Although some Orange County voters cast the wrong electronic ballots in the March 2 primary, potentially altering the outcome of one race for a Democratic Party post, Registrar Steve Rodermund said he will certify the results of the election today.
In a report circulated late Monday to the Board of Supervisors, Rodermund acknowledged for the first time that his office's failures could have affected a race -- and gave ammunition to critics of electronic voting.
The report said 33 voters out of 16,655 in the 69th Assembly District received the wrong ballots and were unable to vote for six open seats on the Democratic Central Committee.
The candidate who finished seventh in that contest, Art Hoffman, trailed sixth-place candidate Jim Pantone in the final count by 13 votes. However, 99.7% of Orange County ballots were cast properly in the primary, Rodermund will tell supervisors today before certifying the election results to the secretary of state.
"With the help of our poll workers, these issues will be nonissues in November," he said in a report to be made at today's board meeting.
But Rodermund's report sidestepped a critical issue from Orange County's debut of electronic voting, analysts said. Although past election controversies focused on counting ballots, the problems experienced at some Orange County polling places March 2 centered on whether proper ballots were cast by eligible voters.
"At least in Florida, you had a physical object to look at, whereas when the e-voting system malfunctions, it's much harder to tell exactly what happened," said John J. Pitney, government professor at Claremont McKenna College.
"My sense is that [supervisors] need to take a deep breath before going any further with the system," he said.
Orange County poll workers who were poorly trained on the new eSlate equipment, manufactured by Hart InterCivic of Austin, Texas, gave about 7,000 voters incorrect access codes to generate their ballots, a postelection analysis by The Times found. The incorrect codes -- for precincts next to where voters lived -- caused the wrong ballots to appear on their voting machines, The Times found.
Many of the ballots were identical to those that voters would have received for the proper precinct, but an unknown number of voters were allowed to cast ballots in races for which they were ineligible.
