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Most of LA County problem ballots to be counted

By Michael Alvarez

While I was in New Mexico earlier this week, Dean Logan, LA County's acting registrar-recorder, announced that it looks like they will be able to count most of the problem ballots from the February primary. Here's some quotes from a story that ran in the Pasadena Star-News earlier this week:

On the Scantron-like ballot, bubbles 8-10 were assigned to candidates from both parties. Bubbles 11-15 were also assigned to Democratic candidates.

Logan said the department would use two criteria to determine the voters' intents.

The first criterion would be to count all votes in bubbles 11-15 as Democratic votes, since those had no overlap with the American Independent Party, Logan said.

"We will go through and count those votes, even where the voters did not fill in the party selection bubble," Logan said.

The department also plans to review voter rosters. Precinct poll workers marked down next to each independent voter's name which party's primary they voted in, if any. If a precinct had no American Independent voters, all the "double bubble" ballots from that precinct would be counted as Democratic, and visa versa, Logan said.

In a sample review, 20 precincts out of 49 examined had exclusively Democratic crossover voters, he said.

"We believe ... that we have solid ground for determining voter intent on those ballots," he said.

Here is a pdf version of a letter that was cited in that same story, from Logan to Secretary of State Bowen describing the details.

Full post as published by Election Updates on February 29, 2008 (boomark / email).