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Archive for the 'Precinct watch' Category

What does it cost to throw a presidential election?

November 7th, 2008, 6:00 am by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer

Perhaps more than you think. Consider all this before you make your guess:

  • In Orange County, there were a staggering 1,181 polling sites.
  • Those polling sites were equipped with 9,600 electronic voting machines.
  • Those machines were overseen by some 10,000 poll workers.
  • About 1,128,000 Orange County voters cast ballots.

Planning for Election Day 2008 began more than a year in advance at the Orange County Registrar of Voters office on Grand Avenue in Santa Ana. The Registrar is czar of the electoral process here. Workers had to be trained, paper ballots had to be printed and delivered, voting machines had to be transported from warehouses to polling places and back again. “There are quite a few trucks, and they’re coming in morning noon and night for the last 10 days,” said Brett Rowley, spokesman for the Registrar. ”There’s a lot of logistics, a lot of recruitment and training that goes on.”

The final tallies for 2008 won’t be in for a few weeks, but the cost of the 2004 election - including overtime, poll workers, trucking vendors, printing, etc. - was (drum roll, please)…

…about $4.7 million, Rowley said. If we’re in that ballpark again, it would translate to some $3.60 per voter. Or the cost of a fancy coffee at Starbucks.

Not counted in all this is the cost of the equipment:

  • The initial purchase of our e-Slate electronic voting machines was $26 million.
  • The retrofit - adding paper printers to each machine, so there’d be a paper trail - cost $12 million.
  • More systems were bought this year, costing $2.3 million.

That’s more than $40 million - or some $4,150 per machine.

Hey, no one said democracy would be cheap! And  those little “I Voted” stickers for your lapel? Priceless, indeed.

More Watchdog:

Posted in: Elections • Precinct watch • Taxes | 4 Comments »

Blind man struggled to cast ballot in OC

November 6th, 2008, 12:46 pm by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer

 Scott Quinlan of Fountain Valley lost his sight three years ago. He served in the US Army from 1983 through 1988; he worked as an auto mechanic, then an aircraft mechanic; and then the complications of adult-onset diabetes left him blind.

Quinlan is a can-do type of guy. He’s back in school, studying for his psychology degree, hopes to become and advocate for the blind. He’s not the type to let a disability stop him from living a full life.

So when Election Day rolled around on Tuesday, Quinlan did as he has been done for years: Headed to his polling place at the Tamura School to do his civic duty.  

It was about 2 p.m. He had a small window of opportunity: about three hours before his next class started at Golden West College.

Each polling place in Orange County is supposed to be equipped with an electronic voting machine especially adapted for the handicapped. But the machine at Tamura School wasn’t working.

So Quinlan was sent to another polling place - a church a few blocks away - where he encountered yet another non-operational voting machine for the handicapped. “The poll workers were very nice and tried to be very accommodating,” he said. “They wanted someone to go into the booth with me to help me vote.”

He didn’t like that idea. The secret ballot thing and all; he wasn’t comfortable with someone knowing exactly how he voted on all the issues. “I’m a veteran,” he said. “I put my life on the line for this country. I want to be able to vote on my own.”

Frustrated, Quinlan went home and called the Orange County Registrar of Voters office in Santa Ana, the czars of the election process. Not much luck. Then he called Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s office. They told him to try the California Secretary of State. And there he lodged his complaint.

By now, it was time to get back to school for his 6 p.m. class. That’s when his phone rang. “Can you go back to your polling place?” an official said. “We’ll have someone there to fix the machine.” Quinlan said he couldn’t; he had to go to class. ”I’m so sorry you won’t be able to vote,” the official said. “Yeah,” Quinlan responded. “So am I.”

In class, Quinlan put his phone on vibrate. At 6:45, it started to wriggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Elections • Precinct watch | 23 Comments »

Same-sex measure rankles polling places

November 4th, 2008, 12:39 pm by Tony Saavedra, Register investigative reporter

Protesters earlier in the race

With voting down to the wire, critics and supporters of Proposition 8 are fighting like, well, an old married couple. So emotional is the debate that several times this morning police were called to polling places to settle problems involving the same-sex marriage measure.

It seems in some instances, Democratic poll watchers were confused with anti-Prop. 8 campaigners — and police asked everybody to leave.

Reporter Sam Miller , who is spending election day with the local Democrats, said “No on 8″ advocates were booted this morning from Don Juan Avila Middle School in Aliso Viejo. Principal Shawn Lowman tells the Watchdog that he asked the folks to leave because they were walking around campus, handing out fliers. Steve Bolinger, an attorney for the Democratic Party, said the group is legally allowed to campaign on campus, as long as they are 100 feet away from the entrance to the polling area and not bothering any classrooms.

“School officials have a tendency to want to panic and kick them off the property,” Bolinger said.

That appears to be the case at Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach, where police were called to disburse Democratic poll watchers who were accused of campaigning against Prop. 8. Democratic officials said poll watchers merely monitor the voting list and contact party members who have not voted. Poll watchers do not campaign or approach anyone, they said. But Newport Beach police asked them to leave.

At SeaCoast Grace Church in Cypress, junior high pastor Cody Surratt said church officials asked poll watchers to hit the road as well as anti-Prop. 8 folks who were handing out literature. Church staff also took down “Yes on 8″ signs that were planted on church property.

