City Clerk Is Counting on a Smoother Vote

As elections go, the evening of the March 8 vote in Los Angeles was hardly the best of times for City Clerk Frank T. Martinez.

Fog grounded city helicopters that were to carry ballots from distant precincts to downtown, there were delays counting ballots and there were allegations -- none proved true -- of ballot tampering.

As a remedy to some of those problems, a different voting system will be used in Tuesday’s mayoral runoff that will also decide one City Council seat and two charter amendments.

Gone, for now, is the Inkavote system in which a narrow ballot card is placed in a holder and marked with a special pen.

Replacing it will be a simple paper ballot that lists each race or issue and requires voters to use a marker to fill in an oval next to their choices. The ballots are already being used by absentee voters.

The benefit: It’s hard for anyone to mess up, says Martinez, although he can foresee that some people will manage to either miss the oval or instead circle the candidate’s name.

The problems March 8 were part of an ongoing debate over future voting systems in the city and county of Los Angeles.

In city elections in 2003, Los Angeles used a punch card voting system. But disputed results in Florida in the 2000 presidential election -- due in part to the phenomenon of the hanging chad -- led governments around the country to seek a better system.

The assumption in most quarters was that electronic voting would be the next big thing in the election world. But that too has been controversial, mainly because of fears that computer hackers might be able to fiddle with votes.

In the meantime, Los Angeles County decided to use Inkavote as a transitional system beginning in 2004, with the city to follow with its 2005 elections.

Inkavote and punch cards are similar. Both require voters to insert a ballot in a holder and then flip through an attached book of issues to be voted on. But with Inkavote, a special pen is used to mark, rather than punch out, circles next to the name of a candidate or measure. The ballots are then fed into and counted by an optical scanning machine.

The county used Inkavote in November’s presidential election and had no problems.

In March, Martinez was concerned that if voters held the special pen at the wrong angle or didn’t push hard enough, the mark wasn’t always clear. Sometimes it registered as a quarter-moon or half-moon.

So before the mayoral election, he made a decision: Each ballot would be inspected before being fed into the scanner.

If the oval wasn’t entirely filled in, but the intent of the voter was clear, city election workers would use a blue highlighter to completely fill in the oval to ensure that it was counted by the machine.

But Martinez didn’t realize how long that would take; 420,570 votes were cast.

Also conspiring against him was the weather. Heavy fog settled over most of L.A. that night, grounding the two city Fire Department helicopters used to ferry ballots from distant precincts to Piper Technological Center, the city’s downtown facility where ballots are counted.

The net result: At midnight of election day, just a fraction of votes had been counted.

Unofficial results weren’t posted until 4 a.m. the next morning, about two to four hours later than usual.

That meant news outlets could not report much in the way of results, and candidates were left in the dark.

No one knew the count would take so long, and no one realized that city workers would be “overmarking” ballots with blue highlighters.

Martinez’s intent was to be ultra-cautious, given that the five-way mayoral race was expected to be tight. But by Wednesday morning, City Hall was abuzz with jokes about ballot boxes floating down the L.A. River. (In a San Francisco election in 2002, city officials were embarrassed when a dozen ballot box lids were found floating in the bay.)

Incumbent Councilman Dennis Zine was grumpy because he had to stay awake until 4 a.m. to learn that he had trounced his opponent in his San Fernando Valley district by 37 percentage points.

One Internet blogger claimed that the whole thing was a conspiracy: that Martinez, hired by Mayor James K. Hahn, was throwing votes in Hahn’s favor.

“People have throughout history been suspicious of late election returns,” county Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said.

“There’s a lot of emotionalism around elections, and I think the counting the last four years has brought that to the fore; ever since Florida in 2000, everyone’s an expert and more suspicious than they used to be.”

Martinez is still peeved at suggestions of tampering, pointing to the fact that there were plenty of impartial observers on hand to watch the ballot count and that, besides, he’s not dishonest.

“We felt that it was good to get as good and as accurate a count as possible on election night. That’s why we chose to do that,” Martinez said. “We were not expecting for the ballot inspection procedure to take that long.”

Martinez said he believes everything will be better this time around.

All the campaigns have been briefed about the ballot and counting process.

Even the skies seem prepared to cooperate, with the National Weather Service forecasting Tuesday to be partly cloudy, with highs in the upper 60s and mid-70s.

And, if all else goes well, by midnight Tuesday, Angelenos will know the name of their next mayor: the incumbent Hahn or challenger Antonio Villaraigosa.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Preparing for the vote

Officials have switched voting systems to help ensure that the Los Angeles mayoral runoff election on Tuesday runs more smoothly than the March vote. Also they are hopeful that helicopters used to transport some ballots will not be grounded by fog this time.

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Tuesday’s election

Goodbye, Inkavote

The new system allows voters to use markers to fill in ovals on the ballot. The Inkavote system, used in March, required ballots to be marked with a special pen.

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Moving the votes

Polls will be open. 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Once the polls have closed:

- Two people drive the ballots and supplies to one of 36 collection depots.

- The votes are taken by helicopter or ground trans-portation to the Piper Technical Center in downtown Los Angeles.

- The ballots are inspected and counted.

Approximately 8:30 p.m.

- Announcement of unofficial tally of absentee ballots.

- Unofficial vote count updates begin and will be given periodically.

Around midnight

- Announcement of unofficial vote results of the mayoral race, one City Council district election and two charter amendment votes.

Sources: City Clerk’s Election Division, Times research.