With the count for the California State Controller's race ending, there is a lot of talk about whether John Perez should seek a recount, and where he should start.
The final results are in and Betty Yee has beat John Perez by 484 votes. Some say that Perez is unlikely to call for a recount. Manual recounts are costly, and they rarely change the results of a vote. In Los Angeles County, a recent local city council race cost over $20,000 to recount 7,654 ballots cast, or a cost of about $2.50 per vote.
Although it would be the most costly location to start a recount, Los Angeles County may be one of the best places. The ballot counting system is old and not as precise as other counties. There is also reason to believe that attorneys have been getting ready for this due to a "dry run" elsewhere. More after the jump.
I've looked at recent recounts in Los Angeles County (easy enough by searching for daily recount results on the lavote.net website) and placed them into Excel.
Recounts will almost always generate more raw votes than machine tabulation, due to issues in reading the dots.
For the most recent recounts accessible, in the Steve Fox-Ron Smith recount for AD 36, 97 more votes were found out of 29,819 total, or 0.32% more votes. In the Proposition 29 recount, 714 more votes were found out of 87,197 total, or 0.82% more votes. In the West Covina City Council recount, 92 more votes were found, or 1.9% more votes (although this was a "vote for three" multi candidate race).
This is not the case for all counties. The AD 36 recount in San Bernardino County, which uses optical scan ballots with names printed on them, generated nine votes out of 6,444 cast, or 0.14% more total votes.
The Perez margin in Los Angeles County was 34,821. Based on a moderate estimate of 0.8% more votes cast, roughly 280 additional votes to the margin could be expected on average in Los Angeles County. If the West Covina case was used as an upper bound Perez could gain 650 votes, putting him over the top.
There are some structural issues with the County's voting system:
Short-staffed polls. I have worked the polls for the County for over a decade, with my first election to October 2003 recall. I've been an inspector the last few years (when one inspector walked out allegedly due to jury duty and no one else on the board wanted to volunteer to take her place, and I've done it since). A good board is at least five people. In some boards I've shown up and only one other person was there. Other times people will wander in hours late. Fortunately at my June 2014 polling place, my board was four people, which is adequate for a low turnout election such as this one. This is not a rare experience, as there appear to be few consequences for volunteers to not show other than not getting invited to participate again for a cycle or two.
End of day exhaustion. Pollworking is a long day and many inspectors dread the half hour to hour wait to drop off their supplies. Therefore, there is an incentive to break down and quit as quickly as possible. In high turnout elections, such as the recount, the votes may not balance. This could also mean that smeared or damaged ballots are not pulled aside. And ballots with faint dots are almost never pulled aside to be remade by election officials.
Outdated equipment. Everyone at the County knows that the polling system needs to be replaced, but the registrar's administration is determined to put together as perfect a voting system as possible, with superior user interface design and open source technology. Unfortunately, that means that the current Inkavote Plus system and central tabulation, with its old IBM mainframes dating from the punchcard era, continues to persist. It should also be noted that, although the Inkavote Plus precinct ballot readers do tabulate, that the Secretary of State has banned their use. As an inspector recently I have corresponded the "ballots cast" tally written down in the sheet given at check-in with the ballots counted on election night in the Statement of Votes Cast. Almost always the amounts in the SVC are lower than the actual ballots delivered to the Registrar at the end of the day, even when accounting for ballots set aside due to write-ins or smears. The Inkavote system warns for blank ballots, but not for undervotes and faint dots may not be read by the computer. In writing this diary, I learned other activists have noted issues with tabulation equipment as well.
Another reason why a recount is likely is that a law firm may have done a "dry run" on how to challenge votes as recently as seven months ago. In the West Covina City Council race, Lloyd Johnson was running against veteran Republican operative Mike Spence. Johnson was leading on election night but when the votes were certified lost by two votes. Spence later complained about the source of funding for the recount, and lawyered up to challenge Johnson votes and ultimately prolong the recount (with County intervention to make up for lost time). The attorneys who ended up helping Johnson have ties to Democrats. Certainly, there is no substitute for on the ground experience in Los Angeles county's recount procedures.
Unfortunately, the biggest challenge is cost. As the BradBlog has noted, costs vary substantially between counties. Los Angeles, Stanislaus, San Diego, and Fresno Counties are some of the most expensive, while Orange County and many of the rural counties are some of the least. So it may be just based on which county happens to charge the least, in order to conserve resources and build up momentum for one side or another.
Incidentally, in a sign that Mike Spence is a sore winner, he had his boss introduce a bill banning individuals like Johnson from taking in third party contributions, which was later killed by the BradBlog writing an article about it. However, this may be the incentive for the California Legislature to pass a law calling for hand recounts below a certain threshold, similar to 21 other states.