In L.A., a High Turnout of Critics

As some Los Angeles City Council members demanded answers to why Tuesday’s election results were delayed for hours, the city clerk said he was already considering changing the system in the May runoff to avoid a repeat of the problems.

City Clerk Frank Martinez faced complaints Wednesday that polling places were not adequately staffed, that ballots took too long to be counted and that the city did not have an effective backup plan when fog grounded helicopters meant to ferry ballots downtown from distant neighborhoods.

Critics also questioned the city’s procedures for inspecting each ballot, saying they seemed unnecessarily time-consuming.

All three members of the City Council’s Rules and Elections Committee called on Martinez to report why the final bulletin of election results was not issued until 3:49 am, nearly eight hours after the polls closed. In comparison, the final tally was released at 2 a.m. in the mayor’s race four years ago.

“I was frustrated,” said Councilman Dennis Zine, a member of the election committee who said he stayed up all night to make sure he had won reelection.

Zine said that he had scheduled a big party with a band to celebrate his expected win but that he ended up sending his supporters home at 11 p.m. when only a fraction of the ballots had been counted and there was no end in sight.

Martinez said the biggest factor in Tuesday’s delays was that this was the first year the city used the InkaVote system, which requires voters to mark ballots with an ink stylus through a plastic grid rather than to punch out holes.

To be sure all votes were properly counted, Martinez said, the new system required a time-consuming, manual inspection of each ballot to confirm that the ink mark on the small hole designated for each candidate was sufficient to be read by a machine. With Tuesday’s long ballot, inspectors had to make sure that as many as 10 ink markings were clear on each ballot.

“This time we had to look at each marking and make a judgment call about whether it was clear enough to be read,” Martinez said.

Los Angeles County election officials, who started using the ink-based voting system in November 2003, said they were surprised that the city took such a labor-intensive approach to counting the ballots. On Tuesday evening, county observers watched city election officials scrutinize each ballot and pull those that didn’t have a circle completely colored in.

“I’m puzzled by their procedure,” said Conny B. McCormack, the registrar/recorder of Los Angeles County. “They made a conscious decision to look at every ballot ... which we would think is completely unnecessary.”

County officials encountered no problems when they used the ink voting system in November’s presidential election. That election generated the highest number of ballots ever cast in the county and produced the largest voter turnout since 1960. By 1 a.m. Nov. 3, election workers had counted about 75% of 2.7 million ballots delivered Nov. 2

“Certainly we counted a lot more ballots in a shorter period of time” than the city, McCormack said.

Martinez said he chose the more intensive inspection procedure out of an abundance of caution, given that the InkaVote system was new to his office.

The city clerk said he would probably redesign the ballot for the May election, temporarily setting aside InkaVote equipment, because the list of candidates would be much shorter.

The ballot used Tuesday had numbers and small circles on a card that lined up next to candidates’ names on a separate page. For May, Martinez said, he is considering a single-page, stand-alone ballot, with the name of each candidate on the ballot itself and a larger circle for the ink mark.

Regular pens, not just the InkaVote brand, would be usable.

The design change would increase the likelihood that the marking would be readable by the machine and require inspectors to take less time examining ballots, Martinez said.

The problem that got the most attention from candidates on election night was the inability of two city helicopters to fly ballots in from San Pedro and remote parts of the San Fernando Valley because of fog.

Martinez said the grounding of the aircraft was a factor in delays but not a major one, because his office was able to send out nearly 80 vehicles to the five remote locations to pick up the ballots and drive them downtown.

The clerk estimated that the city lost about half an hour in having to call in ground transportation instead of using air support.

Other cities have solved the transportation problem in different ways.

Many of the nation’s largest cities electronically transmit election results from multiple collection centers to a central facility, doing away with the need to cart ballots around on election night.

In Chicago, a custom-designed counting system is so quick that residents usually have the results within an hour after polls close, said Tom Leach, a spokesman for the Chicago election board.

Chicago election officials use a 5-year-old punch-card voting system that allows them to transmit results directly from the city’s 2,709 precincts to a central computer.

In San Francisco, officials also rely on an electronic voting system to get early returns. Typically, voters know who won by 10:30 p.m. the night of the election -- when about 50% to 65% of the vote has been counted, depending on the election cycle and the race, said John Arntz, director of elections for the city and county of San Francisco. (San Francisco, however, has only 493,000 registered voters, compared with 1.5 million in Los Angeles.)

New York City also relies on an electronic system that requires election results to be transported to collection centers by car.

Martinez said he and McCormack were looking at Chicago and other cities as possible models for the future. City Council President Alex Padilla said cost would have to be considered, and Zine said he was wary of adopting the election procedures unless they were proved to prevent fraud.

“Counting ballots at the precincts could be a problem,” Zine said. “You don’t want to have any temptation for election fraud.”