L.A. County May Stick With InkaVote Ballots

Los Angeles County may continue to use its temporary InkaVote balloting system for several more elections, despite complaints from some voters that the system is difficult to use and evidence that it’s less accurate than touch-screen machines.

The InkaVote system was purchased to help the county make the transition from punch-card ballots -- banned after the 2000 presidential election -- to touch-screen machines.

The Board of Supervisors initially intended for InkaVote to be used until 2006 to give the county time to purchase an electronic voting system, which could cost as much as $115 million.

But Registrar Conny B. McCormack said InkaVote might stay in use for several years beyond 2006 because county officials do not want to rush into purchasing a new system.

The InkaVote machines met with mixed reaction from voters both Tuesday and in the March primary.

San Pedro resident Doris Kennedy said she nearly submitted a blank ballot Tuesday before discovering that the pen at her polling place was out of ink. She tried a second pen, but it marked only a few of her choices. Although she caught the mistakes, Kennedy said she worries other voters might not have.

In the March primary election, Los Angeles County voters were more than twice as likely as voters in the state’s 14 electronic-voting counties to submit ballots without a choice on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s financial recovery bond, Proposition 57. In Los Angeles, 6.8% of voters did not vote on the measure; ballots without votes on that issue averaged 3.3% in the e-voting counties.

On Tuesday, about 1.6% of the ballots cast on InkaVote machines -- more than 35,000 ballots -- did not include a vote for president, McCormack said. By comparison, 0.43% of voters didn’t record a vote for president on several touch-screen machines set up for early voting.

McCormack conceded that the touch-screen machines do a better job of reducing so-called under-votes. Those machines flash a reminder to voters if they did not vote in a race and allow voters to go back to complete their ballots before recording the choices.

With the InkaVote system, voters insert the tip of a pen into tiny holes adjacent to names of their chosen candidates, leaving an ink spot on their ballot cards. Unless voters check their ballots to make sure the pen marked their choices, it’s possible for them to not make choices in some -- or all -- of the races.

“Clearly InkaVote is harder to use,” McCormack said. “But is InkaVote impossible to use? No.”

Still, McCormack said she believes that the machines are overall highly accurate and that voters are getting used to them.

“Every voting system you put in, it’s going to have a vocal minority of critics.... We had three million voters and we had a handful of complaints like this,” she said. “I feel very confident that our system is accurate.”

Poll workers were trained to advise voters to make sure they marked their ballots properly. The county also spent $1.1 million of federal money on a preelection advertising campaign that featured a Dalmatian puppy and the slogan “Got dots?” to remind voters to check their ballots before dropping them in ballot boxes.

Theodore Campbell, an 81-year-old retired pilot from North Hollywood, said he had no problem casting his ballot. He said he spent about four minutes marking his choices, checked the ballot to make sure it was marked properly and then dropped it in the ballot box.

He had this advice for McCormack: “Keep the same one going.... We don’t need electronic or anything ingenious. For old fogies like me, it’s harder to learn to do something new.”

But Kennedy, the San Pedro voter, thinks InkaVote should go.

“I think it’s a rotten system,” said Kennedy, a retired high school principal. As for her mishaps, she added: “If it happened to me, it could have happened to anyone.”

Supervisor Mike Antonovich said he shares some concerns about InkaVote.

“My problem with the device is that ... you had to do it more than once. You had to do it sometimes three times to make that mark.”

He said that he experienced problems with the ballots when he voted on Tuesday and had to re-ink his ballot a couple of times. “I always check. My wife always checks,” he said.

Elections officials in California must meet a series of federal and state requirements for voting systems by 2006. Touch-screen machines need to produce paper receipts for voters to review before casting their ballots. With ink-based systems such as InkaVote, elections officials would need to have scanners at all polling places so voters could be sure their ballots were valid before they left the polling place.

McCormack said she would ask the Board of Supervisors in January to decide her next step. The county will likely decide between two options: spending about $20 million to upgrade InkaVote so it meets federal standards by 2006 or buying a touch-screen voting system at a cost of up to $115 million.

Eventually, McCormack said, the county probably will purchase some type of electronic voting system, but the state has not yet certified an e-voting system that produces printed receipts. McCormack said she is leery about spending millions on a system that might need to be modified.

“That’s not small change,” she said. “And we’re closing hospitals in Los Angeles County.”