Can she fire him like Ohio's SoS can in the same circumstance?

(At this point, there's apparently not going to be any sort of court challenge to any of this, so the whole thing becomes an acedemic exercise, but...)

Your 'subtraction' scheme may seem fair to you - and I certainly see its value - but there's no way in hell it would ever hold up in court. And I assume Logan and Bowen understand that (my guess is what they propose would also be overturned in court).

I'm with CourageCampaign on this one: declare victory on the votes that will have been 'recovered' and move on.

I am the Vice Chairman of the American Independent Party of California. I attended as an observer last week of the trial count of the
one persent review. I notice an employee writing
and erasing in one of the precinct rosters and
getting reprimanded by her supervisor for the issue of writing in the rosters but not being
reprimanded for making erasures in the same rosters. Further, I noticed that a Registered
Republic was given a Democratic Ballot with a
non inclusion on the provisional listing of ballots, viz., Republican voted in Democratic
Primary.

I was also informed by an employee of the Registrar of Voters that some of DTS voters
tried to cast there DTS ballots in the
Republican Primary. It was detected, because
some DTS ballots showed voting in the Republican
fields, viz., bubbles higher in number to the
DEM fields (in the bubbles above the DEM fields.

As of now, I can not see why votes casted in bubbles #'s 8 - 10 can be counted correctly because of the overlap vote. I doubt that there
was any precinct out of the 4766 that DTS voters
stated 100 percent that they wanted to vote as a
DEM in the Roster of Voters. Therefore, I do not
see any votes being counted in bubbles 8, 9, & 10.

Mr. Ed asked:

Can she fire him like Ohio's SoS can in the same circumstance?

No. There is no such provision in state law in CA as far as I know.

Robert Earle said:

Your 'subtraction' scheme may seem fair to you - and I certainly see its value - but there's no way in hell it would ever hold up in court.

Why? Every vote counted with that plan is guaranteed to be accurate, and in accordance with state law requiring that ballots must be counted if voter intent can be determined.

Are you suggesting that Logan's current plan of randomly discarding thousands of votes for no reason would somehow be more in accordance with the law?? What law would that be??

Mark Seidenberg said:

As of now, I can not see why votes casted in bubbles #'s 8 - 10 can be counted correctly because of the overlap vote.

What does that have to do with it? If there was 5 (unaccounted for) NP-AI voters in a precinct, then you simply subtract 5 votes from each Dem candidate. Every vote counted is accurately counted.

Where's the problem?

HAVA stipulates a maximum allowable error rate of 1 in 500,000 for voting machines. How 'bout stipulating a maximum allowable error rate for the Registrar of Voters? If the allowable rate were applied to Mr. Logan, he would be out of a job by now.

one one-thousand one two one-thousand two three one-thousand four ...

Should be done by summer ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...

Real high tech there LA ... what's next public transportation by hot-air balloons?

Brad Friedman is Comment #6 said:

Where is the problem?

There was an overlapping vote in bubbles 8, 9, & 10. What if a DTS voter broadcast of party pre-
erence or lack there of was just a ruse -baruch ha-Shem- to protect their secret ballot vote. Again the ballot design was very flawed, there
is no way to know which voter was connected to
which ballot. Counting bubbles # 8, 9. & 10 is
just a wild guess, because there were two choices in each of the 8, 9, and 10 bubble spots.
I do not believe that you will find any of the
4766 precincts that show 100 % DTS-DEM or 100 %
DTS-AIP on their Roster of Voters written in by
that precinct clerk. At least from the Roster
of Voters 1 % sample, I saw last week there were
zero % of precincts that show 100 % of anything.

The Democratic Party had little interest in the
counting of these DTS ballots, because I saw no
one with the Democratic Party in that 7th floor
room of the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voter
at Norwalk, CA observing that mish-mash (hugger-mugger) review of that 1% precinct DTS practice
tally last week.

Mark Seidenberg -

I think you need to read the actual article above that you are commenting on.

I speak to all of the concerns that you mention. You are inccorrect when you say that the ballots cannot be counted accurately due to the #8 to #10 bubbles being used by both DTS-AI and DTS-Dem voters.

Please read the full article above.

Re: Logan's plan
"Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office said she was satisfied with the outcome."

