Mail-in ballot system fixes sought

Riverside County’s aging absentee ballot system needs a major overhaul, and election officials must do a better job convincing absentee voters -- who accounted for more than half the ballots cast in the November election -- to vote early, county officials said Tuesday.

The registrar of voters blamed a three-week delay in reporting results of the November 2006 election on the crush of absentee ballots mailed on election day and the county’s quarter-century-old absentee ballot system, according to a report submitted to the county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

A week after the election, hundreds of thousands of ballots throughout the state had yet to be counted, including one third of the votes cast in Riverside County. Nearly 160,000 county residents had voted by absentee ballot. About 100,000 of those weren’t counted until after election day, county officials said.

The stockpile of uncounted ballots was caused in part by the unusually heavy load of absentee ballots dropped in mailboxes on election day, said Barbara Dunmore, the Riverside County registrar of voters.

“There were so many to the point that we received a call from our postal representative saying they weren’t going to be able to sort the ballots from by the rest of the mail by the time we’d come to pick them up at 8 p.m.,” she said.

As a result, Dunmore had mail carriers drop off ballots at polling locations along their routes. Ballots must be in the registrar’s custody by the close of polls on election day to be included in the official tally.

Voters are told of the deadline in their sample ballots and on their official ballot envelope, yet many still wait until the last minute to cast their vote. Dunmore surmised that the recent ballot’s unusual length -- requiring extra return postage -- probably caused more voters to hang onto them longer.

The lengthy ballot was also partially responsible for long waits at the polls. In some cases, voters waited up to 90 minutes to cast a ballot.

Most absentee voters remembered to tack on extra postage, Dunmore said, but the registrar established a fund with the post office to cover insufficient postage for those who forgot.

Once an absentee ballot is returned, election officials begin the task of processing them. They check the signature on every returned absentee ballot envelope with the voter’s signature on their original voter affidavit and then file the ballots in precinct order.

To help speed up the counting, Dunmore is hoping to buy a new absentee system by February 2008. Most new systems allow registrars to post hourly updates; posting daily updates with the county’s current machines is difficult.

A new state law that went into effect this year also gives election officials an extra four days to begin processing absentee ballots before an election and include them in the semi-official tallies released on election night. The number of absentee voters has risen since state lawmakers passed a law in 2002 allowing people to register as permanent absentee voters, according to the secretary of state’s office.

As for getting absentee voters to turn in their ballots sooner, Dunmore’s hoping that larger reminders in the sample ballot and a public awareness campaign will suffice.

sara.lin@latimes.com