Registrar Gets an ‘F’ on School Bond Vote

The Orange County Registrar of Voters transposed the results of an Anaheim special election Tuesday night, releasing a tally showing a school bond measure defeated by a wide margin, when in fact it gained a majority of votes cast.

But Measure Y, a property tax increase to repair deteriorating classrooms and build campuses, still fell short of the two-thirds majority required.

The error by the Registrar of Voters, which agency officials said was the biggest in its history, happened when a computer programmer reversed the “yes” and “no” ballot positions in the software used to tally votes.

Among the 20% of registered voters who cast ballots in the election, 5,587, or 55.5%, voted for the initiative and 4,473, or, 44.5%, voted against it, according to corrected results certified by the Registrar on Wednesday.

“I just was absolutely floored when I heard it,” said Jacinth Cisneros, an Anaheim parent who led the grass-roots campaign for the bond measure in one of the county’s most crowded school districts.

“It reassures me that we were actually able to reach the majority of the voters. I know the hundreds of volunteers who were out knocking on doors are going to feel pretty good when they hear this.”

Orange County Registrar Rosalyn Lever said employees discovered the error early Wednesday when, as mandated by California law, they tallied a small sampling of the votes by hand.

“That’s where we saw what had happened, when the ballots came out 100% transposed,” Lever said. “We’re upset. It doesn’t happen every day, certainly not in this county. It was an error, and we’re sorry.”

Since 1968, voters in Orange County have cast ballots by punching holes in voting cards. The cards are deposited in sealed boxes, collected and sent to the registrar, where they are unsealed and read by electronic scanners hooked up to computers.