" 'Secretary Bowen is pleased that the county is taking steps to count all the votes where voter intent could be reasonably determined,'" spokeswoman Nicole Winger said."
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_8374207

Comment of Rick Jacobs, chair of the Courage Campaign, on Logan's plan: "I want to thank Mr. Logan for taking a very difficult situation and doing everything he could ... we ended up finding the best solution possible."
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_8374207

"In her Feb. 14 letter [PDF] she (Bowen) wrote that "If the intent of any of these voters can be ascertained, Los Angeles County would be in the position to count votes for president that, to date, have gone uncounted," after examining the rosters."

Ultimately, I think that only those precincts where there were no AIP voters on the roster, can be counted.

I understand your idea Brad and I think it's probably the most fair way to go about counting ALL the ballots, but it would not uphold ascertaining the intent of a voter. It would just throw out a couple ballots. I don't know if the law would uphold disenfranchising a few voters over disenfranchising thousands by not counting those unmarked (party preference)ballots in a precinct at all. What makes sense is not always what's in the law.
(However, I think that McCormack/Logan should be hauled into court for disenfranchising voters. This happened before in LA County and more than once is not an accident)

I believe that Logan's scheme is much worse though. He would be selectively disenfranchising, discarding selective votes for a candidate.

Someone ought to know, since they have to know to count the ballots, who was put where in the ballot rotation. That information might be interesting although I bet hard to get, as to who might win/lose the most with Logan's scheme.

If this is the best he can do, after accepting and defending the McCormack joke of a ballot, LA County needs to tell him to get out of the election business.

As for the 1% recount and messing with the precinct rosters (#3), that has the flavor of the recount fixing in Ohio. Another red flag.

Brad at #5 (and Mark):

A couple weeks ago now, I heard Rick Hasan (election law professor at Loyola Marymount) on the radio talking about the 'double-bubble' problem. And he reminded everyone about the mayoral election in San Diego in 2004 (?), where one candidate mounted a write-in campaign, and came close to winning. And she would have won, except that some number - five thousand or so - votes for her were disallowed, in court.

At the time in San Diego, voters wanting to write in a candidate had to both write the name AND fill in a 'bubble' indicating their intent to 'write-in'. On the disallowed ballots, the voters had failed to fill in the 'write-in' bubble.

The analogy to LA County's 'double-bubble' problem is obvious: voters being required to take a second action to validate their ballots; voters failing to take that second action having their votes discounted.

In San Diego, the inference of what the voter intended was certainly more simple and clear than what you propose (and more so than what Logan and Bowen propose) - they had literally written the name of the candidate they wanted to vote for on the ballot! And still it was disallowed. Sorry to say, but it makes me think your plan's chances of success pretty slim (should a challenge ever come. Hey Mark - do you know if the AI Party is contemplating any sort of court action?)

- Robert

Another thought:

Logan may be just running out the clock.

He knows he can count precincts where no AIP voters were indicated.

But he's thrown in a silly scheme along with it.

By the time the haggling is over, there will be no more time.

I would like to see Bowen take over the reins and get the job done that can be done, then serve notice to the LA County head honchos that they have to get the mess that is the LA County elections cleaned up immediately- which means getting Logan out of there and insuring that McCormack has no more influence or any other traps awaiting the county left over from her.

I don't know if 'running out the clock' is really fair.

At the end of election day, working at the polls, one thing a pollworker has to do is page through the Roster of Voters, counting the number of signatures. It usually takes two or three passes to be sure the count is correct (ie getting the same answer twice).

So I've got a pretty good idea of what the examination of the Rosters looking for the NP->DEM and NP->AI notations entails. It is a manual process - no way at all to automate it, have it done by computer, etc. - and my guess is that it would take maybe an average of 15 minutes per book. (Can you do a book faster than 15 minutes? Yes. Can you do your 47th book of the day - accurately - in less than 15 minutes? Probably not.)

So, more than 4000 Roster books at 15 minutes per book. That's more than 1000 man-hours. Now, I have no idea what sort of manpower the Registrar's office has to throw at something like this. But 1000 hours is probably no small amount of work.

I will also point out that for the first time, they are being asked to stage two primaries in a single spring, and - we certainly hope - they are trying to re-design their ballots and voting mechanism before June. So I doubt there are very many people sitting around, twiddling their thumbs - intentionally or otherwise.

