(Dade County, CA) — The news reports of last week that the SD County Registrar of Voters had not ordered enough mail ballots elicited a kind of "color me surprised" response from many political watchers.
It’s nice that photocopied versions were sent to those requesting ballots. What you may have missed, however, is that the information on the estimated-to-be-returned 5,000 photocopied mail ballots will have to transferred by hand to official ballots, so they can be run through the opti-scan vote counters.
Say what?! That’s right, the results of every up- and down-ticket race, every local office, and every statewide and local ballot measure for about 5,000 ballots will have to be recorded by hand.
And we thought hanging chads were bad.
As far as day-of-voting, the SDUT is already reporting technical glitches with many electronic voting machines. The line was long, but things seemed fine when I hit my polling place at 7:15 a.m. Yet, the very first person I saw at an 8 a.m. meeting said none of the machines at his poll were working, so he finally gave up and left at 7:20 a.m.
Somewhere, someplace, someone might call this "disenfranchisement," regardless of the number of voters impacted.
Reports from the ROV indicate "minor problems at the polls regarding the touch screens, but nothing major." Okay, I’ll buy that for now…let’s see how the day progresses.
At any rate, here is some useful info from the Registrar about vote totals tonight and in the next several days (results at www.sdvote.com):
-The first bulletin on election night will be released just after 8 p.m. and consist of the absentee ballots voted on paper that have been signature verified and prepared for tabulation.
-The second bulletin will be at approx. 10 p.m. and will consist of absentee ballots cast on the touchscreens at the Registrar’s office during the 29-day voting period. (This will be cumulative; including the results of the first bulletin.)
-Precinct results will appear on the third bulletin at 10:30 and then every 30 minutes after that. (Again, cumulative; including results from the first two bulletins.) If it is important for you to know the absentee results later, then you should print out the first and second bulletins before the precinct totals show up.
-Precinct-by-precinct totals will be available a day or two after the election. Please call before you come to the Registrar’s looking for them. It will be a few thousand pages and we might wait until after one or two of the add-on counts, just so they are more complete. The final precinct results will be available after the election is certified; no later than December 5. A certified copy will be mailed to each jurisdiction with candidates or propositions on the ballot.