Law, ‘Provisional’ Ballots Fuel Election Woes

What happens when California’s unique social attributes--habitual mobility, an unshakable faith in everyone’s right to a second chance and the irrepressible desire to be nice--meet the unintended consequences of the federal government’s well-meaning desire to extend the democratic franchise as widely as possible?

Well, what you get is the mess that currently has candidates and public officials in Los Angeles and Orange counties biting their nails over who won an election that occurred 10 days ago.

The culprit is the collision of California’s singular system of “provisional” voting with elements of Washington’s recently enacted “motor voter” law.

Because of that confluence, an unprecedented number of electoral contests in Southern California are still undecided.

Among them is the Los Angeles County district attorney’s race, where, according to Conny B. McCormack, Los Angeles County’s registrar-recorder and county clerk, “every time we count, it gets closer.” In Orange County, where veteran Republican Rep. Robert K. Dornan trails his Democratic challenger, Loretta Sanchez, by less than 1,000 votes, about 1,200 absentee and between 1,500 and 3,000 so-called provisional ballots remain to be tallied. In the Glendale-Burbank area, Democrat Scott Wildman leads Republican John Geranios by 168 votes in their contest for an Assembly seat the GOP has held for 62 years.

And the fate of school and park bonds in the cities of Los Angeles and Whittier remains undecided.

No other state in the union has anything quite like California’s 13-year-old category of provisional ballots, which are cast by people whose names don’t appear on the voter rolls in the polling place where they turn up on election day.

Sometimes, their names simply have been omitted from the list by mistake. Others have gone to the wrong polling place or failed to inform the country registrar’s office of a change in address. Some people may believe they’ve registered to vote when they haven’t; some may even be intent on committing election fraud. In any case, the prospective voters may request a provisional ballot, as long as they have either a California driver’s license or identity card or two other proofs of current residence, such as a utility bill or mortgage statement. They also must sign their provisional ballot, swearing under penalty of perjury that the information on it is correct.

“In other states, if you’re not on the list, you don’t vote,” says Los Angeles County’s McCormack. “Here in California, we give everybody a second chance.”

The process of sorting this electoral wheat from chaff was a manageable one, she said, until this year’s implementation of the federal “motor voter” act apparently doubled the number of provisional ballots statewide. The problem is particularly acute in Los Angeles County, where 3.9 million registered voters are spread across 5,632 precincts and 17 congressional districts in America’s largest electoral unit.

In the 1994 election, for example, 29,779 provisional ballots were cast in Los Angeles County; this year the figure is 58,300, about 2% of all votes cast. Orange County amassed about 13,000 this year, approximately double the number two years ago. Historically, according to McCormack, only about 60% of all provisional votes survive her office’s scrutiny, which often involves 20 minutes or more for each ballot.

When this burden is added to that of counting the growing number of absentee ballots cast in each election--one of every seven ballots cast in Los Angeles County this time around--the counting process lengthens exponentially. Legally, however, it must be completed by Nov. 26 so that the California secretary of state’s office can certify the election by the December deadline.

“At the moment, we’re slogging through these ballots at a snail’s pace,” said McCormack. “We have at least 200 people working on this--double shifts, nights and weekends right now. Our research is showing that quite a number of people thought they registered at the Department of Motor Vehicles [as the federal “motor voter” act provides], but did not properly fill out the form or left crucial portions blank.”

Be that as it may, McCormack said, “We’re now nine days away from the election and we owe it to the people involved to finish.”

The Orange County registrar of voters office will not begin counting its 13,000 provisional ballots until next week. Because the office has extremely limited experience with the new brand of provisionals, Assistant Registrar Don Taylor declined to estimate how many of them may be valid.

McCormack applauds the federal reforms that unintentionally turned election day into election month. “It’s a wonderful way to make sure people are not disenfranchised,” she said. “I favor the concept myself. But the reality is that it extends election day for weeks. Now we are living that reality.”

Times staff writer Nancy Cleeland contributed to this story.