After a disastrous roll-out of a revamped county voting system that saw some voters wait in line for as long as four hours to cast ballots, some advocates said Wednesday the delays prevented the electorate from having their voices fully heard.
“Eager voters, including a steady stream of Latino voters, showed up to participate and were met with long wait times, malfunctioning equipment, incorrect information and insufficient Vote Center workers and Spanish-language assistance,” said Arturo Vargas, CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund.
“Unfortunately, because of yesterday’s numerous election problems, we believe many voters did not have the opportunity to make their voices heard,” Vargas said, calling the issues that arose “foreseeable and avoidable.”
Supervisor Janice Hahn said she will ask her board colleagues next week to officially call for an investigation into the issues.
“This new voting system was meant to make the voting process easier and more accessible for voters with opportunities to vote-in-person over 11 days, machines designed for people of all abilities, and multi-lingual ballot marking devices,” Hahn said. “Some hiccups are to be expected with a new system — but there were widespread reports of problems. We need a full investigation of the challenges that voters faced, and these issues need to be fixed before this November.”
Hahn said some voters gave up.
“Many simply left without voting out of frustration,” Hahn told her colleagues.
She plans to formally bring her motion calling for an investigation before the board next week.
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan went before a bank of television cameras Tuesday evening and publicly apologized to voters for the delays, saying, “there’s a lot to be learned” from the experience.
Logan said the main problem at polling places was the electronic check-in system, which is used to ensure voters only cast one ballot at one location. He said once people got beyond that check-in, the actual voting system worked smoothly.
He also said the county was unprepared for the low number of voters who took advantage of the availability of early balloting at the vote centers, which opened 10 days prior to the election. Only about 250,000 people voted early at the centers, according to a spokeswoman for Logan’s office.
“I think that we perhaps overestimated how many of those voters would take advantage of the 10-day early voting period and that resulted in a significant amount of voters turning out on election day,” Logan said. “And then the distribution of the vote centers themselves I think is something we need to look closely at as well. We know there are portions of the county where the (centers) functioned quite well today, but there were other places — in particular in downtown L.A., Santa Monica, Carson and also particularly at our college campuses, where for the first time ever we had voting available on the campuses and where voters could actually register to vote and vote on the same day, which is a great service but it’s difficult to plan for the capacity of that.”
The roughly 1,000 vote centers that were open on election day was a dramatic reduction from the more than 4,500 precinct polling places that were offered during previous elections.
Supervisor Kathryn Barger expressed confidence in Logan but suggested it might be useful to hire an independent consultant to help him solve the system problems.
“We knew there were going to be problems,” Barger said.
The implementation of the touch-screen voting system dubbed Voting Solutions for All People was a well-intentioned effort to replace the county’s five-decade-old process of collecting and tabulating ballots. But in practice during Tuesday’s primary election, the combination of an overwhelming number of voters at many centers, difficulties with the electronic voter-check-in system and the questionable placement of the vote centers themselves led to dramatically long waits, some of which continued close to midnight — four hours after the polls had technically closed.
Overall turnout based on unofficial results published Wednesday morning was 20.6% in Los Angeles County, lower than the vast majority of other California counties and than the statewide turnout of 25.8%, although county turnout will increase as more votes are tabulated.
Under state law, anyone who was in line at the poll-closing time of 8 p.m. is allowed to vote.
But long lines had already formed at some of the roughly 1,000 vote center locations by mid-afternoon. So bad was the problem that Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’ campaign went to federal court seeking an order requiring the polls to remain open to voters who arrived at voting locations as late as 10 p.m.
The order was not granted, but even with the 8 p.m. closing time, lines persisted into the night.