The San Francisco Chronicle
Monday 28 January 2008
San Francisco probably won't see a repeat of November's vote-counting fiasco, but the Feb. 5 presidential primary could be a long night - or week - for other counties across California.
New state rules severely limiting the use of touch-screen voting machines in California have left many counties scrambling to prepare for elections using paper ballots. Napa, Santa Clara and about 20 other counties will have to move from their all-electronic systems for the first time in years.
"We're estimating that it's going to be 6 a.m. Wednesday before we get all the precinct votes counted," said Elma Rosas, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara County registrar of voters. "Our goal is to have 90 percent of the votes counted by Friday afternoon."
That's not good news for politicians and pundits who will be anxiously waiting to see who wins the presidential primaries in the nation's largest state, which has 58 counties. If Santa Clara County's problems are replicated in the other counties that are being forced to use new voting systems, final vote counts could be a long time coming.
Most of the problems stem from Secretary of State Debra Bowen's decision in August to virtually bar the use of most electronic voting machines after a controversial state-sponsored review found that the systems were vulnerable to hackers and might not accurately tally votes.
While Bowen approved the use of the Hart eSlate system used in San Mateo and Orange counties, she limited other electronic terminals to one per precinct so that disabled voters could make their election choices unaided.
"We don't anticipate there will be any significant problems" with the vote count, said Kate Folmar, a spokeswoman for Bowen. "If the results come in a little late because we're ensuring the totals are correct, Secretary Bowen believes that to be a fair trade-off."
It's a trade-off, however, that many counties are struggling with.
Napa County, for example, will conduct the Feb. 5 election with one terminal per precinct and use paper ballots for backup in case of long lines or delays at the polling places.
"We haven't touched paper ballots since March 2004," said John Tuteur, the county registrar. "We'll tally the cartridges from the machines and have those results quickly. But we're still going to have a lot of paper ballots to count."
It's much tougher in Santa Clara County, which typically used as many as five electronic machines in each polling place. The single machine allowed under Bowen's edict won't be enough to handle the expected crush of voters, Rosas said.
"We're going back to paper," she said, with the lone terminal at each precinct used mostly for disabled voters. When the polls close at 8 p.m., the ballots will be brought back to the county elections headquarters and run through the central electronic tallying machines.
The ballots, which are the same as those used for vote-by-mail, aren't a problem to deal with, but just will take more time to count, Rosas added.
Some of the state's largest counties, including San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Sacramento, also are going back to paper ballots. When San Bernardino tested the paper ballot system in local elections in November, it was after midnight before polling place results were available. In Sacramento, election officials say it could take until 9 a.m. Wednesday to get all the polling place ballots counted.
"It's going to be a long, long night," said Steve Weir, Contra Costa County's top election official and head of the state Association of Clerks and Election Officials.
"If California is in play (on election day), it may be one of the last to report, and that may be well into Wednesday," he added.
The disputes over electronic voting aren't getting all the blame for the ever-lengthening vote count. The continuing growth of vote-by-mail balloting has meant that hundreds of thousands of mail ballots are dropped off at the polls on election day, which means it can take days for all of them to be tallied.
"Vote by mail is already delaying the vote count, and that's not necessarily a bad thing," said Kim Alexander, president and founder of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. "Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, Fred Thompson and Bill Richardson are all on the California ballot and all of them have dropped out of the presidential race and more could quit by election day.
"It's smart for vote-by-mail voters to hold on to their ballots as long as possible and bring them in on election day."
One winner in the voting machine scramble is San Francisco, which dumped Election Systems & Software as its voting machine vendor after state-imposed conditions stretched out the November vote count for weeks.
Because of the limits on electronic voting machines, San Francisco was able to borrow hundreds of extra Sequoia Voting System terminals from Riverside County to serve disabled voters. Those touch-screen machines will be the only difference San Francisco voters will notice, said John Arntz, the city's election chief.
"It won't be anything like November," he said. "We'll release the absentee results by 8:30 p.m. and then report the results from polling places. We want to be done with the precinct count by midnight."
The growing interest in the presidential primary has election officials predicting a strong turnout on Feb. 5, which also could slow the final vote count.
But delays shouldn't be a concern to voters, said Alexander.
"It's more important to get it right than to get it fast; most people are willing to wait a day or even a couple days to see the results," she said. "It's the campaigns and the media who have put so much pressure on election officials to get results out quickly, which can lead to problems."
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