Faster Vote Counts Envisioned : County Registrar Wins Computerization Bid

If you called the office of the San Diego County registrar of voters last Election Day, chances are you were put on hold for a few minutes while some of the more than 16,000 others who also phoned that day were helped before you.

Once in contact with a live human voice, it’s likely you were switched from one desk to another, depending on whether your inquiry had to do with your status as a voter, your proper polling place, or some other topic affecting your ability to cast a ballot.

According to Ray Ortiz, the county’s registrar, the whole experience probably left you--and those with whom you shared the wait--wondering about the efficiency of the government whose job it is to manage elections.

That was one reason Ortiz cited Tuesday when he asked the county Board of Supervisors to seek bids from private companies for an $850,000 network of computers designed to more fully automate the registrar’s many functions.

“On Election Day, no matter what everyone else has done, all of a sudden the registrar of voters is the county,” Ortiz said in an interview. “You make a mistake and the whole world sees it. It’s important for the public and the media to see an efficient and well-run, legal, fast election conducted. It’s good public relations.”

The supervisors voted unanimously to put the project out to bid, a move that Ortiz believes will ensure that the computers are in place before primary elections are held in September in the City of San Diego. Ortiz said he hopes to have his workers practice then for the larger elections that will follow in November and beyond.

If all goes according to plan, the computers will save the county about $300,000 a year, and Ortiz’s full-time staff of 70 will be trimmed by 14.

Once installed, the system will also make life easier for campaign consultants and volunteers, reporters and the more than 100,000 everyday citizens who call the registrar’s office for information each year.

Typical of the change the computers could bring is this scenario: After every major election, it takes 40 clerks three weeks to go through lists of the county’s 1 million registered voters, finding the ones who did not vote and putting their names on a list of those to be contacted before being purged from the rolls.

The job takes that long because it must be done by hand, with one person flagging the non-voters on a paper list while others type the names into one of the smaller computers the registrar already uses.

With the proposed computer system, Ortiz said, the same task would take three people a day and a half. The only manual labor would be the job of going through the lists and running a light-sensing wand over a bar code (similar to the price scanning system used in modern supermarkets) next to each non-voter’s name. The computer would do the rest.

Among the other improvements Ortiz promises:

- Each voter’s file will be accessible with only a few strokes on a receptionist’s keyboard, unveiling information about the person’s voting history, whether the voter owns a polling place or works in one, if the voter is handicapped, and whether the person is a permanent absentee voter. Also included in the file could be information such as the date on which the voter’s sample ballot was mailed.

- Broader voter information, such as a list of Democratic voters who live west of Interstate 5 in Carlsbad, for example, would be easily available. Today, campaign consultants, political party volunteers or others who want such information must first find the streets (and sometimes street addresses) in which they are interested, then photocopy the voters’ names and sort the people whose names they seek from others on the lists, all by hand.

- Information about campaign contributions, now kept on paper files that can be photocopied by the public, will be entered into the computer and thus made available more easily and in more detail. Ortiz said he envisions a day when the public or media would be able to retrieve such data within seconds using a personal computer from a home or office.

- Ballots will be counted faster and closer to their source. While all ballots are now taken by car to the registrar’s Kearny Mesa complex, future elections could be handled on a regional basis, with only one-fourth of the ballots counted in Kearny Mesa and the rest tallied at the North, East and South County centers. The results would be sent to the central location by microwave.

While such a system would probably shave less than an hour off the time it now takes to compile complete election results, Ortiz said the change would be valuable because it would provide suburban cities with results closer to home and enable the registrar to count as many as 70% of the ballots before 11 p.m.--in time for the late-night television news. Today, only about 25% of the votes usually have been counted by that hour.

Ortiz said he has few fears about the possible pitfalls of a computerized system. While to some the idea might conjure up images of the “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s book, “1984,” Ortiz points out that the information to be centralized on computer files is data that is already on public record, available to anyone with the desire--and the time--to pore over the sheafs of paper on which the facts are written.

Ortiz said the system will be somewhat safe from computer “crackers” because a master list of voters’ files will be kept on a computer tape separate from the system and inaccessible to vandals who might pry electronically into the computer’s memory.

Plus, Ortiz vowed to resist any efforts by politicians to make it harder for the public to see the registrar’s records--such as the ones documenting campaign contributions.

“Our job is to create an atmosphere of public disclosure,” he said. “The public has every right to see where their elected officials are getting their money and which people are giving it. Our job is to make sure that information is available.”