Skip to content
Advertisement

County officials want assurance November vote will run smoothly

Advertisement

Los Angeles County officials peppered the man responsible for running elections with questions this week, hoping to ferret out any remaining weaknesses in the county’s high-tech voting system before November.

Supervisor Janice Hahn asked Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan to update the board on preparations for the general election to give him “an opportunity to restore the confidence of our voting public in our system and how we’re going to run it.’’

The discussion came after failures during the March primary that led to long lines of voters waiting to cast ballots after polls had closed and two reports, one by an outside consultant and one by Logan’s department, diagnosing the problems.

Both reports pointed to electronic polling technology used to check in voters as the primary source of bottlenecks. The technology frequently froze up, had issues synchronizing with a state database, and not all volunteers understood how to remedy technical problems or had access to help desk-style assistance.

Hahn also pointed to voting centers where electronic voting machines were out of service, though that was not a critical issue according to the analyses.

“When I went into my vote center, some machines had X’s and were taped up and not available,’’ Hahn said. “We were criticized roundly because the county invested millions of dollars into this new voting experience.’’

More electronic poll books — which have been retested by the manufacturer to resolve problems — will be available at each center and will include new, streamlined voter look-up features, according to Logan. A complete retesting of the voting system by an independent party is also planned, to be certified by the secretary of state.

Despite all the work going into planning for in-person voting, county officials are hoping to persuade a majority of voters to use mail-in ballots to limit the spread of coronavirus.

In advance of the November election, every registered voter will be sent a vote-by-mail ballot. However, Logan said elections in the county held since March, as well as primaries in other states indicate that many voters will still want to cast a ballot in person.

“Even with mailing ballots to all voters and with the impact of COVID-19, there’s a good indication that a high number of voters will still choose to vote in person,’’ Logan told the board. “We know, for instance, that in March, 42 percent of the voters who voted in person had been mailed a vote-by-mail ballot. So that’s a dynamic that we know we have to pay attention to.’’

Hahn worried aloud about misinformation reaching voters about the safety of mail-in ballots.

“There is misinformation spread during election season,’’ she said. “There will be some messaging out there to keep people away from voting by mail.’’

Better education of voters will be part of the process. Logan added that the county would spend significant resources on a multimedia campaign to get the word out about how the system works and to encourage voting by mail.

Advertisement

Latest