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Election-Campaign Law

: Election Updates

California Election Woes

By Thad Hall

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The Times reports on the ongoing election woes in California. There are several things of interest here. First, consider this paragraph:

Election officials say a combination of high turnout, technology flaws and millions of mailed-in and dropped-off ballots have led to painstakingly slow returns in some counties, with nearly 800,000 ballots remaining to be processed.

Technology flaws? How could this be? The are using fool-proof paper balloting that do not have flaws.

And then consider this:

Some California polling places were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of ballots in a year when voter enthusiasm was stimulated by competitive campaigns. Several sites ran out of Democratic ballots when more than eight million Californians voted, reflecting the heavy turnouts in other states.

Ran out of ballots? Wow. Good thing they were not using DREs (which never run out of ballots). Those DREs aren't secure.

And my colleague Paul Gronke's admonition not withstanding, I think that a state that thinks DREs are insecure but has not a problem with Santa Clara County photocopying 6,000 ballots on election day (which enfranchises but also creates a large potential fraud problem, since the San Jose Mercury News notes that this copying was done "in a mad rush") is, well, using interesting definitions of security. And to respond directly to Paul's post from last week scolding me, Santa Clara would not have run out of ballots had the Secretary of State not decertified the county's voting equipment.

Full post as published by Election Updates on February 17, 2008 (boomark / email).