Glitches Hinder Casting of Votes

Problems with new electronic voting systems caused some Orange County residents to vote in the wrong district elections Tuesday and prevented some San Diego County voters from casting any ballot at all.

The difficulties in two of Southern California’s largest counties marred the state’s transition from decades-old voting systems to new, computerized ones -- part of a costly nationwide effort to avoid the kind of punch-card ballot problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

In Los Angeles County, voters marked paper ballots with dots of black ink instead of punching out the notorious and problem-prone chads. Officials in the nation’s most populous county have yet to decide on an advanced touch-screen voting system that could cost an estimated $120 million.

Although there was some confusion with the new method of voting in Los Angeles, the county did not experience the trouble to the extent evident in counties to the south.

In Orange County, poll workers unfamiliar with the new electronic voting system made mistakes Tuesday that allowed many people to vote in the wrong districts, potentially endangering the outcomes of several races, officials acknowledged.

Brett Rowley, a spokesman for the Orange County registrar of voters, said “many” voters called to complain that the wrong ballot popped up on their screen, but he said he did not know how many complaints the office had fielded.

“We’ve had quite a few phone calls [from voters] saying they received the wrong ballot,” Rowley said. “It always concerns us if people feel they received the wrong ballot. Unfortunately, once you cast your ballot, it’s the same as if you put your ballot in the box. We can never retrieve it.... That’s the unfortunate thing.”

Orange resident Sharon Urch had an experience similar to those reported by many Orange County voters. When she looked at the ballot on her electronic voting machine, she noticed the names didn’t match those on her sample ballot. She said she was looking for Democrat Bea Foster’s name in the 71st Assembly District race, but instead saw the name of Patrick John Martinez, a Democrat who is running for the Assembly seat in District 60, which does not represent Orange.

“I backed up the dial, thinking I had missed something,” Urch said. “But I proceeded on and kept voting because everything else matched. I had a 3-year-old on my arm and I had to get to work. So I voted anyway.”

Rowley said the problems can be traced to poll workers, whose job it was to provide voters with an access code for the proper ballot, not to the county’s $26-million electronic voting system.

Orange County Supervisor Chris Norby, who worked as a volunteer Tuesday at his neighborhood polling place in Fullerton, said any new election system is going to encounter some glitches. But he said he expected Registrar of Voters Steve Rodermund to investigate what went wrong -- and to learn from it.

“No election system is perfect because it’s run by human beings,” Norby said. “Obviously, anyone who loses a race by just a few votes may wonder where those few votes came from.”

Each Orange County voter was given an access code which, when typed into the electronic voting tablet, was supposed to produce a ballot customized for the voter’s political party and precinct.

Rowley said election officials thought that some poll workers had made mistakes while retrieving access codes, causing many of Tuesday’s problems.

Anaheim resident Shirley Green, a Republican in the 68th Assembly District, said she was given the ballot for the 67th District -- a mistake she said workers acknowledged having made from the time the polls opened at 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. when she voted.

“This is really terrible,” said Green, 69. “It’s not fair to the people that are running and it’s not fair to the people that are voting. I was upset. I was not able to vote for who I wanted to vote for. That’s my privilege and right to vote for someone.”

It remained unclear Tuesday what impact the mistakes would have on any of the races in Orange County. Ballot tabulating mistakes and irregularities often result in legal challenges, but judges rarely intervene and overturn election results, said Mark Petracca, a political science professor at UC Irvine.

“Anyone can challenge anything, but courts do not like to overturn the results of elections” Petracca said. “It is a threshold question and this requires proof that there was a big enough problem that, had it been remedied, would have altered the outcome.... The legal hurdles are very high.”

Without the tangible paper ballots, Petracca added, any recount would inevitably be complicated. Petracca said that any challenge would also have to prove that irregularities were worse than those previously expected with paper ballots and built into the old system.

