Flaw on ballot went unheeded for 6 years

For a nonpartisan voter, the choice of polling booth determines which candidates are listed. Further complicating matters, the nonpartisan ballot uses the same set of bubbles for candidates running in different parties. In the Feb. 5 election, bubbles 8, 9 and 10 were used to represent candidates from both the Democratic Party and the American Independent Party. The overlapping bubbles now make it even harder to count the disqualified ballots, election officials say.

McCormack picked this ballot style for the 2002 primary after the state began allowing a modified form of crossover voting in which nonpartisans could vote in some primary contests but not in others, depending on what the parties themselves wanted.

To handle the new variations, McCormack decided to lump all the nonpartisan options together on one ballot and add the requirement that nonpartisans mark a bubble indicating which primary they were voting in. Not printing separate ballots for nonpartisans in each race cut the ballot variations by nearly half, saving money and making it easier on poll workers who hand them out.

McCormack said that for L.A. County to switch to a system that would allow the names of the candidates to be printed on each ballot would require a complete overhaul of the county's election system.

To accommodate all the candidates' names, the ballots would have to be much larger. Printing costs would soar. New warehouses would be needed for the millions of bigger ballots.

A changeover also would have also required purchasing new, slower machines to tabulate the vote, she said.

"To make that kind of change, I am not saying it's impossible, but the cost would skyrocket," she said. "You would need more staff and buildings. The counting would be slowed. It would be a whole new paradigm for everybody."

After the 2002 primary, Logan said, the county never examined the nonpartisan ballots to see how many crossover voters neglected to mark the extra bubble.

Similarly, no effort was made after the 2004 and 2006 primaries to determine how well the system had worked.

Logan declined to estimate how many votes were lost in the three earlier primaries.

But based on the registrar's finding that about 25% of nonpartisan voters missed the party bubble Feb. 5, Jacobs of the Courage Campaign estimated that 80,000 voters were disenfranchised in the earlier elections.