Paper ballot election hits few bumps

By: GIG CONAUGHTON - Staff Writer
Late returns, big turnout delay totals, but registrar pleased with results | Wednesday, February 6, 2008 12:56 AM PST ∞

Officials said San Diego County's shift from electronic voting to paper ballots appeared to run smoothly Tuesday, but changes to counting procedures were set to push the totals into the early morning hours.

At 8 p.m., 1,650 polling places closed and prepared to ship 1 million-plus ballots to the county registrar's office for counting.

By 8:02 p.m., elections officials locked in a small room with glass windows pushed a button and totaled roughly 250,000 absentee ballots that workers had been counting for weeks -- yielding the county's first official returns.

But county officials immediately said that those would probably be the only returns in San Diego County for several hours, because of changes made to the voting process that included California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's ban of fast-counting electronic voting machines and decisions to wait to count all paper ballots at the registrar's office.

"We're hoping that we'll finish (counting) before the sun rises," county Registrar Deborah Seiler said of the vote count.

County officials said past presidential primaries usually brought between 44 percent and 53 percent of the county's registered voters to the polls. Due to the high interest in this year's race, county officials expected Tuesday's turnout to be at the high end of that range.

Seiler said Tuesday evening that voting was running smoothly at the polls although there were scattered problems.

Two college precincts at UC San Diego and San Diego State University, she said, came "dangerously close" to running out of Democratic ballots before elections workers trucked more out to them.

In addition, several voters called to complain that they were barred from voting for Republican candidates. County officials said those complaints were caused by voters being registered as independents or with no party affiliation and wanting to vote Republican -- and the Republican party had closed its primaries to independent voters.

Seiler said the ballot-shortage problem arose when too many voters wanted to cast provisional ballots, which were special ballots given to voters who show up at the wrong precinct.

Seiler said many of the voters were urged by political campaigns to "just go and vote" even if they did not go to their assigned polling places.

"In some cases we had reports of 100 percent of the people in line were voting provisionally," she said. "But we did the best we could, and to the best of my knowledge we didn't turn anybody away."

Bowen barred San Diego and 21 other counties in August from using the expensive touch-screen voting machines that San Diego used in 2006, saying they were vulnerable and could be tampered with.

Meanwhile, in past paper ballot elections in San Diego County, elections workers had placed optical scanning machines at the polls where they could count votes as they were cast.

But county officials chose not to do that this time, meaning that vote-counting couldn't start until trucks carrying the ballots started arriving at the registrar's office Tuesday.

At 8:03 p.m. Tuesday -- after absentee votes were tallied with the push of a button -- hundreds of election workers at the registrar's office began a patient wait for trucks carrying ballots from the farthest regions of the county.

Chuck Wallis, the registrar's internet technology coordinator, said last week that vote counters who would scan ballots in one by one Tuesday night would have to wait for trucks that typically arrived late.

"They always say all the ballots (trucks) made it here by 11:30," Wallis said. "The trouble is, they all came in at 11:15."

Those trucks began arriving at the Registrar's warehouse at about 10:15 p.m., turning the area into a frenzy of activity.

Sealed boxes of ballots were taken from trucks by teams of high-school aged volunteers, placed on rolling carts and taken to waiting tables.

Other workers carted the boxes to more volunteers, working inside chain-link fenced areas in front of 100 optical scanning counting machines perched atop cardboard boxes.

With roaming supervisors waiting to help or answer questions, men and women started feeding ballots from each precinct one at a time through the scanners.

The scanners quickly read the ballots before depositing them into the waiting box, while memory cards collected the vote tallies.

Behind the volunteers working at the scanners, workers with more rolling carts and small plastic boxes collected the counted ballots and memory cards as each precinct-count was completed.

The completed ballots were whisked to another room to be shelved, while the memory cards were handed to another group in a room adjacent to the locked final tabulation room. The memory cards were organized by precinct before being sent into the final tabulation room, where three teens removed them from their plastic slipcovers and fed into flat counting machines. The cards' vote tallies were uploaded into three eight-foot tall computer servers that held the final count.

Watching the intricate movements of the various groups, San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler said, "It really is a big ballet that you have to choreograph."

The volunteers feeding the ballots one-by-one through the optical scanning machines worked at different rates and with different techniques.

One man held the ballots in his left hand and attempted to fan them slowly into the scanner.

A young black woman in a maroon sweatshirt held the ballots in the crook of her arm, and quickly picked single ballots to feed into the scanner at a fast pace.

County officials said they hoped that each worker would be able to finish scanning a full precinct in roughly 15 minutes.

When the counts were finished, memory cards with the individual precinct counts would be sent to another secure room, where they would be uploaded into a central counter to yield vote totals.

-- Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.

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