Few election glitches, except for independents
'Decline-to-state' voters allowed to vote for Democratic candidates report receiving wrong ballots or having their ballot nullified for procedural reasons.
Voting in California's presidential primary proceeded relatively smoothly, election officials said Tuesday, but some independent voters reported trouble getting the proper ballots and others worried that their ballots might not be counted.
In Los Angeles County in particular, some independents who voted in the Democratic contest feared their votes would be thrown out because they did not mark a separate Democratic Party bubble.
Secretary of State Debra Bowen, concerned that some independent voters were improperly denied partisan ballots, issued a statement hours before the polls closed reminding poll workers of the rules allowing independents to vote in the presidential primary.
Independents, officially known in California as decline-to-state voters, were entitled to vote in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries. The California Republican Party declined to let independents vote in its presidential contest.
"The secretary of state's Voter Hotline has received several dozen calls from [decline- to-state] voters around the state reporting some county poll workers have not been fully aware of voter rights," Bowen's office said.
Overall, voter turnout was high, and in some places it was evident that independent voters were having no trouble getting ballots. In Riverside and Contra Costa counties, for example, election officials said some polling places were running short of Democratic ballots by the afternoon and more had to be shipped.
In Los Angeles County, problems for independent voters were compounded by a unique voting system that required voters to mark the party designation in addition to the candidate they were voting for.
Paul Drugan, executive assistant with the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters, acknowledged that hundreds of ballots might be thrown out because the party bubble wasn't marked. But he said the instructions on the ballot were clear and that election officials had been educating independent voters about the requirement for months.
"We kind of foresaw this would be a problem a while ago," he said. "Seeing that was going to be a problem, we got the message out."
Even so, Drugan acknowledged that his office had received a number of calls from irate and panic-stricken voters worried that they had not marked the party bubble and that their ballot would not count.
"Is it a perfect system?" he asked. "No, it is not. Elections are an imperfect beast."
