, many more who made this victory possible.

The registrar has promised to change the ballot, so that this never happens again.  The Courage Campaign will make sure he follows through on that pledge.  In addition, we will be seeking legislative changes to make it easier the millions who are registered as Decline-to-State vote.

Rick’s statement and more detailed information on how this count will happen is on the flip.

The Courage Campaign applauds Acting Registrar Dean Logan’s solution to the ‘double bubble’ issue in Los Angeles County.

Clearly, the winners in today’s announcement are, first and foremost, the voters of Los Angeles County who can maintain their confidence in the electoral process and in knowing that their vote will be counted.

Also, through the concerted efforts of the Courage Campaign, concerned citizens and organizations, strong Board leadership, and a Registrar willing to listen and do what it takes to ensure that every vote counts, Los Angeles County has, today, avoided the serious and demoralizing problems confronted by election jurisdictions elsewhere throughout the country.

Mr. Logan has arrived at the solution the Courage Campaign has advocated since the day after the election. The Courage Campaign has consistently demanded that all votes be tallied so that we know how many DTS voters tried to vote for president and then that every ballot be counted where voter intent can be ascertained. Mr. Logan is using the method suggested by the Courage Campaign and many of our friends in the election protection community. We will monitor the counting to assure that it is carried out in a timely manner.

In addition to 32,776 Courage Campaign members who signed a petition to Mr. Logan, we thank County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky for his leadership on this issue as well as the ever vigilant Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

This is a complete victory for people-powered politics and a sign that the people of this state will only accept transparency in the election process.

We look forward to working with the County, the Secretary of State and our friends in the election protection community to assure that this never happens again. Mr. Logan has promised to change the ballot design and the Courage Campaign will follow through and ensure that it is completed in time for the June primary election.”

As for the mechanics of how this will work, check out the letter for specific details.  They will be resetting the machines to do the count.  Not every vote will be counted and here is why from the AP.

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.

That is the difference between the 100k figure and the 50k figure that we talked about a few weeks ago.  The estimations were established from a 1% canvass of the vote, so these are not hard numbers.

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.

This is exactly what the Secretary of State requested happen, which the Courage Campaign supported.  There is no way to count all of these votes, given the overlap of the other party’s candidates.  It just further emphasizes how poorly designed this ballot was and why we need to make sure this never happens again.  Voter intent will be determined as much as possible and that is all we have been asking for all along.

Needless to say I am very happy.  And thanks again to everyone who helped make this possible.

( – promoted by David Dayen)

Full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign

BradBlog, as is the norm over there, provides an excellent evaluation of where things currently stand with the DTS ‘double bubble’ ballots.  It’s long, in-depth, and awesome. In part:

For the moment then, some 50,000 voters in Los Angeles County have had their votes for Presidential candidate currently miscounted. An intended vote for Hillary Clinton, for example, has not been registered as a vote for her. She has lost that vote for the moment, and the voter has been disenfranchised. Needlessly.

Moreover, current acting Registrar Dean Logan is claiming that, due to the fact that the same sets of bubbles were used for both Dem and AI candidates, it’s “impossible” to determine with absolute certainty the intent of the voter. But he is wrong. In almost every single case.

The current miscount/error rate for those 50,000 ballots is now at 100%. Thus, any ballot counted at this point will only lower the current miscount/error rate.

Since almost every single one of those ballots can be counted accurately, as per the voter intent, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s an absolute absurdity and outrage that Logan is claiming that none of them can be, as he argued in an absurd report [PDF] delivered to the County’s Board of Supervisor’s on Monday.

He closes with an elegant summation:

The excuses must stop. Dean Logan must get to work and start counting. NOW.

Any questions?

But w-w-w-wait it gets worse…

The Sacramento Bee has a love note for democracy this Valentine’s Day.  There are still 1 million ballots uncounted from the California primary a week and a half ago.  The state is aiming at a March 4 deadline

Unless you enjoy watching sausage getting made, you may want to look away:

In Sacramento County, 90,000 ballots remain unprocessed, while 277,000 had been counted as of Wednesday afternoon.

Los Angeles County has 200,000 unprocessed ballots – and that’s not counting the 50,000 presidential votes it discarded because a quarter of the decline-to-state voters improperly marked the county’s ballots.

Statewide, Weir said, most of the uncounted votes – about 600,000 – are absentee ballots turned in on election day. Still to be vetted, he reckons, are 400,000 provisional ballots, which typically are valid about 85 percent of the time.

He estimates 10,000 more uncounted ballots are damaged: shredded in the mail, mutilated in vote-counting machines, or gummed up by sloppy voters who dribbled coffee or ketchup on their absentee ballots. Election workers must pry them open, try to figure out the voter’s intention, and then create a fresh ballot to feed into the machine.