Assemblyman Ken Maddox, a Republican candidate for state Senate in the 35th District, said he had driven to the polls at Westminster Christian Assembly after fielding calls from voters complaining that his name wasn’t on their ballot.

“I went down there to find out what was going on,” Maddox said. “I got there about noon. They hadn’t even bothered to notify the registrar. We called the registrar and they told us the technician had gone to lunch.... You can imagine how I’m thinking. It’s called, ‘You don’t get lunch today. Eat in your car.’ ”

After several phone calls to the registrar, Maddox said, precinct workers realized they had entered the wrong district into the voting machines. As a result, the 35th Senate District race did not appear on the ballot.

“This was especially disturbing to me because this is my base,” Maddox said. “A large Asian district was denied the right to vote today. Vietnamese American voters were denied the right to vote for me, as well as for [Assembly candidate] Van Tran.”

Maddox said officials at the registrar’s office told him there was nothing he could do.

“I’ll have a better sense [today] about whether or not I want to pursue legal action,” Maddox said.

San Diego County’s experience with its new $30-million touch-screen voting system was less than stellar.

An hour after the polls were supposed to open, the new voting machines at 10% of the county’s 1,611 precincts still were not operating, according to Joe Tash, a spokesman for the county registrar-recorder’s office.

Tash said poll workers saw an unfamiliar screen when the Diebold system, purchased in December, was turned on at precincts across the county. Until poll workers were given further instructions, they were unable to sign on to the system. As a result, they could not program the plastic “smart” cards that tell the touch-screen voting machines what kind of ballot a voter can cast.

Tash said that machines at 75% of the county’s precincts were open within 15 minutes of the scheduled 7 a.m. start time. “By 8 a.m. you had 90% up and running.” He could not estimate how many voters left their polling places because they were unable to cast ballots.

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley expressed concern about what he called the “somewhat serious” problems in San Diego County. “Anytime someone is delayed, that is a potentially disenfranchised voter. It’s obviously of great concern,” Shelley said.

But San Diego County Registrar of Voters Sally McPherson said “voters were not disenfranchised, only inconvenienced.”

McPherson said the county is the biggest single jurisdiction in the nation to switch to an all-new voting system.

“Election officials want perfect elections. That was my hope here,” she said. “I am disappointed it did not start perfectly. But we had things fixed very quickly.”

San Diego County Supervisor Bill Horn called the problems “intolerable” and demanded a full investigation into the computer glitches. Horn said he believed some of the poll workers were inadequately trained.

In Los Angeles County, voters were handed a paper ballot, but the familiar stylus used to punch a hole in the card was gone. For the first time in a state election, residents of California’s largest county were given a specially designed device that leaves an ink spot when pressed onto the ballot.

County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said the $3-million InkaVote system was only an interim step as the county explores what type of electronic system to install.

McCormack said there would be problems “anytime you have a new system.”

She said some voters who cast absentee ballots in Tuesday’s election actually punched a hole in the paper. And she said some independent voters who wanted to cast a ballot in the Democratic primary encountered difficulties.

The InkaVote method didn’t sway longtime Los Angeles voter Frank Brittingham one way or the other.

“I like this even better than punch cards but I never had any trouble with those,” the 90-year-old said. “Anybody with half a brain should not have a problem.”

Some problems were reported at Los Angeles County polling locations Tuesday. Poll workers at the Venice Four Square Church turned away nearly 300 voters who arrived at the location incorrectly. The address for the church had been printed on their sample ballots. Poll workers were unsure whether to let the voters cast provisional ballots or to send them to the correct polling location.

In Kern County, Ann Barnett, the registrar of voters and county clerk, said she had not received complaints about the new touch-screen system there.

“We’ve had a very good response from the voters,” Barnett said. “It’s simple. It’s just like video poker.”

Times staff writers Jennifer Mena, Kimi Yoshino, Jean-Paul Renaud, William Wan, Jeff Gott lieb, David McKibben, Joel Rubin, Joy Buchanan and Arlene Martinez contributed to this report.