Officials say long lines, complex ballot cause most problems at polls

JIM WASSERMAN

Associated Press  02 November 2004

 

SACRAMENTO - Elections officials reported a mostly smooth vote Tuesday in California, noting only minor complaints as people cast ballots and scattered malfunctions among 28,000 electronic voting machines.

"There have been isolated incidents, but they've been corrected very quickly," Caren Daniels-Meade, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, said before polls closed. "We know that it's going to be a fairly long night and a slow count."

Many problems involved the lengthy ballot and long lines at polling places. Some voters said they were rushed by precinct workers.

But political party officials and others monitoring electronic voting reported no major problems - even with a record 12 million residents expected to cast ballots.

"It's been pretty calm to be honest with you," said Mary Guiterrez, spokeswoman for a Democratic Party group monitoring polls for civil rights violations.

Voters had to be in line by 8 p.m. to vote at thousands of churches, garages, school gyms and other sites across the state.

"It's a landslide of people coming out, which is nice. It renews my faith in society," voter Theresa Cocco, 45, a business owner, said outside the Surfing Museum in Huntington Beach.

When polls closed, 58 county registrars faced their biggest challenge: accurately tallying the votes. The previous high state turnout was 11.3 million votes in the 1992 presidential contest that elected President Bill Clinton.

An Associated Press exit poll found that most voters had confidence in California's election system - nine of 10 voters surveyed said they are confident that the votes in the state would be counted accurately.

The poll, conducted for The Associated Press and television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, questioned 1,919 voters, including 474 absentee voters interviewed by telephone this week.

Results were subject to sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, higher for subgroups.

In Orange and Alameda counties, where glitches struck electronic voting machines last March, officials said new safeguards were helping prevent malfunctions.

"The good news is that California counties are not experiencing the kind of disastrous problems we saw in the March primary election," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. "Where there have been machine problems, there have been paper ballots available as a backup."

Still, voters in Alameda County reported a handful of malfunctions to the National Election Incident Reporting Service, including machines that shut down during voting at the University of California, Berkeley.

County Registrar Brad Clark said he had 80 troubleshooters monitoring 4,000 electronic voting machines, with backup equipment in each precinct. Clark said batteries ran down on the Berkeley machines because they weren't plugged in or were "plugged into a bad circuit."

"As soon as they were plugged in they were up and running with no loss of data," he said. "Overall, this was probably the smoothest Election Day I have experienced in 20 years."

Eight other counties offered touch-screen voting to a total of 4.5 million voters, or about 30 percent of the state's 16.5 million registered voters. Another 4.3 million requested absentee ballots while the rest largely voted by inking ovals next to their choices.

In Los Angeles County, four polling places opened late because poll workers were tardy or supplies didn't show up on time, the county reported. San Diego County Republicans complained that some poll workers drank coffee from John Kerry-marked cups.

Kern County Republicans said the county ran out of paper ballots in some majority Republican precincts. Another precinct in Stockton also ran out of paper ballots that were to be counted by optical scanners. As a result, ballots requiring hand counting were being used.