The main differences are that San Diego (and about half of CA counties) use
"centralized tabulation" (bad). The other half use
"precinct-based" tabulation (better). And
San Diego is the lead CA county in resisting transparency and accountability. Its registrar, Deborah Seiler, is
Diebold's former chief salesperson in California (--an outrageously corrupt situation). San Diego filed the lawsuit against SoS Bowen's improved auditing rules. They lost, but that doesn't mean a change of heart in SD: expect special resistance there to citizen oversight.
San Diego has
"centralized tabulation" - true of many of the "bad actor" counties. About half of CA counties do "centralized tabulation" - that is, all voting machines, tapes, ballots, etc., are conveyed to a central location
before any tallying occurs. This is a bad practice, that enhances opportunities for fraud and error, and removes the process further away from local people who might notice weird totals. The other half of CA counties use
"precinct-based tabulation"--that is, the votes are tallied at the precinct level, and are required to be posted at the precinct on election night and for a period thereafter. And, although this is a machine tally (not actual ballot counting), it provides local people with info that could prevent fraud/error at (or in route to) centralized locations. There is no local precinct tally posting with "centralized tabulation."
This is an important difference between the counties--
"precinct-based" vs "centralized" tabulation. See my Assessment (link below) for the two lists of "P" or "C" counties.
MOST CA counties use optiscans for most of the voting--like San Diego. With optiscans, voters vote on a ballot, which drops into a box, and is almost never seen again, and with electronic machines, run on "trade secret" code, telling us what the totals are--at the precinct, or at the centralized location.
Los Angeles, Orange, San Mateo and
Nevada Counties have significantly different voting machine systems from other CA counties (see the Assessment). All four used "centralized tabulation.
All counties--centralized or not--must do a 1% audit (comparison of 1% of the ballots to machine totals--very inadequate). All CA votes must have a paper ballot or "voter verified paper audit trail" (VVPAT). And Absentee Ballot votes (50% in California!) are treated like optiscan ballots (i.e., scanned into the riggable electronics). The handling of AB votes needs serious watching--both at the county center (mailed in early) or drop-off AB votes at the precinct on election day. AB votes MUST be included in the 1% audit. (They often were not, prior to Bowen, and prior to L.A.'s kickass citizen activists, who got this changed statewide.) Uncertified Diebold machines are often used for "signature verification" of Absentee Ballots (in L.A., for instance).
Three of the worst "bad actor" counties (resistant to reform) are:
San Diego, Riverside and
San Bernardino. And
Los Angeles had a "bad actor" registrar for more than a decade (resigned Dec 07) and is now run by her hand-picked successor.
These four counties alone comprise about 9 million of CA's total of 15.5 million voters--more than half! Assessment of California Election Integrity
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4380748This thread also has a list of County Registrar Contact Info, and the SoS Election Fraud hotline numbers, as well as further discussion of "bad actor" county registrars (and their plotting against SoS Bowen's reforms - which may include a slowdown of the CA voting returns into tomorrow morning, to be blamed on Bowen's reforms).
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