I Know, Let’s Make Voting Harder

by dday

I’ve been doing a lot of reporting from the ground in California for Calitics. My sense is that Clinton probably (though not definitely) has enough banking of early votes to withstand a late surge of momentum and hold on for a tight victory, although Obama is likely to win more of the delegates here. But I wanted to check in with this little barrel of fun that, considering how close the race seems to be out here, could have a legitimate impact on the race.

In Barack Obama’s final email to supporters, this little reminder kind of jumped out at me:

If you declined to select a political party when you registered to vote, you can still vote for Barack Obama if you request a Democratic ballot from the poll worker. Make sure you mark “Democratic” in the appropriate space or the vote might not be counted.

Vote might not be counted, ay? What’s this all about?

Turns out that in Los Angeles County, if a DTS voter requests their Democratic ballot and casts their vote, but does NOT mark “Democratic” in the appropriate space, the vote will indeed not be counted. The ballot will go through the scan-tron machine, not register as a counted vote, AND will not spit back out for the voter to fix. In LA County, they feed the ballot through the tabulator right in front of the voter, presumably to prevent errors just like this. But this one doesn’t get caught in all the tests.

This seems to me significant just as a voting rights issue. There are 776,000 DTS voters in LA County alone, which is ¾ of everyone who has voted in the first four Democratic primaries thus far. Setting up an additional hurdle for these voters if they want to participate in the Democratic primary, and then NOT INFORMING THEM if they fail to clear that hurdle, seems to me to be just completely unacceptable.

Here’s the ballot, and you can see that there’s virtually no reason to give people something else to screw up. There’s only one bubble to fill out, and it’s already been implicitly “filled out” when they asked for the ballot in the first place.

My friends in the Courage Campaign (who are trying to get the word out to DTS voters that they can actually vote in the primary) sent a letter to the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters, noting that the law is pretty clear on the issue:

The statute is clear: voters who have already affirmatively requested a Democratic ballot and cast a vote for a Democratic candidate, but who inadvertently fail to mark line number 6, must have their vote counted. To do otherwise is contrary to the statute. We can find no statutory basis for requiring voters to mark additional boxes to indicate that they are DTS voters requesting a partisan ballot.

I’m trying to get a PDF of the letter up as well, but I’m all thumbs with this pesky technology, so bear with me. The point is that a lot of people tomorrow may not realize that their vote is in risk of not being counted. Which is terrible for democracy, regardless of preference in the primary race.

The full letter from the Courage Campaign lawyer is here.

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