County Voters Heed Campaign to Eliminate Hanging Chads

The heightened consciousness of chads during last week’s Los Angeles election seems to have had the desired effect: The half-million ballots cast by voters came in extraordinarily clean, with only 1,300 deemed “questionable.”

After watching the spectacle of last year’s presidential vote in Florida, Angelenos took care to meticulously poke their way through their punch card ballots.

Election workers were so cautious that they set aside ballot cards that looked the least bit bent, torn or otherwise battered, said Kristin Heffron, the city’s elections supervisor. Most of the uncounted ballots merely need to be fed through tabulating machines, she said.

“I think that this election was exceptionally clean,” Heffron said. “We were very pleased that voters got the message.”

The small pile of unread ballots is not likely to tip the balance in the tight 3rd Council District race, where candidates still await a final tally, Heffron said. Council aide Francine Oschin came 164 votes short of snagging a spot in that runoff, but she’s hoping to pull off a victory once officials finish counting about 24,000 remaining absentee and provisional ballots, possibly later this week.

“I’m absolutely not going to concede,” Oschin said Wednesday. “I’m going to wait until the city clerk makes a final determination.”

The error rate in last week’s election--less than half of 1% of the ballots were set aside--is a marked improvement over the November results. The counting machines used in Los Angeles County during the presidential election failed to tally 2.36% of the vote, according to a recent federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union over vote counting disparities.

But Oschin maintained that the city could do even better.

“I’ve lost by less than half a percent, so it certainly has an impact, doesn’t it?” she said. “It’s certainly better than Florida, but maybe it’s not enough.”

All the vigorous ballot punching also had an unintended effect: Dozens of voters were so determined to banish hanging chads that they snapped the metal tip off their stylus.

Now, in addition to the “Got Chad?” reminders taped to the ballot boxes last week, Heffron’s got a new message: “I would caution the voters that once [the stylus] is through, they need to stop pushing.”