Badger #13 said:

I understand your idea Brad and I think it's probably the most fair way to go about counting ALL the ballots, but it would not uphold ascertaining the intent of a voter.

Nonsense. How would it not "ascertain the intent of the voter"? It would do so 100% accurately.

I don't know if the law would uphold disenfranchising a few voters over disenfranchising thousands by not counting those unmarked (party preference)ballots in a precinct at all.

Also nonsense. The current plan by Logan is to count some ballots in a precinct (if the selections were in the #11 to #15 bubble), but toss out the rest (in the #8 to #10) bubble. Randomly discarding thousands of votes for no reason.

Why is that a better plan? In the meantime, there is no way to ascertain the intent of the "few voters" you suggest would be disenfranchised by my plan. If their votes can't be counted with certainty, they can't be counted by CA law.

I believe that Logan's scheme is much worse though. He would be selectively disenfranchising, discarding selective votes for a candidate.

Yup. And, as noted in my original article above, that is decidedly against both the law and the Constitution of CA. Want a lawsuit? Logan's plan is a great way to trigger one.

Robert Earle -

The horrible and legally unsound San Diego decision you refer to is a fine example. Setting bad precedent now, will hurt later.

Because an awful judge made a terrible decision, supporting the even worse San Diego Registrar of Voters (Mikel Haas) at the time, is disgraceful. But NOT counting the ballots of voters, and NOT ensuring ballots are counting to their intent, as CA law requires, was a hallmark of Haas' horrible administration of elections in San Diego.

State law having been discounted in San Diego, is not a legitimate reason to ignore it again in Los Angeles.

(NOTE: BRAD BLOG commenter "OMS Media" is Don Haas, brother of failed SD registrar Mikel. No doubt, he'll jump in soon with some misinformation in order to try to protect his brother's bad name.)

Florida and Ohio all over again!!!

Brad, I said:

"I understand your idea Brad and I think it's probably the most fair way to go about counting ALL the ballots, but it would not uphold ascertaining the intent of a voter. It would just throw out a couple ballots. I don't know if the law would uphold disenfranchising a few voters over disenfranchising thousands by not counting those unmarked (party preference)ballots in a precinct at all. What makes sense is not always what's in the law."

If you subtract some votes in some precincts, because you can't insure voter intent of all the ballots, that is still disenfranchisement. The law is about "intent," not how many ballots can be counted if we subtract x amount from the total to compensate for the lack of a second mark on the ballot, based on how many people indicated they were voting in the AIP primary.

You said in a reply:
"What does that have to do with it? If there was 5 (unaccounted for) NP-AI voters in a precinct, then you simply subtract 5 votes from each Dem candidate. Every vote counted is accurately counted."

"Where's the problem?"

Brad, maybe I'm being thick, but say if you have 4 Dem candidates, and you subtract 5 votes from each, you have now discarded 20 votes- which is 15 more than the 5 AIP votes. So you have disenfranchised at least 15 Dem voters, correct? And maybe those ballots did indicate a Dem party preference.

It's not that I don't think your idea has merit, I said it was the most fair one proposed. Reasonable certainty in precincts with no AIP voters can be concluded about intent. What I did try to point out is that what the law says is about intent. IMHO, I think that would be interpreted strictly as intent, and where no provision exists in law for what to do in a mess like this, even your great idea is not going to be upheld by the law. I don't see a separate provision for individual intent and intent of the many. That is what I am suggesting. Someone with legal expertise can weigh in here. To often, when it gets down to the nitty gritty, the judge has to uphold (or should) what the law says. The issue is what the law says and what it will uphold.

If the law is about intent and also about counting every ballot cast, then it's going to be a decision about the two laws and how to combine them under the intent of each law.

As for running out the clock, I was referring to the counting of the disenfranchised ballots, not the poll books per se. i.e., as a way to create haggling over Logan's silly scheme which would run out the time available for counting those ballots, therefore, Logan doesn't have to get them counted.

Another problem with Logan's scheme is that it neglects the possibility, for example, that a precinct has three DTS-AI voters who all filled out their ballots correctly with the appropriate AI bubble filled in. In that case, we could reasonably surmise that the remaining ballots in question were intended as Democratic Party votes.

