over 100,000 votes of independents in LA not counted in California primary

[Windy]

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Up_to_100K_Los_Angeles_voters_0211.html


As many as 100,000 independent voters in Los Angeles did not -- and most likely will not -- have their ballots counted in last week's Democratic presidential primary because of an unnecessarily complex system, inadequately trained poll workers and little effort by elections officials to notify voters of the proper procedures, according to news reports and voting-rights activists.

In a system that seemed tailor made to fail, more than half of the Decline to State voters who cast ballots last week in Los Angeles County have been effectively disenfranchised. Unlike every other county in California, LA County requires unaffiliated voters to fill in an extra bubble on their ballot clarifying whether they plan to vote in the Democratic or American Independent Party primaries. (California's Republican party bars independent voters from casting ballots in its primary.)

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[MoJoWorkin]

1. I don't care which candidate they voted for---this is WRONG.

[stellanoir]

2. I've been meaning to post about this in election reform

and have been wondering why no one else had. Thanks for the reminder.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5665#more-5665

[Baconfoot]

3. I worked the election in LA County and it was worse than the article states

Everything in the article is true except that as a pollworker, I was familiar before the primary with the procedure for non partisan voters.

OK so why do I think the situation was worse than what the article describes:
1) The article neglects to mention that the very first page of the voting machine instructs N/P voters to flip to the yellow pages, which come after the pages for the primary. I think a lot of people flipped, then flipped back when they realized that the yellow section was just the propositions. So by the time they get to the extra bubble, they are already confused.

2) As always, many people at my polling location voted provisionally. Most of the people voting provisionally asked for a Democrat ballot, not non partisan. Just comparing the percentage of N/P provisional voters to the percentage of N/P regular voters, I'd say that a significant number of provisional voters who claimed "democrat" were actually non partisan voters. Those people got issued the wrong ballot technically speaking. However, their votes will likely count whereas the nonprovisional N/P voters votes won't count if they didn't fill out the bubble. How's that for equal protection under the law?

I don't support Obama but LA County really screwed him over.

And I can report that in my precinct, every single N/P voter voted in the Democratic Primary.

Additionally, pollworkers were supposed to record in the roster which party's primary each N/P voter said they were voting in. SO I would recommend checking the rosters for that information to determine what number of American Independent party primary N/P voters there were. If that wasn't recorded (and roster clerk can get pretty hectic), you could call the inspector and ask if there were any AI, NP voters. If it wasn't recorded, the likely explanation is that they were all voting in the democratic primary, which can be verified by the pollworkers.

[babylonsister]

4. This is disgusting. Why are we even bothering with this farce? nt