Poll-Worker Training Seen as Voter-Machine Remedy

Hoping to avoid a repeat of mistakes with the county’s new electronic voting machines that caused thousands of voters to be issued incorrect ballots in the March election, the Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a sweeping plan to improve the process.

The board signed off on a proposal by Registrar of Voters Steve Rodermund to strengthen poll worker recruitment and training and take other steps he said would help in the November election.

Rodermund estimates that 2,000 voters received ballots in March that listed races in which they were ineligible to vote; many of the wrong ballots, for instance, listed candidates for offices in cities where the voters did not live. He said that the result of only one race, for a seat on the Democratic Party Central Committee, could have been affected by the mistake and that the party agreed to handle the matter internally.

Among Rodermund’s ideas is placing a paid and highly trained county employee at every polling place and reducing the class size at training sessions for volunteers from 30 to 20. Rodermund is also considering a plan to recruit volunteers from schools in the county.

Supervisor Bill Campbell, co-chairman of a committee that reviewed the election day problems, said he’s satisfied that the machines the county purchased last year from Hart InterCivic of Texas functioned properly.

The mistakes were attributed to poll workers who gave some voters incorrect access codes to type into the machines, causing the wrong ballots to appear on the screens. Those problems occurred at polling places in which the registrar of voters had consolidated multiple precincts, meaning poll workers needed to scroll through a computer list to make sure they gave voters the proper codes.

“The equipment works. There are some things we have to do to make it work better,” Campbell said. “It recorded votes, gave people their ballots, kept it private for them and we were able to count it up in an automated fashion.

“It didn’t work as well as you’d hope, but you shouldn’t be surprised [that] the first time out there were some problems. Most of the problems are fixable by better training and doing a better job of figuring out which precincts we should put into combined polling places.”

One idea Campbell supports is combining precincts at one polling place only if the ballots are identical. That way, he said, any mistake would be harmless.

Tuesday’s board action came one day before Secretary of State Kevin Shelley begins two days of hearings aimed at determining whether to certify electronic voting equipment for the November election. In addition to Orange County, several other counties, including San Diego and Alameda, experienced problems with electronic voting machines in March.

Orange County supervisors also voted Tuesday to send Shelley a letter encouraging him to certify the Hart equipment for the November election, despite the March problems. Supervisor Chris Norby said he intends to testify at the hearings in support of the equipment.

“My hope is he’ll look at each system independently and realize the things we had are correctible,” Campbell said. “But if he tells us to [use a different voting system], then we’ll operate in a different fashion.”

The board also voted to approve paying $29,000 to a catering company that served volunteer election workers at a barbecue this month. Rodermund and the supervisors held the barbecue to thank the volunteers and to solicit recommendations to improve the process.