June 10, 2008 - Mail-ins slow vote tally - Complicated process strains elections office
Paper: Sacramento Bee, The (CA)
Title: Mail-ins slow vote tally - Complicated process strains elections office
Date: June 10, 2008
Author: Terri Hardy
Maybe freeway fix-it ace C.C. Myers should be counting votes in Sacramento's mayoral race.
It is likely to take election officials longer to finalize results of last week's mayoral election than it took the famed Rancho Cordova road builder to resurface a downtown section of Interstate 5.
Then again, Myers probably never encountered election bureaucracy.
To understand the slow count, a quick look inside the Sacramento County Registrar's Office is instructive: Purple vote-by-mail envelopes and fill-in-the-bubble ballots are everywhere, in various stages of processing. It's a testament to the love affair with absentee voting -- more than 117,000 Sacramento residents used them for the June 3 election .
Complicating matters: More than 20,000 mail-in ballots were dropped off on election day. The ballots arrived as the registrar was dealing with 546 polling stations and the need to sort absentee votes by precinct.
A week after the June 3 election , it's still not clear just how many votes will go to Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo and her challenger Kevin Johnson. Election officials said it appears neither will capture a majority, sending them to a runoff in November.
When the count was updated Friday, Johnson led Fargo 46 percent to 40 percent. Jill LaVine, Sacramento County's registrar of voters, said about 10,000 ballots remained to be tallied and it could take several more days to know the outcome.
California's election system has changed of late to be more convenient for voters and give more accurate and illuminating results. A hybrid process using both mail and polling places, however, is probably the least efficient type of vote, said LaVine.
"I run two elections, one at the polls and one by mail," LaVine said. "Two processes handled at the same time, and both equally time-consuming."
By law, counties have 29 days after an election to certify results. However, the public has grown accustomed to immediate information. Pressure to produce tallies quickly weighs heavily on registrars.
"People need to chill out," said Freddie Oakley, Yolo County's pull-no-punches clerk-recorder.
About 9,000 people in Sacramento County used to vote by mail before the law changed in 2000, allowing anyone to participate. Now 230,000 voters are permanently registered to vote by mail, with 245,000 signed up in this election.
For the June 3 race, LaVine has 38 full-time workers and hired 200 temps for the election. It was a bit of overkill, she said, given the dismal turnout. About 25 percent of the county's registered voters have cast ballots so far, LaVine said Monday.
To get an accurate count that complies with state laws and LaVine's own policies, it takes time. Votes cast at polling places are easy to retrieve; mail-ins take lots of work.
First, envelopes are sorted electronically by precinct. Workers then pull each one and check the signature on the back with the signature on the voter's registration card, called up on a computer.
Each ballot is then removed from its envelope and scrutinized for write-in votes, over-votes or damage. Ballots not needing special treatment go to a sorting room and are again divided by precinct.
A new state law that went into effect for this election called for this micro-sorting. It allows political campaigns to see distilled results and more easily target mailers to particular voters in the future, LaVine said. An interesting byproduct is that information may be sorted in new ways. A report last week in The Bee, for instance, showed how each neighborhood voted for mayor.
The change added "substantially more time" to the process, LaVine said.
Ballots with write-ins or problems -- in this election about 2,000 -- require workers to hand-process the results or fill out a new ballot. As always, some voters like to make political statements or fool with the ballots, particularly with write-ins.
Some vote for Elvis, God, or the "Lesser of Two Evils." Volunteers roll their eyes at X-rated contributions. The biggest unqualified candidate is Mickey Mouse.
"One year, I got more votes than God," LaVine said. "I was very pleased."
Once sorted by precinct, ballots are fed to electronic counters. The machines count about 300 of the bubble-in ballots per minute, down from 1,000 per minute for the old punch ballots. Punch ballots were kicked to the curb after hanging chads in Florida stymied the 2000 presidential election.
Also, before an election can be certified, there is a hand count of 1 percent of precincts to ensure the numbers from computerized counting machines are correct.
Both Oakley and LaVine said they'd like to see all-mail elections -- lower-cost, more efficient and accurate -- when possible. They believe they could gear up with enough workers and enough time, far enough in advance to ensure swift results. They concede that some voters will have a hard time giving up a trip to a polling station.
Meanwhile, LaVine's office would like state approval to extend the time to process mail-in ballots. Registrars are allowed to start processing them seven business days before an election .
Why more time isn't allowed isn't clear to LaVine.
"Security? Worried that we'd influence the election? I'm not sure," LaVine said.
LaVine and Oakley worry about processing results of the November election, when turnout is expected to be high. LaVine believes having electronic rosters -- the book signed by voters entering a polling place -- would save time.
Next to each name is a bar code. After an election, workers use a supermarket-like scanner to click on the codes, entering each voter into the election databank. With an electronic roster, hand scanning would be eliminated, and would take only a matter of hours to do what now takes days or weeks, LaVine said.
Oakley, however, doesn't like the idea.
"Electronic gizmos have a dismal failure rate," she said. "It's one more technology to foist on poll workers."
The secretary of state's office has decided that counties can't use some funds provided under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 for the electronic rosters.
Kate Folmar, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state, said registrars have been told there are different pots of federal election funding, and some are restricted to voting systems. Counties have been told that the all-purpose money can be used for electronic rosters.
The California Association of Clerks and Election Officials has now circumvented the secretary of state's office and asked the federal Election Assistance Commission for permission, LaVine said.
"It would cost $2 million, and we have $4 million set aside," Alice Jarboe, Sacramento County's assistant registrar. "We've run out of ways to spend the money."
How mail-in ballots are counted
1. Envelopes are sorted electronically by precinct.
2. Workers pull each one and check the signature on the back with the signature on the voter's registration card, called up on a computer.
3. Each ballot is removed from its envelope and scrutinized for write-in votes, over-votes or damage.
a. Ballots not needing special treatment go to a sorting room and are again divided by precinct.
b. Ballots with write-ins or problems must be processed by hand. Damaged ballots -- a coffee stain, for example -- require one worker to read out loud the voter's choices to another worker, who fills out a new ballot.
4. Ballots are fed to electronic counters.
Mail-In ballots by the numbers
9,000 - Approximate number of people in Sacramento County who voted by mail before the law changed in 2000
230,000 - Voters now permanently registered to vote by mail
245,000 - Voters signed up in this election
Caption: Renee C. Byer / rbyer@sacbee.com
Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: METRO
Page: B1
Record Number: SAC_0405230965
Copyright 2008 The Sacramento Be