Senate Elections, Reapportionment &

Constitutional Amendments Committee

Debra Bowen, Chair

Informational Hearing:

O Voter, Where Art Thou?—The Move Away From

Election Day Balloting

State Capitol, Room 4203

February 18, 2005

SENATOR DEBRA BOWEN: ...members of the Senate Elections Committee. It is 9:30. We are still missing one of the witnesses for our first panel. So my aim is to begin in three to five minutes. I’m told the person will be here momentarily.

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Good morning. Give the TV folks 30 seconds, put down their coffee cups. Good morning, and thank you all for joining this committee this morning for our first informational hearing.

What I want to look at today is how and where people are voting in California. If our goal is to make it easy for people to vote and to improve voter turnout, what should we be encouraging or discouraging? Should we be expecting to see a greater consolidation of precincts? Should we expect more centralized or mobilized voting centers? Should we anticipate the greater use of all-mail ballot elections? And what are the various advantages, disadvantages, and costs to voting in these different ways?

Last November, the turnout in California was 76 percent, but nearly one-third of our voters did not go to the polls on election day. They voted by absentee ballot. And I’m certain thousands of others voted at early voting centers in their county.

The federal Help America Vote Act was designed in part to get rid of the dreaded chads and put electronic voting machines into each polling place. But we have to ask ourselves if—thanks to California’s liberal absentee voting rules, we have fewer and fewer people actually going to the polls on election day as a percentage of the overall voting population—whether we should be spending the lion’s share of California’s Help America Vote Act money on equipment that’s used in the polling place on election day. So these are the kinds of nuts-and-bolts issues that we’re going to discuss this morning.

For those of your who have not been through an informational hearing with me, have not had the great fortune to be involved in California’s energy picture over the last number of years, we try to run a hearing that’s interactive, not just a series of presentations. The goal is to give people the ability to ask questions, to have discussion. I encourage disagreement if it leads to learning because the goal here is for us to learn about what’s actually happening with people who have to deploy—the county registrars, those who deploy the voting systems, and, of course, the voters, who ultimately have to use whatever systems we put in place.

So with that, let me first call up John Mott-Smith from the Election Division of the Secretary of State’s Office. He will help us get started. He’s going to set the stage, talk to us a little bit about the state of voting in California. Maybe we should call this the—institutionalize this and make it the state-of-the-vote address.

Welcome. Thank you for being here.

MR. JOHN MOTT-SMITH: Thank you for inviting me.

My name is John Mott-Smith. I’m chief of the Elections Division for the Secretary of State’s Office. I was asked to provide a view from 20,000 feet on non-precinct-voting options, including absentee, all-mail, and early voting. And to be honest with you, 20,000 feet is about as close as we, at the Secretary of State’s Office, get to the actual administration and the details of voting, and you’re going to hear from the people who are really the experts on that, the Registrar of Voters later on.

Setting the scene, in 1978, first-class postage was 15 cents; the movie Star Wars had just been released; the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever topped the charts for 24 weeks; Reggie Jackson was suspended by Billy Martin for not bunting (laughter); hurricanes were for the first time not named not only after females; Leon Spinx beat Mohammad Ali for the world boxing championship; the hot new videogame was Pac Man; the Shah was on the throne in Iran; and Laverne and Shirley was the top-rated TV show.

In terms of technology, almost all voters voted on punch cards; no one had a PC on their desk; there was no email; there was no internet; there were no fax machines. No one carried around pagers, cell phones. Text messaging was not in the dictionary. A blackberry was something you put on top of pancakes. Students and employees still typed papers and memos on typewriters with carbon paper, and record stores sold records, not CDs. And the election center, the election night center, at the Secretary of State’s Office, in those days was in the atrium of the old building, the public market building. It literally consisted of a chalkboard and a person standing on a step ladder who would, whenever a telephone call came in with results, erased the old ones and chalk in the new ones. And perhaps most significantly, 96 percent of the people who voted in California had only one way to vote. They could vote at a polling place.

I’m going to talk a little bit about absentee voting, permanent absentee voting, special absentee voting, and all-mail ballot voting. In 1978, the Legislature passed and Governor Jerry Brown signed Chapter 77, Statutes of 1978, permitting any voter to apply for an absentee ballot. Prior to this time, you could only vote absentee if you were ill, absent from the precinct on election day, had a physical disability, or a conflicting religious commitment, or lived more than ten miles from a polling place. At the November general election in 1978, there were 10.1 million registered voters; 7.1 million cast ballots. Of these, 314,000 were voted by absentee ballot. This was 4.4 percent of the total.