Most likely this doesn’t ultimately have a huge impact overall, and the article notes that Mitt Romney dropped out anyway.  But it begs the question.  As an example, if either the full results were known sooner and Romney had done better or the nomination schedule was a bit slower, would people be dropping out so fast?  The whole vote-and-forget thing seems poised to draw a little attention here.

Regardless, the current state of California’s electoral infrastructure is becoming much more clear in the public eye.  I’ve got no objection to it taking a while to count mountains of absentee votes or even the due diligence involved in checking provisional and DTS ballots.  But it isn’t exactly the simple process people try to make it.

(full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)

Dean Logan, the acting Registrar of Voters in Los Angeles issued a detailed

report (pdf) yesterday evening, following a 1% sampling of the Decline-to-State vote.  Unfortunately, he is still refusing to count every possible ballot.  Following his report, the number of uncounted ballots is estimated at 49,500, since the sampling showed that a significant portion intended to just vote non-partisan.  We do not know the hard number, since he has only done a sampling, not pulled and examined all of the ballots.  AP

Registrar Dean Logan said those improperly filled out ballots are impossible to count by hand because of the county’s complicated voting system, which requires crossover voters to fill in two “bubbles”: one to choose a political party and one to indicate their presidential choice.

“There’s no way in looking at the ballot to discern voters’ intent,” Logan said after releasing preliminary findings about the flawed voting system.

Wrong.  Voter intent, as the Courage Campaign has argued all along is clear.  These voters requested a Democratic ballot, voted for a Democrat and just because they missed an extra bubble does not mean that you can’t determine voter intent.

28,000 people have signed our petition to the Registrar demanding he count every possible vote.  Have you signed yet?

Check the flip for more, including excerpts from a letter our lawyers sent back to Logan that specifically discuss voter intent and his obligations under the state Constitution to count every vote.

The full letter from Steven Reyes, a lawyer for the Courage Campaign is available for download in pdf.  Here are the main sections:

First, the “universe of ballots impacted by the cross-over issue” while smaller than some media reports, is nonetheless staggering: 49,500 voters will, unless additional action is immediately taken, have their votes discarded. Twenty-six percent of all DTS voters in Los Angeles County are estimated to have cast ballots that will not count. In some districts, that rate climbs to 41% (in the 46th Congressional District); 45% (in the 27th Congressional District); and 56% (in the 37th Congressional District). We remind the Board that requiring DTS voters to take additional steps to cast their ballots – such as filling in a party selection bubble — is neither required, nor permitted, by law.

Second, we strongly disagree that the “limitations of our voting system and the ballot design impede an ability to determine voter intent on those ballots that were impacted . . . .”  The report states that “there is no way to definitively rule out the distinct possibility that a non-partisan voter used, for example, a Republican Party or minor party vote recorder and marked their ballot for one of those party candidates.”

If this were true, all ballots cast at the polls would be suspect unless poll workers personally escorted each voter to the correct voting booth and ensured that a correct ballot was cast.  Thus, for example, if a registered Green Party voter inadvertently cast a ballot in the Republican Party voting booth, the Inka-Vote system would record that voter’s ballot for the corresponding Green Party candidate. The mere possibility that such a voter might cast a Republican ballot should not cause those ballots to be thrown out.  Moreover, we find the likelihood of this “distinct possibility” extremely remote. Ultimately, when a DTS voter cast his or her ballot for a candidate in positions 11-15 – ballot positions for which DTS voters were only authorized to vote for Democratic candidates – it is contrary to the State Constitution and to the state Elections Code to disregard that vote.

In response to the Florida electoral fiasco in 2000, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 43 on March 5, 2002. Proposition 43 inserted one simple line into Article II of the California Constitution:  A voter who casts a vote in an election in accordance with the laws of this State shall have that vote counted. (Emphasis added.)  Further, state law clearly states that when reviewing votes and voting systems, Election Code requirements “shall be liberally construed so that the real will of the electors will not be defeated by any informality or failure to comply with all of the provisions of the law.” (See Cal. Elec. Code Sec. 19001.)

Logan is coming up with excuses not to count all possible votes.  Our lawyers are arguing that these voters cast legal votes, since the additional bubble is not required to be filled out under the law.  Our state constitution requires that every vote be counted.  Therefore Logan should count every vote.

Here are the actions that the Courage Campaign has demanded be taken in response to the report.

1. The Registrar must take all necessary steps to identify the precise number of DTS voters that were adversely affected by the ballot design flaw and identify the candidates for whom these DTS voters cast a ballot or, alternatively, the range of candidates for whom these voters may have cast a ballot.
2. The Registrar must ascertain voter intent, in a manner consistent with the Elections Code and the State Constitution.
3. The Registrar must count the votes of all DTS voters who cast a ballot for a presidential candidate, but did not mark the party selection, where voter intent is clear.
4. The Registrar must, as identified in his preliminary report, take all necessary steps to ensure that the DTS ballot design flaw is remedied for the June 3, 2008 State Primary Election.