I would be curious to know how many poll books actually show entries for DTS-AI voters. It's plausible that many "independent" voters got mistakenly identified as AI Party members.

I find it interesting that nobody, including Mark above, seems to have any concerns about the tally for the AI Party. Oh well!

the recently-arrived, but still-befuddled, county clerk details how he now plans to potentially toss out thousands of votes,

I must protest. Dean Logan is not "befuddled." He is setting expectations and procedures for the general election. Whether he is a partisan or simply available to the highest bidder, he is demonstrating his ability to muddle or throw an election. What he is doing now is simply advertising for what he can do in the future.

Dolphyn -

If you go here...
http://regrec.co.la.ca.u...Statement_Votes_Cast.cfm

... and open up the 'Precinct Bulletins', you can see on a precinct-by-precinct basis how many precincts had NP (or DTS) voters who did indeed mark their ballots to ;cross-over' to the AI primary. No, I haven't looked at all 4300, but many, if not most, have NP->AI voters. This isn't the Roster books, but it is a pretty good indication that many, or most, Roster books are also going to have notations of NP->AI voters.

Brad, once again you are a hero for our EI movement. As the co-chair of Stand with Debra Bowen, I am outraged that LA county is doing all it can to flout the law, disenfranchise voters, and try to embarrass Debra. It is the ghost of Conny McCormack we are dealing with here, and her replacement seems to have learned well from her. I also recall this guy had problems up in Washington state. What were the LA county supervisors thinking-fraud?

Badger #20 said:

If you subtract some votes in some precincts, because you can't insure voter intent of all the ballots, that is still disenfranchisement.

It is. And it's unfortunate (thanks Conny McCormack!) but California law also says you cannot count a vote if you can't ascertain certainty of voter intent. The plan I suggest in the article above counts the maximum number of ballots on which voter intent can 100% be discerned as certain.

if you have 4 Dem candidates, and you subtract 5 votes from each, you have now discarded 20 votes- which is 15 more than the 5 AIP votes. So you have disenfranchised at least 15 Dem voters, correct?

Correct. Though there is no choice, regrettably.

And maybe those ballots did indicate a Dem party preference.

No, if they stated a party preference, they are not a part of this counting at all. If they stated a party preference, the ballot would be counted no matter what.

I don't see a separate provision for individual intent and intent of the many.

None is needed. In my suggested plan, the intent of every single individual ballot that can be counted, *will* be counted accurately to the voter's intent.

As to the legal issues, unless there is some law here that I'm so far unfamiliar with (which could certainly be the case, though I'm not aware of one), my plan meets every single election code provision and constitutional provision on this matter. At least those which am familiar with at this time. I'm certainly open to any specific legal argument/cite that would counter my suggested plan.

Dolphyn #21 said:

Another problem with Logan's scheme is that it neglects the possibility, for example, that a precinct has three DTS-AI voters who all filled out their ballots correctly with the appropriate AI bubble filled in. In that case, we could reasonably surmise that the remaining ballots in question were intended as Democratic Party votes.

Right. Instead of getting that deep into the weeds, I'm presuming he's already figured that one out, and is only referring to unaccounted for ballots in his suggested scheme. I do realize that may be rather presumptuous of me, given his record, but for now, I'll still allow him the benefit of that particular doubt.

Logan's vote counting plan: "A lot of credit goes to Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who suggested a process to identify voters' intent, and Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who provided leadership in resolving a complex situation."
http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_8388982

Logan is attempting to hide behind Bowen, despite the fact that she did NOT recommend, or even approve of, the scheme that Logan is currently set to use to count the votes (and needlessly toss out thousands of them).

In fact, he asked for swift "concurrence" from her for his scheme, in his letter to her, which she has still NOT granted at this time, as I noted in my latest update to the story above yesterday.

Having spoken again with the office today, they cannot add anything publicly to comments I quoted from spokesperson Nicole Winger yesterday on this matter.

Dean Logan has posted on the Registrar's website a notice that they will begin counting the cross-over votes tomorrow, starting at (Saturday) at 7:30 am in Norwalk with a Logic and Accuracy test of the MTS Central Vote Tabulation System.
http://lavote.net/ (click on "Notice of Supplemental Cross Over Vote Tally"

If Bowen disagrees with Logan's plan, she needs to tell him soon.