Data issue causes voting delays in these 15 California counties. State says problem fixed
State election officials say a connectivity issue involving the California Secretary of State’s voter file database forced local vote centers in 15 counties, including Sacramento, to look up voters’ info and print ballots manually, slowing the process considerably for a number of voters Tuesday morning.
Sam Mahood, press secretary for Secretary of State Alex Padilla, said in an emailed statement to The Sacramento Bee just after 12:30 p.m. that Sacramento was one of 15 counties affected by the technical issue, which has since been resolved.
“This should not prevented any voters from casting a ballot, as counties have contingency procedures in place to check-in voters,” Mahood’s statement said. “If a voter left without casting a ballot, we encourage them to go back to the polls before 8 p.m.”
According to Mahood, the 15 affected counties were: Alpine, Calaveras, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Fresno, Madera, Merced, Napa, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, San Mateo, Shasta, Stanislaus, Ventura and Yolo.
Mahood also said there was “no evidence of malicious activity” related to the technical mishap.
Sacramento County elections and voter registration spokeswoman Janna Haynes said the system appeared to be back up and running as of about 11 a.m., but that starting a couple of hours after polls opened at 7 a.m., and for a period lasting between about 30 minutes and an hour, election workers could not access voters’ files from the state database.
“So basically, because of the format that our county now has where you can go to any of the vote centers and we normally identity your precinct ... we didn’t have the information that we needed to print out their specific ballot,” Haynes said.
The Fresno Bee reported the same issue in Fresno County when the county’s election computer system apparently crashed around 9:15 a.m. The network outage affected election workers’ ability to look up voter information and get them the proper ballot, one poll worker said.
Brandi Orth, Fresno County’s registrar of voters, said Tuesday evening that the county’s network did not go offline entirely.
“Some vote centers were down for 5-10 minutes and there were some vote centers that were having issues for a period of up to 1.5 hours,” she said in a emailed statement to The Bee. “Most voters waited and some left and came back. Some voters left and went to another vote center.
“There may have been some voters who did not come back, but I think that was a small number.”
The Secretary of State’s public-facing website was also struggling to keep up with demand this morning, returning so-called timeout errors earlier in the morning.
“The entire county network went down,” said Valarie Cooper, an election coordinator at the voting center located at the Central California Blood Center in downtown Fresno.
In Sacramento County during the outage, Haynes says staffers had to call the office to look up voters’ precincts, manually print out that ballot and have voters — even those who were already registered — complete a conditional voter registration form, “just like they would if they were a new voter.”
Haynes says Sacramento County voters were given the conditional, aka same-day voter, registration documents to ensure that everybody received their proper ballot.
The Voter’s Choice Act has changed the voting system for Sacramento County and 14 other counties as of the current election, including nearby Amador, Butte, El Dorado and Nevada counties. Among changes that also include mailing ballots to all registered voters, the legislation allows voters to receive and fill out their ballot any of the county’s 84 vote centers on Election Day regardless of their precinct, Haynes explained.
Because of this, the technical outage had a particular significant impact on Voter’s Choice Act counties, Haynes said, which made up eight of the 15 counties listed by Mahood.
Haynes said it was “hard to know” how many voters may have been impacted in Sacramento during the technical issue.
“Hopefully, we won’t experience any more technical issues today,” Haynes said.
This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 11:17 AM.
