O.C. Snafus Are Blamed on Workers

The chairman of the company that designed Orange County’s $26-million electronic voting system vowed Wednesday to work with election officials to try to prevent the missteps that caused many voters to cast the wrong ballots Tuesday.

Orange County’s registrar of voters said he will never know exactly how many people voted improperly -- many were given ballots with candidates from the wrong political parties or wrong districts -- but said he planned to investigate what went wrong and to estimate the number of flawed ballots.

“I’m very concerned that it happened.... I thought we took measures to ensure it wouldn’t happen, and I was wrong,” said Registrar of Voters Steve Rodermund.

“I have to tighten up on the training of the inspectors to make sure it doesn’t happen again. On the flip side, I don’t think the mistakes or the issues out there affected any of the contests.”

Most Orange County contests were decided by wide margins, and no candidate had expressed interest in challenging the outcome because of Tuesday’s snafus.

Orange County was one of several in California to experience electronic voting problems.

San Bernardino County’s computer system bogged down for several hours while tabulating votes, prompting the slowest ballot count of any of the state’s 58 counties.

In San Diego County, some of the ballot machines didn’t function properly election morning, delaying the opening of many polling places for more than an hour.

But in Orange County, the problem wasn’t about inconvenience but rather an unknown number of voters who cast ballots in races in which they were not eligible to vote.

The problem was traced to poll workers, who were responsible for entering a voter’s political party and precinct number into a computer, and then issuing the voter a printed code number to enter into voting machines to get the proper ballot.

Poll workers were supposed to scroll through several combinations of parties and precincts until they found the match from several choices. Some workers chose combinations that included the proper precinct but the wrong political party -- or the proper political party but the wrong precinct.

Voters then entered access codes, and the wrong ballots appeared on the screens, Rodermund said. Some voters noticed the mistakes, and poll workers were able to correct them. Others voted and later notified the registrar of voters about the mistakes.

Orange County election officials placed at least one trained inspector at each of its more than 1,100 polling places. Each inspector had attended five hours of training and passed a test to display fluency with the new voting system, Rodermund said.

“Every issue we had was related to a person not following the directions,” Rodermund said. “Those that didn’t get it, this will be their last election.”

Rodermund said he would review such data as voter turnout in an effort to estimate the number of ballots cast improperly. It’s possible, for instance, that some precincts will show that more people voted than were registered because ballots from that precinct were used by voters from outside that precinct.

A Times review of some election data found several precincts with unusually high turnout, such as one in Mission Viejo where more than 99% of voters cast ballots. That contrasts with 39% who cast ballots countywide.

David E. Hart, chairman of Hart InterCivic, the Texas-based company that manufactured Orange County’s voting system, said he intended to work with Rodermund to reduce the possibility for human error in future elections.

“There’s nothing wrong with the equipment,” Hart said. “I’m happy with the way the equipment performed. I’m disappointed we had some user issues. It did everything it was advertised to do. We just need to make sure that the poll workers have proper information and are adequately trained to do the job.”

One poll worker who acknowledged making mistakes placed the blame on inadequate training. Marcial Garboa, who supervised workers at a polling place on Gilbert Street in Anaheim, said he didn’t realize until lunchtime that there were multiple precincts at his polling place. He said he dealt with complaints from voters by telling them to write in the names of their candidates if they didn’t see them on their ballots.

Garboa said that there were more than 50 poll workers at his training class and that he didn’t get access to the new voting machines being used by instructors. The training time “was too short. This was the first time using the machines,” he said.

One Orange County voter said he was not surprised to hear about the problems. Brett R. Barbre, a Yorba Linda resident and president of the board of the Municipal Water District of Orange County, said he tried to vote at one of the county’s early voting booths in February but was given the wrong access code four times, causing a ballot from another district to appear on his screen.

“Only because I’m a political guy, and I know my precinct inside and out -- that’s the only way I was able to ascertain I was not given the correct precinct,” Barbre said.

Officials say they cannot determine who voted incorrectly because poll workers who provided access codes don’t know voters’ names.

After hearing about problems in other counties, Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said the county’s decision not to buy a $120-million touch-screen voting system was the right one. “Before Los Angeles County invests in that kind of nascent technology, we want to have a comfort level that is higher than it is now,” she said.

Instead, the most populous county in the nation spent $3 million to take an interim step -- transitioning from the old punch-card voting system to a new approach that involves marking the same type of ballot with a dot of ink.

Some candidates in Orange County said they were disheartened to learn that some voters did not vote in the proper district. But many sounded like Ken Maddox, an assemblyman who lost the Republican primary in the 35th state Senate district to Assemblyman John Campbell by nearly 30,000 votes. Maddox said it did not make sense to challenge the outcome of the election.

“The amount of money it would cost, given the vote spread, doesn’t pencil out,” Maddox said.

He said he hopes Orange County election officials learn from their mistakes.

“There was no mechanism in place to make sure the correct data was input into the computers. You were completely relying on somebody that said, ‘Yeah, I’ll sit in a garage all day and help with the election,’ ” Maddox said.

One of the tightest races in Orange County was in the 69th Assembly District Democratic primary, in which attorney Tom Umberg held a 327-vote lead over Santa Ana City Councilwoman Claudia Alvarez, with some absentee and provisional ballots left to be counted.

Alvarez said Wednesday she was not aware of any glitches with the electronic voting in the district and would wait until all ballots were counted before deciding whether to ask for a recount or investigation of possible voting irregularity.

“The election is not over yet. I don’t know how many absentee or provisional ballots remain to be counted in the district.... I’m feeling pretty comfortable right now with my position,” said Alvarez, who is also an Orange County deputy district attorney. “My plan is to go back to work and wait for the final results.”

San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Scott Konopasek said the three-hour delay in tallying votes there was because officials were completing the final details of the installation of the electronic voting system just hours before the election. When election returns began to trickle in, he said, officials had yet to download security and location data from 1,700 of the county’s 4,000 new touch-screen computers into the main tallying machine.

Election officials tried to input the data for all 1,700 machines at the same time Tuesday, causing a computer logjam. But Konopasek defended his staff, saying workers were racing up to the last minute to get the system up and operating in time for the election.

San Bernardino County purchased the system from Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland in July for $13.8 million. Konopasek said the county received and tested the components in December and used some of the touch-screen machines for a small election in January.

Bad weather was also to blame for some of the delays. Sheriff’s deputies usually fly voting cartridges from four outlying regions to the registrar recorders office, but the heavy rain Tuesday night grounded the sheriff’s helicopters.

San Diego County election officials are declaring the first use of electronic voting a success despite the problems there.

“It’s unfortunate, but it’s fixable,” said Dianne Jacob, chairwoman of the county Board of Supervisors.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Hugo Martin, Ray Herndon, Jean-Paul Renaud, Tony Perry, Jeffrey L. Rabin and H.G. Reza.