Busy registrar staff aims to do it right 
 

By Daniel J. Chacón 
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE October 30, 2004

With three days until Tuesday's election, San Diego County officials are feeling the pressure to make sure the closely watched event doesn't turn into a disaster.

From mailing the wrong absentee ballots to distributing Spanish-language voter guides that contained grammar and spelling errors, the Registrar of Voters Office has grappled with embarrassing problems in the past few weeks.

Yet county officials said yesterday that plans are in place to try to ensure the election, which is expected to have a record turnout, goes smoothly.

On Election Day, the registrar will have 108 trouble-shooters, 340 rovers checking polling places at least five times a day and cell phones with text messaging at most polling places in case a widespread problem comes up. The registrar also has about 72 trouble-shooting phone lines, up from 11 in the March primary.

"I think this will be something like we've never seen before," Registrar of Voters Sally McPherson said yesterday.

Much of the interest is fueled by the presidential race, she said, and in San Diego by the mayor's race.

More than 1.51 million people are registered to vote in the county, about 100,000 more than the record set before the 2000 presidential election. The secretary of state predicts a 73 percent turnout statewide, and McPherson said it should be around 70 percent in the county.

Voter interest is at an all-time high.

Since Oct. 4, the first day to vote early in the county, 12,159 people have cast their ballots, compared with 7,271 people who voted early over the same period four years ago.

More than 400,000 voters have requested absentee ballots, compared with 286,666 in the last presidential election. Typically, about 80 percent of the people who ask for absentee ballots actually cast them, McPherson said.

Hopes for change
"It's very important to us that this election goes as well as all of the other elections in the past," Michael Workman, the county's spokesman, said.

"I'm excluding March," he said.

During the March primary, more than one-third of polling places opened late and an unknown number of voters were turned away when a device used to activate voter cards failed and disrupted a new $31 million electronic voting system.

Under orders of Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, the county had to shelve the touch-screen voting machines and imposed a November 2006 deadline for developing a system that can produce a paper trail.

An optical-scan system used in the primary to count absentee ballots will be introduced to voters countywide Tuesday. The paper-based optical scanners miscounted more than 2,800 absentee ballots in March, but election officials said that problem has been corrected.

McPherson said she's "feeling really good" about the election. "I would not expect a catastrophic event," she said.

She would not answer questions about election problems that have occurred in the past few weeks, referring the questions to Workman.

"There are small problems conducting an election this size, and there have been all along," Workman said. "As long as they're small problems, we'll fix them."

The first blunder occurred the first week of October, when the county had to send warning letters to 36,000 voters because of a mix-up with absentee ballots at a printing company in Fresno. Wrong ballots were stuffed in some of the ballot envelopes mailed to voters.

So far, 65 voters have reported receiving the wrong ballots.

Voters who may have received the wrong ballots were told to look for the letters "CP" and a number following the letters on the top left corner of the ballot and compare it with the "CP" number on the return envelope on the line above the voter's name and address.

Irene Aspen said the two numbers the county instructed her to look for matched on her absentee ballot, but the ballot was printed incorrectly.

"One side was for San Diego, the other side was for Lemon Grove," said Aspen, who lives in Rolando. "The front of the ballot is correct. It's the back of the ballot that's wrong. That's why it was so hard to detect."

Workman said yesterday he wasn't aware of Aspen's problem.

On Oct. 16, election officials made public that duplicate absentee ballots had been sent accidentally to 1,015 voters. The registrar's processing system is designed to reject one of the ballots if a voter returns both because each has a bar code and an identification number.

Language goofs
Then this week, county officials acknowledged distributing up to 12,000 Spanish-language voter guides with errors in grammar, syntax and spelling. It's too late for those voter guides to be revised for this election.

The registrar's office also has received scattered reports from people who didn't receive their sample ballots in the mail. Others have said they were listed as "inactive" voters when they actually have voted for years or they have complained of chaos at the registrar's office, which has been packed with people since early voting started.

The registrar's office extended phone hours this week because so many people were calling with questions. During a three-hour period Tuesday, the registrar received 10,000 calls.

"Just like Wal-Mart at Christmas, it gets busy at the (registrar's office) during our election season," Workman said. "This is common. With an increase in voter registration, there is bound to be an increase in calls. Voters are checking registration, polling places, asking about deadlines."

One challenge the registrar faced – recruiting bilingual poll workers – has been solved, McPherson said. The county has recruited enough bilingual poll workers to assist voters in Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese, as required under a settlement reached with the Justice Department in June.