The recent California primary election is a good starting point for a range of observations. This is a little disconnected, but hopefully I can find a thread or two that will tie things together.
The first and most obvious is the fact that the taxpayers of California footed the bill to move the primary election forward, splitting the presidential primary from that of other state and local offices. The intent was to give California more leverage by having its primary earlier in the season rather than later, when the candidates were already known. Of course, we ran the table and still did not know who had won until the so-called super delegates had announced their decision. Just imagine how much attention California would have received had our primary been the last, attention that we gave up to South Dakota, Montana and Puerto Rico.
I think that the super delegates were the same ones that moved the primary date.
Since there were not many races on the ballot, and the turn out was rightfully expected to be low, many of us ended up in precincts that were only vote by mail. Maybe this makes sense if the Registrar of Voters needs to save money ... like the cost of the extra primary election. Still, if you want to encourage people to give up the practice of casting a physical ballot at a real place, voting by mail needs to be competently executed. My experience was anything but an example of competence.
To begin with, the Registrar of Voters understood that they needed to give the vote by mail participants a way to check on whether or not their ballot had been received. I used my Web connection to do just that and the system told me that it had not. So, I called the Registrar's office and was told that they had not processed everything, that there were more ballots at the post office and that I should check again to see in a few days.
About a week later, I repeated the same scenario, right down to being asked to check later. Then again, on election day, June 3, I tried the same thing. Again, the online answer was that my ballot had not been received. So, I called the Registrar's office for the third time. I was concerned that I might have to go somewhere to cast a provisional ballot. This time they said that my mail-in ballot had been received and noted on May 23. While that was 11 days after I mailed in my ballot, it was also 11 days before the primary and it was still not visible online to the public.
The young man manning the phone line at the Registrar's office told me that many people had called in because the system said that their ballot had not been received and that in every case he knew of, it had. So what went wrong? I am not sure, but when I wanted to check to see if the Registrar's site could tell me something about an actual polling place in Morgan Hill, I got a form asking me for my street number, street name and zip code. With that, they properly showed me my precinct numbers, said it was a mail-only precinct and displayed a map with my home address highlighted, only the address shown was in Western Iowa, not even in California.
I am a believer that the most valued customer is the one who takes the time to complain. So, I did. I decided to call both the County Executive and my Supervisor, Don Gage. At this point, the situation gets even more ludicrous. Rather than getting the Supervisor's office, I found that, on election day, the phone system did not work properly. It was, at 9:30 in the morning, still giving the night time message to call back during normal hours.
Now, if I had called back, I would have found that Gage was in an all-day meeting on the county's budget problems. And maybe that is where all of these problems begin. All of my direct communication with the Registrar's office was polite, professional. It was only the Web-based interface that failed to deliver. The problems that I experienced were such that they would have been discovered with even basic testing. The solutions are so obvious that they could have been easily fixed, had anyone bothered to actually test what they put online. The supervisors are looking for places to cut spending, while the politicos load extra elections on the Registrar's office. Yet, we are asked to use systems that guarantee extra work for the Registrar, just handling the volume of phone calls that became necessary only because the system did not work.
On top of this, the experts would ask us to trust further automation in the voting system, and still allow some very basic errors to become visible to the public. This is not a way to build trust for such systems.
As Gage and the rest of the supervisors look for ways to make our county government more efficient, they need to make sure that the systems they put in place actually do what they are supposed to. What we are seeing are political manipulations of the voting process that backfire and Web-based systems that are not sufficiently tested.
Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear in The Morgan Hill Times. Reach him at wrolley@charter.net.
Wes Rolley Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Although the Morgan Hill Times does not have any obligation to monitor this board, the Morgan Hill Times reserves the right at all times to check this board and to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to the Morgan Hill Times in our sole discretion and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. The Morgan Hill Times also reserves the right to permanently block any user who violates these terms and conditions. All threats to systems or site infrastructure shall be assumed genuine in nature and will be reported to the appropriate law enforcement authorities. Submission of any comments will be considered permission to use online or in print.
Behind the brews: the origin and making of El Toro beers
