Congressional District in L.A. Had Voting Glitches

More than 4% of votes cast in the congressional district of Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) went uncounted in the 2000 election, according to a study commissioned by 18 members of Congress.

The voting disparities in the Los Angeles district, which includes downtown, East Los Angeles and other poor communities, mirrored those of similar districts nationwide among those in the 40-district survey.

The study, to be released today, found that the types of foul-ups that threw Florida’s presidential election results in doubt were most common nationally in congressional districts whose populations were relatively poor and heavily minority and whose voting equipment was old.

While other studies conducted in the wake of the muddled 2000 presidential election have come to similar conclusions, the authors of the new one say theirs is the first to look at congressional districts on a national level. Most others focused on counties.

Four California districts were included: two with a majority of affluent voters and few minorities, and two with the reverse. But only in Roybal-Allard’s district, where votes are still counted on old punch-card machines, was the incidence of uncounted votes significant.

“When you’re dealing with a district such as mine,” Roybal-Allard said, “not only is the technology outdated, but I have a high immigrant population, new citizens who aren’t familiar with voting and don’t fully understand it. It’s a major problem.”

Roybal-Allard said she found the study’s results disturbing but not surprising. She said she has co-sponsored legislation, one of several similar bills introduced in recent months, that would, among other things, institute touch-screen voting and mandate that voting instructions be offered in various languages.

Instituting such changes nationwide would be extremely costly, Roybal-Allard acknowledged. She said she would push for the work to be done in stages, with districts such as hers, with high rates of voting problems, getting first priority.

“This study makes it abundantly clear that in minority and low-income parts of the country, it’s more likely than not that old voting technology will be used and more votes will be discarded,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles, the top-ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee.

He said the study showed that “this is a problem that can be solved if there’s a determination to do it.”

In the study, committee staff examined the vote in 40 congressional districts--half of them heavily poor and minority, the other half largely affluent and white, in 20 states. It found that voters in low-income, high-minority districts were more than three times as likely to have their votes for president discarded as those in affluent, low-minority districts--4% against 1.2%.

Better voting technology narrowed the disparity, the study concludes. Local authorities instituted new voting technologies in the heavily poor and minority district of Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (D-Visalia), and only 0.9% of votes went uncounted.

Waxman said he hoped the study would spur Democrat and Republican lawmakers to fund local government efforts to modernize their voting equipment.

“This is about whether local governments are willing and able to make the investment in the new voting technology, and about instituting standards to ensure that every voter will be treated fairly and their votes counted.”