The good news is that Logan is indicating that he will make sure that this will not be a problem when voters head back to the polls in June.  We will make sure he keeps his word.  In the meantime the Courage Campaign will continue to put pressure on the Registrar to count every vote.

(full disclosure: I work for Courage)

There are 94,000 Decline-to-State (DTS) votes that have gone uncounted in Los Angeles County due to the “Double Bubble Trouble”

The Courage Campaign lawyers have been back in forth with Dean Logan, the LA County Registrar of Voters (ROV) over the last 24 hours.  While the Registrar is making noises to the press about counting all 94,000 votes that have not been counted because the voter missed the redundant Democratic bubble, he is only talking about sampling 5% of the vote.  Those 94,000 amount to about HALF of all of the ballots cast by Decline-to-State voters on Tuesday in LA County.  

That is why this afternoon we launched a petition to Dean Logan.  The message is simple. Count. Every. Vote.

We have gotten dozens of stories via email, phone and our website from DTS voters in Los Angeles who think their votes have not been counted, because they missed the extra bubble.  This one from Julian H. is just heart breaking to me.

“I’ve been following politics before I even hit my teens. And 2 weeks before this election, I turned 18, with my registration in weeks before. I knew the issues, the candidates, the propositions, and for the fist time in my life cast a ballot. I heard the next day about the double bubble. No one at the polls mentioned it, and I didn’t see instructions that even pointed to its existence. It’s not such a great feeling that you’re first close up experience in a system you’ve watched for so long at a distance could have amounted to nothing.”

Julian is just one of the 94,000 voters who are currently disenfranchised.

Despite Logan’s last minute attempts to notify poll workers about this problem, at the suggestion of our lawyers, not everyone got the message.

Maria wrote on a blog post of mine on the Courage site:

As a volunteer pollworker our training materials (which I still have) only indicated that non-partisan voters should be given a non-partisan ballot and should be directed to either a non-partisan booth, an AI booth or a Democratic booth.

Believe me if we had been told that their vote would not count if that bubble were not filled we would have emphasized that.

I feel betrayed by the county. After spending all this time preparing for the elections we had 1/6 of the voters voting provisional ballots because they could not be found in the rosters and now this.

Who can I talk to about what I witnessed on Feb 5th? I am really concerned. I have volunteered 3 consecutive times as a pollworker and this is the worst election by far.

We will not let this one go.  All of the votes need to be counted.  The Registrar needs to make sure that this never happens again.

We need to fix the underlying problem effecting all DTS voters.  Poll workers should be allowed to and trained to offer up choices of ballots to DTS voters.  There is no reason why they should have to ask for one.

(full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)

Here is the latest on the “double bubble trouble”.  Today the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors held a hearing.  Several people testified including Rick Jacobs and the Registrar of Voters Dean Logan.  The good news is that Logan sounded amenable towards counting the votes, but made no specific promises.

Any Decline-to-State voter who failed to mark the extra bubble indicating that they wanted to vote in the Democratic primary has not been counted thus far.  There are no guarantees it will happen and so we are continuing to press the issue until every vote possible is counted.

The Courage Campaign is doing three things right now.

1. Requesting that the L.A. ROV conduct a count of all DTS votes, precinct by precinct.
2. Requesting that the L.A. ROV immediately take steps to fix the DTS ballot design flaw for future primary elections
3. Asking DTS voters across Los Angeles County to hold on to the receipt of their vote (“voting stub”) until further notice.

As to #3 on this list.  If you are a DTS voter in Los Angeles County who asked for a Democratic Party ballot on Election Day and still have your paper receipt for voting (“voting stub”) please let us know so our lawyers can insist that your ballot be counted.  

OR

If you are a DTS voter in Los Angeles County and you had trouble at the polls and/or believe your vote may not have been counted.

Please use this form to report your story and receipt number if you have it on the Courage Campaign website.

Courage Campaign lawyer Steven Kaufman (of Kaufman Downing LLP) sent a new letter (pdf here) today to the L.A. ROV.  Excerpts on the flip:

It is clear that under the state election code that DTS voters who have inadvertently failed to fill in bubble numbers five and six after having received a Democratic or American Independent ballot, took all the required steps necessary to have their ballot counted, and that any additional issues inherent in the Inka-Vote system or ballot design process are contrary to law.

It is not sufficient to merely estimate the scope of the problem through random sampls and investigation. As you have stated in various media statements with regard to this issue, every effort to ascertain voter intent must be made by the Registrar’s office. Taking the steps outlined below will help restore voter confidence and send a message to voters that their votes will count and that their vote does make a difference. All this can be accomplished within the 28-day statutory period for certification of the vote…

That is why the Courage Campaign is asking for a full recount.

After the votes are (hopefully) counted we will need to work hard to make sure this never happens again.  This can be fixed.