Voting advocates allege problems at Los Angeles polls

[fed-up]

(02-05) 17:37 PST Los Angeles - --

Polls were still open in California when the first challenges were raised Tuesday to ballots and voting procedures that progressive advocates - and the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama - suggested Tuesday were designed to discourage and confuse millions of decline to state voters.

"This is definitely a Florida," said Rick Jacobs, who heads the Courage Campaign, the California-based progressive grassroots 527 group whose partners include Common Cause and MoveOn.org.

Jacobs said that his group, which held a conference call with the Obama campaign Tuesday, has moved to mount a legal challenge to the Los Angeles County voting system, charging that confusing procedures in that major urban area could disenfranchise the estimated 776,000 "decline to state" voters there.

The Los Angeles system requires that decline-to-state voters not only ask specifically for a Democratic ballot - but also fill in a special bubble on the ballot specifically indicating their desire to vote on the Democratic presidential ticket. Failure to fill in the bubble voids their presidential ballot.

..snip

and similar problems in San Francisco

http://www.sfgate.com/flat/archive/2008/02/05/chronicle/archive/2008/02/05/BA7NUSERR.html?tsp=1

02-05) 17:35 PST San Francisco - --
Voters across the state turned out in droves this morning and afternoon to cast ballots in an election that brought - along with high turnout - a few glitches that left election officials scrambling.

In Contra Costa County, so many independent voters showed up at the polls today to vote Democratic that the county registrar of voters had to deliver stacks of extra Democratic ballots to polling stations. Eight precincts reported they were running short of ballots. In lieu of actual ballots, the county registrar was prepared to let voters use sample ballots.

In Alameda Country, ballot shortages were also reported by its registrar of voters, which sent over hundreds of extra ballots to precincts where they were needed.

Decline-to-state voters are not permitted to vote Republican, but can cast their votes for Democrat or American Independent candidates.

[Peace Patriot]

1. Well, that's an interesting election mess-up, and one that I did not anticipate

in my "California Election Integrity Assessment 2008," except in a roundabout way. I noted the high percentage of "decline to state" voters (20% statewide), and the fact that these independents could vote in the Dem Primary, but not the other parties' primaries (except Amer. Indep. Party, which permits it--but they are 2% or less in statewide registration). I would also observe now that, when you have a "culture of secrecy" in an election system, dominated by private corporate vendors who are 'counting' all the votes with "trade secret," proprietary programming code, and who are raking in billions from over-complicating the simple act of voting and counting the votes, you get county registrars who are anti-voter--anti-transparency, anti-open government, anti-public service, insular and corrupt. They owe their allegiance to the corporate vendors, not to the voters. And they can be counted on to make mistakes like this, because they don't really give a damn about us. It is the corporate vendors who get all their love and attention.

It should be noted, also, that these rightwing-connected major election system vendors--Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia--often get the contracts for designing and printing ballots. In L.A., Diebold was given the entire Absent Ballot printing concession. And, in Florida 2000, it was Sequoia who provided the damp, flawed punchcards that created the "hanging chad' debacle--Sequoia, an e-voting corporation! (See Dan Rather's extraordinary documentary, "The Trouble With Touchscreens," www.HD.net.)

So, if you have a secretive, profiteering corporation designing ballots, their sympathies are not with the voters. The voter is the patsy--like consumers of toothpaste. They are to be propagandized, and bilked. That the product is a shoddy piece of crap doesn't matter to these corporations. They are profit-mad. And too many registrars of voters feel the same way. And that is all apart from the potential for deliberate fraud in this case. I may not have anticipated a problem for independent voters for Obama, but you can be sure that, if there are those in the election theft industry who wanted to favor Clinton, they thought of it long ago.

Here's my CA Assessment, with many tools for analyzing CA's results:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4380748

[ursi]

2. the California election process still stinks to high heaven!

Indepedent voters aren't the only ones screwed!

[Peace Patriot]

3. I agree. But I do think it is now going in a positive direction, and that SoS Bowen's

reforms are seriously biting into the riggability of the system. The corrupt county election officials wouldn't be getting prompts from Diebold & co., to file lawsuits against her, and all the other crap they're doing, plotting against her, if she wasn't causing serious problems for the bad guys behind it all.

But CA does have a lo-o-o-ong way to go, to real transparency. The system remains highly vulnerable to insider tampering. I'm looking at some county partial returns (about 50% of the precincts) today--60% Clinton, 30% Obama--that I just don't believe. Something's wrong. But the system has been riggable, and rigged, for a long time, so something being wrong is predictable. You MUST assume fraud, in a system that is this non-transparent. Where is it? How is it being done? That will be the problem for the next few months. I could be wrong. This is where political analysis comes in. What is a likely outcome, given all the political factors? And what would motives for fraud be, in Clinton vs. Obama, among those who have the power and access to rig it? Maybe there are political factors to explain Clinton's high totals. Gut feeling says something's wrong.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. CA's largest voting district disenfranchises indy votes for Dems?

Los Angeles County is CA's largest voting district, and has a huge number of indy voters.
The independent votes were expected to help Obama.

Calif. Nonpartisan Voters Report Trouble At Polls

City Attorney Concerned About L.A. Voter Confusion

Democrat Barack Obama's campaign, which expected its advantage to come from independent voters, placed calls to nonpartisan supporters reminding them to fill in the bubble.

Meanwhile, one voter-outreach group that claimed the county's ballot setup violates state election law said it planned to set up a Web site to collect ballot stub numbers from nonpartisan voters in order to request special hand-counts from the county registrar's office.

"The registrar has to be willing to tell people whether their vote counted," said Courage Campaign chair Rick Jacobs. The group is not affiliated with any candidate, but had retained an election law firm that also represented Obama.

http://cbs2.com/politics/Ballot.Double.Bubble.2.646580.html