County says error won't impact election
By Helen Gao
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

October 17, 2004

KEARNY MESA – In the latest foul-up before the Nov. 2 election, county election officials yesterday announced that the Registrar of Voters Office inadvertently sent out duplicate absentee ballot packets to more than 1,000 voters. 
 
With Registrar Sally McPherson by his side, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Alex Martinez made the announcement in front of a bank of cameras at the registrar's office on Ruffin Road, where workers were busy preparing for the election.

Martinez said 1,015 voters have received two identical absentee packets, and the county told them by phone to destroy one of the packets. So far, a dozen of those voters also have called the county to report receiving duplicate ballots.

If a voter returns both absentee ballots, the county's processing system is set up to reject one of the ballots.

Each absentee ballot's envelope has a bar code and an identification number, assigned to a voter when he or she requests to vote absentee. The processing system can tell when a duplicate has been entered.

Absentee ballots must be returned in the envelopes they come with. Before the ballots are counted, the envelopes are checked for signature verification and bar code information, so duplicates can be identified when they are returned.

"The outcome of the election is not impacted and the integrity of the election has not been jeopardized," Martinez said.

The problem of duplicate absentee ballots resulted from errors by the registrar's staff.

A quality control supervisor saw that some absentee ballot envelopes at the county were being fed improperly into machines, causing the voter's address and bar code information to be printed on the wrong side of the envelope. The misprinted envelopes were destroyed.

Although not every ballot in the printing run was misprinted, the entire run was redone, producing about 1,000 duplicate envelopes.

Yesterday's announcement of duplicate ballots is the latest election problem the county has faced since the March primary, when electronic touch-screen voting machines were introduced. The state has since banned the use of the electronic voting system in the county because of glitches that marred the March election.

Last week, the county revealed that a printing company put the wrong absentee ballots in some envelopes that went to voters.

So far 50 voters have reported receiving the wrong ballots. A couple in North Park reported receiving absentee ballots intended for East County residents that did not include races for San Diego mayor, city schools or their Assembly district.

The registrar's office also has struggled to recruit enough bilingual poll workers who speak Spanish, Tagalog or Vietnamese. McPherson put out another call yesterday urging Filipinos, Hispanics and Vietnamese to sign up to help staff the polling places.

Pamela Smith, a member of the county election watchdog group SAVE-Democracy, urged residents to take part in observing how votes are counted, if they are concerned about duplicate ballots.

"Residents can help by observing and participating that way, making sure it works properly," she said.

This year, McPherson said 1.4 million voters have registered to vote. Monday is the last day to register.

When the registration period ends, a record of about 1.5 million people are expected to have registered. The previous registration record was 1.4 million. As of yesterday, 306,440 absentee ballots have been mailed to voters.