Given the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters, and maybe even hundreds of thousands of voters, from Super Tuesday’s Los Angeles County Democratic Primary election, which the county’s current acting Registrar incorrectly claims to be “impossible” to count accurately, we believe it’s time to place some blame squarely where it belongs for the entire mess.
A Los Angeles Times editorial this week, where, it seems, the paper may have finally found religion on the issue of Election Integrity, serves up a great starting point…
As of today, we take back the jeers about hanging chads and the unkind comments about inept voters befuddled by butterfly ballots. Somehow it doesn’t seem as funny when it happens at home — voting irregularities in Los Angeles County will disqualify the ballots of thousands of people who went to the polls on Super Tuesday.
In 2000, Florida voters flubbed their choices for president because they were confronted with a ballot whose design was new to them. But that’s not the case here. L.A. County officials have long used a ballot whose design was known to consistently disenfranchise unaffiliated voters. They simply did nothing about it.
…
Election officials are calling this a glitch, but the outcome was entirely foreseeable. In fact, it has happened before. In the March 2004 election, 44% of crossover ballots were unusable, and in June 2006, it was 42%. With numbers this high, the county registrar should have investigated this matter long before now.
So it happened before. 44% of Non-Partisan cross-over ballots went uncounted in March ’04 and 42% in June ’06. And yet, the county went into ’08’s primary with no plans to change a thing.
The woman who dreamt up the ridiculous scheme, former Los Angeles County Registrar and Diebold cover girl Conny McCormack, quit just over a month before the election, and knew about the problem from years past, but did nothing about it. Or, she didn’t know about, and was thus criminally negligent in her job as chief voting official for the nation’s most populous county…
We’ll have more on the latest Los Angeles County “Double Bubble” mess over the weekend, but for the moment, speaking of “criminally negligent”, we’re glad to see that the LA Times has finally begun to come to terms with these sorts of issues — at least if their editorial is any indication — as sad as it is that they had to wait until it “happen[ed] at home.”
As they write, “Election officials are calling this a glitch, but the outcome was entirely foreseeable.” Indeed it was forseeable. Yet, the Times, arguably the state’s paper of record, has done next to nothing to cover these issues for years, as The BRAD BLOG has pointed out over many of them. (Yes, we live in LA County, and the Times is our local hometown paper.)
Even after last week’s Super Tuesday — and even as it appeared that hundreds of thousands might be disenfranchised by McCormack’s idiotic Non-Partisan cross-over voting scheme — the Times played down the problems in an article headlined “Few election glitches, except for independents.”
The sub-header of their editorial this week is: “Super Tuesday presented a unique choice. Too bad that a flawed ballot disenfranchised thousands in L.A.”
To which we’d add: “Too bad the LA Times didn’t give a damn about such issues until now.”
We’ve come to expect irresponsible public officials like McCormack, and her inept compatriot in Sacramento, the thankfully-former Sec. of State Bruce McPherson, to get away with whatever they can. On the other hand, we also expect our fourth-estate, the mainstream media, to keep them honest and hold their feet to the fire on such issues. Instead, the LA Times has served as little more than a mouth-piece and surrogate for those public officials over the years, even going so far as to endorse the irresponsible McPherson when he was challenged by the thankfully-new Sec. of State Debra Bowen back in 2006. That election came long after the problems with California’s voting systems were quite well known, and even long after McPherson had re-certified the Diebold voting system despite it’s failure to comply with federal voting systems guidelines, and thus, it’s failure to comply with California state law.
Again, we’ll have more details on the latest “Double Bubble” trouble soon. But the above should be noted along the way in hopes that someone holds somebody accountable for this mess that McCormack’s current replacement, acting Registrar Dean Logan, seems hell-bent on making even worse that it needs to be by telling LA County’s Board of Supervisors that it would be “impossible” to determine the intent of the voters on all of those uncounted ballots.
