A group in California called the Courage Campaign has been informing people about the tens of thousands of votes not counted in Los Angeles County on February 5. These were Decline-to-State voters who wanted to vote in the Democratic primary, or possibly the American Independent Party primary. On their ballot they had to bubble which party they were voting in, and then vote for the candidate. Apparently 94,500 people missed the first bubble and just voted for their candidate. Here's what the Courage Campaign wrote last week:
We warned Los Angeles County about the impending trouble with the "double bubble." Now, the Sacramento Bee editorial board is calling it "a major voting disaster." And there is speculation that the outcome could change how many delegates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama receive in California.
Here's the bad news: Despite a record-breaking turnout of 189,000 voters registered as "Decline-to-State" (DTS), Dean Logan, L.A.'s Registrar of Voters, is still refusing to physically hand-count these ballots, effectively disenfranchising 94,500 -- at least HALF -- of DTS voters because they didn't fill in an extra, redundant bubble before voting for President.
The campaign to hand-count the votes quotes the Sacramento BEE, a major newspaper in the state:
Calling it "a major voting disaster" and a "raw deal" for Decline-to-State voters, the Sacramento Bee's editorial board puts "94,500" in perspective:
"The scale of disenfranchisement is huge - 94,500 of 189,000 decline-to-state votes. That's half of the nonpartisan ballots. By comparison, in the infamous Florida "butterfly ballot" debacle in the 2000 presidential election, 19,120 Palm Beach County ballots went uncounted because of the bad ballot design."
The Courage Campaign comments:
That's right. Five times as many voters are now being disenfranchised than in Palm Beach County's "hanging chad" catastrophe of 2000....
We don't know if -- as the Los Angeles Daily News speculated -- the "double bubble" debacle "could affect the number of delegates each candidate gets -- potentially determining the Democratic nominee for president." We do know that, no matter the speculation, we can't take one vote for granted.
Today, the Courage Campaign writes that the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors has weighed in:
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has asked Logan to, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, "tally the ballots of tens of thousands of nonpartisan voters... (and) change the confusing ballot in the nation's largest voting jurisdiction to prevent such a mishap from reoccurring."
This is good news, but there's one big catch: The resolution passed by the Board of Supervisors merely asks Logan to expand his random sample -- it does not force him to hand-count every "Decline-to-State" ballot.
But more pressure is needed:
Now, our lawyers are continuing to pursue every possible action -- including filing a lawsuit -- to make sure Logan counts every vote before the certification deadline, just 19 days from now.
We don't know how Logan will respond to the pressure being applied to him by the Board of Supervisors. What we do know is that -- without the threat of legal action from the Courage Campaign hanging over Dean Logan's head -- we can't count on every single vote being counted.
30,185 of you have signed our "Count Every Vote" petition in the last six days -- a signature-gathering drive that will likely become our largest action campaign ever in the coming days. To break that Courage Campaign record, we need to gather at least 35,544 total signatures. On Friday, we plan to deliver your petitions directly to Dean Logan....
If you want these votes to be counted, you can sign the petition and contribute to the Courage Campaign here.
UPDATE: The campaign reports more than 31,000 signatures on the petition now, and thanks Kossacks for their help.