L.A. County registrar to examine independents' ballots; mix-up leaves many presidential votes uncounted
Confusion over need to fill in party bubble affects thousands
Spurred by confusion over Tuesday's voting, acting Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan said Wednesday that his office will examine more than 94,000 ballots cast by nonpartisan voters to determine how many votes for presidential candidates may have gone uncounted.
Logan said he also will try to determine whether the uncounted ballots would make a difference in the way delegates are apportioned between the Democratic presidential candidates and, if so, will seek legal approval to count as many as possible.
The registrar's comments followed an uproar among decline-to-state voters in the county who discovered too late that they were required to mark a bubble on the ballot denoting which party primary they were voting in. Some complained that poll workers told them not to mark the bubble; others said they were unaware of the requirement, which is unique to L.A. County.
"We are going to go back and look at those ballots and make a determination of how many made a presidential selection without marking a bubble," Logan said. "If we can clearly identify the voters' intent, we will seek legal authority to count those votes."
Around the state, there were scattered reports of poll workers denying nonpartisans the proper ballot.
The office of Secretary of State Debra Bowen reported that her election hotline had received nearly 500 complaints by midday Wednesday, most of them from decline-to-state voters who had tried to cast ballots in the Democratic primary.
That number may be only a fraction of voters with complaints. Some who tried to report a problem said hotlines set up by Bowen's office and the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk were so swamped that they could never get through.
The Times received dozens of complaints from voters in L.A. County, most of them independents saying they had been denied a Democratic ballot when they went to vote or had not received correct information about marking the bubble.
"I really want my vote to count, and I would be disappointed if they threw it out," said Karen Palmer, a nonpartisan who learned only after she voted that she needed to mark the Democratic bubble. "I know I didn't fill it in. I didn't see it. I didn't know to look for it."
Some of the complaints came from parents of young voters, expressing disappointment and frustration that they couldn't cast their first ballot in a presidential race.
