BradBlog, as is the norm over there, provides an excellent evaluation of where things currently stand with the DTS 'double bubble' ballots. It's long, in-depth, and awesome. In part:
For the moment then, some 50,000 voters in Los Angeles County have had their votes for Presidential candidate currently miscounted. An intended vote for Hillary Clinton, for example, has not been registered as a vote for her. She has lost that vote for the moment, and the voter has been disenfranchised. Needlessly.
Moreover, current acting Registrar Dean Logan is claiming that, due to the fact that the same sets of bubbles were used for both Dem and AI candidates, it's "impossible" to determine with absolute certainty the intent of the voter. But he is wrong. In almost every single case.
The current miscount/error rate for those 50,000 ballots is now at 100%. Thus, any ballot counted at this point will only lower the current miscount/error rate.
Since almost every single one of those ballots can be counted accurately, as per the voter intent, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's an absolute absurdity and outrage that Logan is claiming that none of them can be, as he argued in an absurd report [PDF] delivered to the County's Board of Supervisor's on Monday.
He closes with an elegant summation:
The excuses must stop. Dean Logan must get to work and start counting. NOW.
The Sacramento Bee has a love note for democracy this Valentine's Day. There are still 1 million ballots uncounted from the California primary a week and a half ago. The state is aiming at a March 4 deadline
Unless you enjoy watching sausage getting made, you may want to look away:
In Sacramento County, 90,000 ballots remain unprocessed, while 277,000 had been counted as of Wednesday afternoon.
Los Angeles County has 200,000 unprocessed ballots - and that's not counting the 50,000 presidential votes it discarded because a quarter of the decline-to-state voters improperly marked the county's ballots.
Statewide, Weir said, most of the uncounted votes - about 600,000 - are absentee ballots turned in on election day. Still to be vetted, he reckons, are 400,000 provisional ballots, which typically are valid about 85 percent of the time.
He estimates 10,000 more uncounted ballots are damaged: shredded in the mail, mutilated in vote-counting machines, or gummed up by sloppy voters who dribbled coffee or ketchup on their absentee ballots. Election workers must pry them open, try to figure out the voter's intention, and then create a fresh ballot to feed into the machine.
Most likely this doesn't ultimately have a huge impact overall, and the article notes that Mitt Romney dropped out anyway. But it begs the question. As an example, if either the full results were known sooner and Romney had done better or the nomination schedule was a bit slower, would people be dropping out so fast? The whole vote-and-forget thing seems poised to draw a little attention here.
Regardless, the current state of California's electoral infrastructure is becoming much more clear in the public eye. I've got no objection to it taking a while to count mountains of absentee votes or even the due diligence involved in checking provisional and DTS ballots. But it isn't exactly the simple process people try to make it.