Logan is out-and-out wrong. As The BRAD BLOG pointed out late this week, it would not be impossible to determine the accurate voter intent of nearly every single one of those currently uncounted ballots. Of course, that would take Logan actually bothering to count those ballots, which sort of seems like his job.
Oh yes, all people must know LA is for Hillary… by not counting ALL the votes, IMO!
I’m hopeful and acting locally for the day people like connie mccormack are in jail.
Yep, if you’ve met one B Esser over in kosickstan you’ve met them all.
Hey Dredd, while praying I get their next turrist FALSE FLAG will be FOILED. tee hee, tee hee. Who knows at this point?
Just vote THE BUMMS OUT (closet boys and girls being compromised by NSA spying maybe…) No homophobe intended. Shit, at least I work with everyone openly! Humans being.
Just emailed NYT for taking the bold step of reporting the obvious…there might be a problem when Obama gets 0 votes in Harlem. Hillary has to steal her way to the WH..just like bush. Charlie Rangel’s district went to corporate hill…surprise surprise.
My money goes for “was thus criminally negligent in her job as chief voting official for the nation’s most populous county…”; now lets see her get prosecuted; and where was the previous SOS ‘investigators’ when this was occurring? Are they still employed? If so, fire their asses.
New motto for Diebold, “we don’t just sell electronic voting machines anymore, we also provide you with election officials to make them perform the way we tell them to.”
The results are in:
(FT). And this while election officials were hoping to catch up with general consumer sentiment about their products. They are just below the general consumer confidence.
You are doin a heckuva job bushies. Won’t it be wonderful if McPain gets to give it to us for a 100 years or more?
I hope everyone notes that, while voting machines do have problems, the worst cases by far of voter disenfranchisement occur not because of voting machines or systems, but by incompetent or negligent election officials whose actions/inactions would cause massive election problems regardless of what technology they were using.
I’m not saying we should back off scrutiny of the technology, but our efforts would pay off more effectively if they were aimed at the laws and officials rather than the vendors who supply them. Potentially, hundred of thousands of voters were disenfranchised in LA due to poor ballot design. I’m not aware of any case where bad voting machines or systems have come anywhere close to doing this kind of damage.
We need standardized ballot design laws nation-wise that ensure our ballots are readable and understandable by the most simple-minded of us along with registration laws ensuring we don’t show up to vote only to find we’ve been mistakenly dropped or re-partied. Better yet, let’s just get rid of that party thing altogether and be “citizens”.
Software companies have spent Billions over the last few decades to study usability in order to design user interfaces that are understandable and intuitive for end users. Ballots are essentially our “interface” into the voting process, yet most ballots are designed by clerks or other election office workers who have no experience, education or training in the proper design of “interfaces”. Perhaps some universities could obtain grants to study this issue and publish national guidelines for the proper design of “fool-proof” ballots that could then be codified into law.
So when will it happen that in some election district (any election district) where the election process had a significant breakdown, the election will be conducted over again?
It seems that this what really MUST happen if we are to have fair elections, in addition to the responsible officials being replace and/or indicted.
#10. I second that. I guess if all the votes started going to Huck and Obama , it would be time for the do overs.
Conny McCorHack
“Election officials are calling this a glitch, but the outcome was entirely foreseeable.” (LA Times)
I would welcome the hasty exodus of the word “glitch” from the election lexicon. Glitch is an alibi, not an explanation.
“Glitch” is a one size fits all implication that an unpredictable, unforeseeable, anomalous, puzzling, quirky, befuddling event has occurred which no one can understand (and of course glitches defy explanation), for which no one is responsible and which could not have been prevented, an oddity leaving otherwise honest, efficient, and competent officials scratching their heads and saying “What the heck?”
Peel off the word “glitch,” and what’s underneath? What are the specific actions that specific people take, or do not take, resulting in specific problems? What information and skills, or lack thereof were involved? Are we looking at honest mistakes, election system shortcomings, procedural gaps, or perhaps unsavory motives? Lets take a clear eyed look and see.