“We wanted our campus to be a neutral environment for people not to be hassled,” Surratt told Miller.

In Fullerton, things got tense at Temple Baptist Church when three people campaigning against

Jeff LeTourneau of 'No on 8,' left, talks with OC Registrar Neal Kelly, right. Between them is teve Bollinger, attorney for the OC Democratic Party. (Photo courtesy Allen D. Wilson, Daily Titan)

Photo by Allen D. Wilson, Daily Titan

Proposition 8 refused the pastor’s order to leave. The campaigners were well past the 100-foot limit from the polling area, but they were still on church property. Registrar Neal Kelley (far right, with Jeff LeTourneau of ‘No on 8′ on the left and Democratic attorney Steve Bollinger in the middle) pronounced the problem a matter of private property. Police agreed. But the leaflet-bearing trio maintained that, at least for the day, the entire church - not just the polling area - was public.

As of 12:44 p.m., the church was weighing its options.
RELATED COVERAGE

MORE ELECTION COVERAGE (complete coverage here)

TOPICS: President | Congress | Ballot measures | Prop. 8

LOCAL RACES: North County | Central County | South County | Schools

MORE: Recent election videos | Voter guide | Today’s election photos

Posted in: Precinct watch | 56 Comments »

Church and state collide at this polling place

November 4th, 2008, 12:01 pm by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer

From our reporters Jessica Turrell and Sam Miller:

Voters in Westminster’s Precinct 003941 perform their civic duty today at the Christian Reform Church of Orange County on Magnolia Street.

Greeting them is a phalanx of “Yes on 8″ signs - a veritable fence, actually - with that gleeful traditional family throwing its arms in the air in elation. 

The plain and sober “VOTE” sign, denoting an official polling place, is at the end of said phalanx. (Our reporter, Jessica Terrell, took these photos.)

It struck even some Yes on 8 supporters - who’d like a ban on gay marriage - as odd, “It’s a little excessive. I don’t know what

they were trying to prove with all those signs. I don’t think there was a need for them,” said a voter who declined to give her name.

Are those signs OK? We asked the Orange County Registrar of Voters.

Yes, they are, so long as the signs are at least 100 feet from the entrance to the poll site, said Brett Rowley, Registrar spokesman (who sounded a wee bit harried).

The entrance to the polling place was around the back of the church, and the signs were along the street in front of the church, so all appears well.

But at least one other church chose not to wear its heart on its sleeve. At Sea Coast Grace Church in Cypress, staffers removed Prop. 8 signs this morning. “We wanted our campus to be a neutral environment for people not to be hassled,” said Cody Surratt, a pastor.

Prop. 8, obviously, elicits a great deal of passion. Longtime Republican activist Kenneth Fisher reports that about 10 Yes on 8 signs that sprouted at the corner of Bixby and Brookhurst in Garden Grove were destroyed overnight.

Reports of vandalized signs have been furiously reported by both sides. Honestly. Can’t we all just get along?

RELATED COVERAGE

MORE ELECTION COVERAGE (complete coverage here)

TOPICS: President | Congress | Ballot measures | Prop. 8

LOCAL RACES: North County | Central County | South County | Schools

MORE: Recent election videos | Voter guide | Today’s election photos

 Read more Precinct Watch posts:

Posted in: Elections • Precinct watch | 50 Comments »

Help us watch for election problems!

November 3rd, 2008, 6:05 am by Chris Knap, Editor, Government, Politics and Investigations

Together with our friends on the Total Buzz Blog we’ll be watching closely all day Tuesday for any election shenanigans that might affect people’s ability to vote. 

You know what we mean: Phony poll guards or signs intimidating voters; lines so long at polling places that people give up on voting (like this 2004 scene in Miami-Dade County); machines that don’t work; election workers who wrongly prevent people from voting, etc.

If you see something like this, contact investigative reporters Tony Saavedra at 714-796-6930 or  tsaavedra@ocregister.com, Teri Sforza at 714-796-6910 or tsforza@ocregister.com, or me, Investigations Editor Chris Knap, at 714-796-2240 or cknap@ocregister.com.

  Or you can call our election hotline at 714-796-7728. Happy Election Day!

More precinct watch:

Church and state collide at this polling place.

Posted in: Precinct watch | 16 Comments »

No purging here, says OC Registrar

October 31st, 2008, 1:19 pm by Tony Saavedra, Register investigative reporter

Clair and Charlene Shepard are getting first-class treatment — ballots hand-delivered today by the Orange County Registrar’s Office – as a way of swatting down rumors that some voters are being purged from the rolls.

The Shepards got concerned when Halloween arrived and they still hadn’t received their sample ballots. They’ve used a post office box for 55 years and apparently there was a mix-up in the mail. They feared that somehow folks with P.O. boxes had been purged from the rolls.

It’s a realistic fear.   According to a story in the New York Times this week, tens of thousands of voters in key battleground states, including Colorado, Ohio, and North Carolina, have been mistakenly purged from the rolls.

But not in Orange County, says Registrar Neal Kelley. 

And just to drive home the point, two paper ballots are being driven from Santa Ana to the Shepards’ home in Dana Point, Kelley said.

Only Domino’s delivers as well.

Posted in: Precinct watch | 20 Comments »