Voting Snafu Reverberates – Half Of California Ballots Still Not Counted
Written by 991KBU on March 5, 2020
Long lines … malfunctioning computers … polling places that were a day and a half late.
As bad as the election was in Malibu … it was worse in some places elsewhere in L-A County.
The L A Times reports that some voters waited four hours and longer in some locations to cast their ballots.
Others drove around from one polling place to the next, searching in vain for shorter lines.
At one polling station, a worker said she wept in frustration while desperate voters scratched out their choices on write-in ballots — written in languages they did not speak.
Calls for a forensic autopsy into the widespread failures are coming from the L A County Board of Supervisors.
The messy outcome was a painful comedown for the county supervisors and elections chief Dean Logan.
They spent 300 million dollars on new voting systems that in most cases worked spectacularly well … but were not deployed smartly across the 3 million person county.
And as of this morning … statewide … more than half of the state’s ballots remain to be counted.
Mail in ballots are trickling in to counting centers in all 58 counties … each one using a different counting system.
Officials won’t even know how many ballots are left to process until Friday.
It will take days and perhaps weeks to tabulate every vote.
Most races are settled.
One cliffhanger is the L A County Attorney’s office race.
Incumbent chief prosecutor Jackie Lacey remains just a few hundred votes above the 50 percent level.
If she drops one vote below 50 percent … she will face a runoff election with challenger George Gascon.
