New trends plague polls

You know you have election day problems when the president of the California Voter Foundation is turned away from her Sacramento polling place because officials can't find her name on the precinct's rolls.

Kim Alexander's frustrating experience at Crocker Middle School was emblematic of the glitches plaguing the election process in Tuesday's statewide presidential primary. Precincts ran low on ballots, poll workers gave voters bum advice, and the final results won't be known for days.

A pair of trends fueled many of the problems: the growing popularity of absentee ballots, and the unprecedented number of voters registering as "decline-to-state" who then crossed over to vote for Democratic candidates.

"It's a giant wake-up call that we're not prepared as a state or at the local level to cope with 3 million decline-to-state voters who will make decisions, sometimes late in the process," said Mark Baldassare, director of research for the Public Policy Institute of California. "We also have to be ready for a lot of mail ballots dropped off at the last minute – and it seems we weren't prepared for that, either."

And the 2008 election season has just begun.

"We are in this long year with three elections, but I think we got the hardest one out of the way," said Jill LaVine, Sacramento County's registrar of voters.

In addition to November's general election, Californians will go to the polls in June for a slate of local, state and congressional races.

Elections officials are bracing for more confusion from crossover voting because, unlike in Tuesday's presidential primary, next time the state's Republican party will allow nonpartisans to request a GOP ballot.

"There are always lessons to be learned and things to improve," LaVine said.

No doubt, many election officials across the state share the sentiment as counties were caught off-guard by the surge of crossover voters – despite early signs of historic voter interest.

In June 2006, when nonpartisans were also allowed to cross over into the Democratic or American Independent primaries, an insignificant number did so – with a mere 1.27 percent of decline-to-state voters requesting a Democratic ballot.

How many nonpartisan voters crossed over Tuesday is still unclear, but huge numbers apparently did so.

Contra Costa County Clerk- Recorder Steve Weir – who is president of the California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials – spent much of his own election day delivering Democratic ballots to polling places that had run dry.

An unprecedented number of mail-in voters also took part in Tuesday's primary. By election day, some 50,000 absentee ballots had been received by Sacramento County elections officials – including 11,000 that arrived in the mail on Tuesday.

Those numbers don't include the 32,000 that were dropped off at polling places.

On Wednesday, election workers plunged into the time-consuming task of sorting the uncounted absentee ballots. Signatures would have to be verified and envelopes opened before the actual ballots could be counted.

The county also reported an unusually high number of provisional ballots, about 8,000, given to voters whose eligibility to vote could not immediately be confirmed.

One way or another, at least half of Sacramento County's registered voters cast ballots in Tuesday's election.

It's too early to calculate turnout statewide, according to the secretary of state's office, because most counties still have not calculated how many ballots remain to be counted.

Because of high turnout and crossover voting, some Sacramento County precincts ran short of Democratic ballots, including polling places in Orangevale, Natomas and central Sacramento.

Yolo County ran into the same problem – and a few Yolo polling places also ran low on Republican ballots, which initially mystified County Clerk Freddie Oakley.

Decline-to-state voters weren't allowed to vote for Republican candidates this election, so Oakley figured that sending each precinct one ballot for every registered Republican would surely cover the need.

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