When the proper noun (name of person) is connected to the active (not passive) verb (specific action taken/not taken by the specific person), we at least are seeking clarity on what occurred.
Anyone who accepts the unexamined explanation of “glitch” allows people to wiggle out of responsibility or fact-based explanations, hiding behind the stars and stripes fairy tale that all is quiet and secure as the election officials walk the streets of election Sparkle City — except, oops, when it isn’t, when a “glitch happens”.
The number of times this word has been given credence, even in election reform activists’ reports, is …. too many. I hope people will press onward when someone posits that a “glitch” jes “happened”.
In LA County, I look forward to hearing who is responsible for creating, road testing, approving, and post-election AUDITING the effects of the ballot design. Are we repeatedly using “great ballot ideas” without testing them first? In a county the size of LA County, why??
If the reply is “no one in particular audits the effects of the ballot,” I would say, “You mean you haven’t received calls from either major political party or any candidates about e.g. the high rate of undervotes and or unexpectedly high votes for third party candidates and looked into it?”
I find it not fathomable that someone in LA County elections administration is not noting who was disenfranchised and where. If that is the case, then we are looking at an election system that is not self-monitoring and self-correcting its own shortcomings and is in dire need of an audit of how they are operating.
I would like to know if candidates affected in past elections contacted McCormack in the past elections and the results of their efforts.
We the citizens want to know how the procedures and people in LA County have allowed this design to be used repeatedly.
IT’s not just about one-shot problems and personalities — it is about building a system and procedures that are so well designed that individuals with less than noble motives — or individuals with noble motives but a lack of skill or knowledge — cannot push bad design forward without its getting caught.
The response when the word glitch is uttered should be NOT to nod wearily and knowingly, but to get a glint in the eye and lay into it, deconstruct it — in LA County, tell us who was responsible for designing, road testing, and approving this ballot design.
The nitty gritty details will be the whole story here. Connie’s gone — did she leave someone behind to keep her legacy alive?
HAS SOS Bowen considered instituting regular ballot design auditing? Has the California legislature considered codifying the road testing of ballot designs under actual conditions on a diverse group of citizens before using it in an election?
The roads to election hell are paved with a variety of types of intentions, some of them good, and some not.
Scratching your head and muttering “glitch,” election officials, is not the rapid path to improvement.
Why isn’t this a bigger headline?
In 2004 when North Carolina lost 4,400 votes in one chunk, it was a major scandal.
Now we are talking about how many – 50,000 to 100,000 votes LOST?
Excuse me, but this is gigantic.
How much did this loss of votes affect the outcome of the election?
What was the margin of “victory” here?
Doesn’t Los Angeles County account for 1/3 of all of the votes in CA? (I read it in Dave Eggers’ column/op in the WaPoo)
Jack Nauti #9, naively said:
Exactly. You’re not aware of any such case. And you likely never will be. That’s the danger.
The good news here, because LA County uses actual paper ballots, we can SEE what went wrong. AND we can correct it!
Couldn’t have happened with a voting machine. At least not with a DRE. They, along with all of the criminal voting machine companies who have raped the American government over the last X years need to be tossed out of the Election Business once and for all. After they pay us back for the criminal fraud they’ve perpetrated on the American people.
Dragging their feet on advertising for a replacement for Conny McCormack, meanwhile the department is run by Conny’s handpicked successor. The job description as defined now, requires nothing more than a drivers license, not a college degree and five years of experience like the dog catcher job requires. Does that make sense to you?
“Dragging their feet on advertising for a replacement for Conny McCormack, meanwhile the department is run by Conny’s handpicked successor. The job description as defined now, requires nothing more than a drivers license, not a college degree and five years of experience like the dog catcher job requires. Does that make sense to you?”
Yeah, it does, IF the fix is in and Logan is getting the job.
IF the previous requirements have just been changed, it’s mighty suspicious.
Therefore, if an election integrity person with higher credentials applies, and LA County still hires Logan….might be time to see if you can follow the money?