Registered to vote? Today is last day for Californians to register online for Nov. 8 election
An image of California registered voter Juan Jose Sanchez during a training day at the University of California, Berkeley, September 15, 2014. REUTERS/Kimberly White
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California has the most stringent electronic ballot-counting system among the 50 states, which should be enough to slow down the state’s massive election problems.
But as of Friday, less than 90 percent of the state’s registered voters had the proper equipment to cast their ballots electronically.
The reason: the deadline to register online for the Nov. 8 elections was Thursday, and the state’s elections office did not issue enough voter-registration centers. The deadline is next week, Election Day is Dec. 15, and the office can’t open many more registration centers.
“It’s a monumental, monumental situation on so many levels,” said Andrew Pollack, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and director of its Institute for the Study of Elections and Democracy. “But the bottom line is, you have to have the machines.”
In 2008, Election Day fell on a Saturday, and a massive storm rolled through Los Angeles County. The county didn’t have enough automated equipment to tabulate an election — even if it had had it.
In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown and the state’s chief elections officer blamed federal regulations and did what Brown told them to do. The California secretary of state said the reason the election didn’t count was California’s inability to produce enough voting machines.
As a result, there were no votes. The governor announced that California’s election system had been “seriously compromised.” His office then issued a report saying the state’s electronic voting machines had been hacked.
But the report was based on faulty evidence. The secretary of state’s office was required to come up with a report on what
