From Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican: more than 94,000 votes from Los Angeles County are on their way to being uncounted thanks to yet another flawed ballot design, supplemented by a healthy dose of inadequate training and information given to poll workers. From the LA Times:
Michael Nola, a poll worker in Claremont, went to two training sessions before election day and was instructed that nonpartisan voters were entitled to cast ballots in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries.
What he never learned in class was that in addition to selecting a candidate, these voters were required to mark a bubble on their ballots indicating which party primary they were voting in. . . . It wasn’t until midafternoon on election day that he and his fellow poll workers learned of the extra bubble, but by then it was too late. Many nonpartisan voters had already cast their ballots, including Nola himself.
So far, no recount is being planned, and the Courage Campaign has a petition up to demand a physical recount of all of the ballots. However, the ballots were so poorly designed that even if a hand count was conducted, it might not be possible to figure out for whom votes were intended; the candidates’ names weren’t on the ballots themselves and the ballot was designed so that bubbles for the first threediffering candidates for each party used the same bubbles.
Huh? I mean, come on – who the hell checks these things before they’re put in voters’ hands? Does anyone? How hard could it really be to design a clear, easy to use ballot? This is yet another example of how, for a nation that loves to lecture other countries about how wonderful and amazing and imperative democracy is, we are astoundingly, monumentally ineffective at conducting the business of democracy here at home.
