Election Officials Face the Challenge of Chads

“Chad,” quips Beverly Hills City Clerk Nina Webster, “is a four-letter word.”

Add “hanging” and you’re describing frontier justice for a guy who steals votes. Such is election worker humor.

Here’s another from a South Pasadena sample ballot: Think of Chad as a nonpartisan annoyance that “has an unusually bad habit of ‘hanging’ around when you don’t want it to.”

There’s no denying it: Chad is back, and he’s hanging over dozens of elections in Los Angeles County next month.

But officials say they will make sure this cardboard nuisance, made a household name during the Florida presidential recount, doesn’t interfere March 6 with municipal elections in 46 cities.

Chads, for those who missed November and December, are the pieces of cardboard that fall away when a ballot is punched properly. If not completely detached, the chads can befuddle counting machines.

As a result, many county municipalities have ditched the controversial perforated ballot cards in favor of a new voting system that works like a hole puncher. Other cities have generated posters and mailings to remind voters to make sure the back of their ballots are clean before depositing them.

Even without these efforts, county Registrar Conny McCormack said she is convinced that the cardboard creeps don’t stand a chance, thanks to the Florida recount drama.

“We couldn’t have bought this kind of public awareness campaign,” said McCormack, who oversees the nation’s largest voting jurisdiction. “Who isn’t going to look at their cards now and make sure they don’t have hanging chads?”

That hasn’t stopped several municipalities in the county from switching their longtime Votomatic punch-card system--the one used in Florida--to one more widely used in Northern California.

That system, called Datavote, relies on ballot cards without the controversial perforations and corresponding numbers that make it difficult for voters to know for sure whether they punched the correct hole.

Instead, Datavote ballots include preprinted candidates’ names and measures. The voter slides the card into a machine that acts like a traditional hole puncher, poking a hole next to the voted-on item and depositing the paper residue into a tray below.

If there’s a mistake, it’s more easily noticed because the writing is on the card, proponents say.

That’s fine for small counties and cities, McCormack said. But there are drawbacks to Datavote when you are talking about Los Angeles County, a jurisdiction with close to 4 million voters.

For one thing, 312 items can squeeze onto one 7-cent Votomatic card, six times more than fit on both sides of a Datavote ballot.

Yet Burbank swears by Datavote. It was the first city in the area to use the system, which City Clerk Judie Sarquiz said has been used for at least six years.

The city will use Datavote machines for elections being held today; the City Council decided not to spend $722,000 to buy 135 touch-screen voting terminals for its 54,000 voters.

With Datavote, all of the races fit onto a double-sided ballot, and voters can have up to three ballots in case they make a mistake, she said.

Given its close race for three City Council seats, Beverly Hills opted to rent Datavote machines for its March election, Webster said.

“The vendor guarantees 100% accuracy on ballots voted using those punch machines,” she said. The demand for Datavote has risen so much that elections vendor Martin & Chapman of Anaheim recently bought 600 of the machines from communities in Northern California and Arizona.

In turn, they are leased to Southern California municipalities, said Glenn Sailer, vice president in charge of election administration and sales.

Besides Burbank and Beverly Hills, Sailer said, communities using Datavote machines include Baldwin Park, Calabasas, Gardena, Glendora, Hawaiian Gardens, Monrovia and San Gabriel.

Manhattan Beach officials, on the other hand, refused to pay hundreds of dollars to rent 40 Datavote machines for their election, which includes a ballot measure, an unopposed contest for treasurer and contested races for three City Council seats.

“The system that we use has always worked and we’ve never had problems with it,” City Clerk Liza Tamura said. “So to consider another kind of method that costs more money . . . would not make sense.”

McCormack agreed, at least when it comes to the choices of punch-card voting systems.

But touch-screen voting, as was tested in Los Angeles County in November, would be more timely and more accurate than any punch-card system, she added.

While waiting for county and state officials to decide whether to increase the availability of touch-screen voting, McCormack has joined with the Arcadia School District to offer the county’s first totally touch-screen polls April 17.

Even absentee ballots, while perforated, will be tallied by optical scanners to ensure that the counting method is compatible, she said.

“We’ve collaborated for them to be our guinea pig to keep us from losing our knowledge,” she joked. “We only own 38 of these devices, so for a little election like this, we have enough.”

In the unlikely case that chads do become an issue in the next few months, McCormack and other election officials are confident that a repeat of the Florida debacle is not in the cards.

In California, county registrars of voters and local election chiefs operate under standardized, statewide guidelines for counting and recounting ballots.

That’s not to say that hanging chads haven’t raised concerns in past California contests. As presidential votes were being recounted in Florida, the county registrar tabulated a controversial property development measure in Malibu that squeaked by with only a few votes, McCormack said.

Unlike in the Florida race, the results were quickly certified, McCormack added: 3,178 for and 3,172 against the measure.

“We also clean our machines after every election. Florida didn’t in eight years,” she said. The real test will come April 10, however, when elections are held in Los Angeles and for the congressional seat of the late Rep. Julian Dixon.

Those outcomes should help rebuild public faith in the Votomatic system, McCormack said. “We’re predicting virtually chad-free elections,” she added.