In the November 2004 election 26 years later, there were 16.6 million registered voters; 12.6 million cast ballots; and of these, 4.1 million were voted by absentee ballot. Between 1978 and 2004, there was an increase in the use of absentee ballots. If you measure it by number, it was 13-fold. If you measure it by percentage, it was eight-fold.

Permanent absentee voting. Permanent absentee voters automatically receive a ballot in the mail without having to apply for it. In 1992 for the June primary, 88,000 persons had applied for status as permanent absentee voters. That number slowly increased to 279,000 for the November 2000 election. AB 150, Chapter 922, statutes of 2001, by then, Assemblyman Shelly did for permanent absentees what Chapter 77 did for ABs in 1978. It opened up PAV status to any voter, regardless of whether they had a reason or not. By the November 2004 general election, almost 3 million persons were registered as permanent absentee voters, a tenfold increase in just one four-year election cycle.

California law was also amended in 2003 to state that an application for a special absentee ballot—and I’ll talk about that in a second—is also deemed as an application for a permanent absentee voter status. And while not quite permanent, the federal law, the Help America Vote Act, requires that an application for absentee voting be effective for the subsequent two federal general elections. So if you applied for an absentee ballot on the federal postcard application for the November 2004 election, that’s also an application for the June and November 2006 election.

Special absentee voters are those who are overseas and military. The federal Voting Assistance Program estimates there may be approximately a half a million of these Californians in this category. And traditionally, this is a very difficult group to enfranchise. We participated in a study with the Department of Defense ?? that indicated that there was a total of 68 days transit time in the election process—if I said 68, I meant 66—22 for the voter to send in an application, 22 for the elections official to send out the ballot, and 22 for the ballot to be returned to the elections official.

California is ahead of most other states in that we have a 60-day application period or we can begin sending absentee ballots to special absentee voters starting on the 60^th day which is better than most states. But it is not sufficient to eliminate complaints from overseas voters, which we get after every election. There’s a lot of things that have been done. To respond to that, one of them, I think you’re going to hear about today, Monterey County. If you don’t hear about it, I’ll fill it in later.

But also, AB 2941 last year was enacted as emergency legislation to permit military and overseas voters to cast their ballots by fax. This goes back to in 1991 when the Legislature permitted military and overseas voters to apply for absentee ballots by fax. So the only—we don’t have a lot of data, but what we have so far is March versus November. And in March of 2004, there were just under 10,000 military or overseas voters, of whom about 3,600 were able to cast their ballots in a timely manner.

For the November election, there were more than 62,000 registered military and overseas voters; 45,000 of them successfully cast ballots. And of these 5,000 and change were delivered by facsimile. And we would expect much in the same way that absentee voting increased as it was open to any voter, and permanent absentee status increased as it was open to any voter. And as more people become aware of the fax option from overseas, that it will increase also.

All-mail ballot elections. California was the first nation in the country—the first state in the country—to conduct an all-mail ballot election. In 1977, the Monterey County Flood Control District conducted an election for 45,000 voters. The turnout was 36.7 percent, which doesn’t sound like much. But it was about 50 percent more than it had ever been before. This was followed in 1981 by an election in the City of San Diego for 430,000 voters with a similar increase in voter participation.

Interestingly, one aspect of contention about absentee voting in specific and all-mail-ballot voting in general was addressed as a result of litigation out of that election. It was a suit that ended up in the California Supreme Court alleging that absentee voting and all-mail-ballot voting violated the secrecy provisions of the California Constitution. The court indicated, “The secrecy provision was never intended to preclude reasonable measures to facilitate an increased exercise of the right to vote, such as absentee voting and all-mail ballot elections.”

Subsequent to 1981, however, all-mail ballot elections more or less withered on the vine in California. You’ll hear from John Lindback from Oregon who took it and ran with it. There are many other states with experience as well. But we can’t ignore, and your staff report points out, that there is more all-mail voting in California than perhaps the general population is aware of. Specified districts of a certain size are able to vote by mail ballot, special districts, “small cities in eligible entities as they’re defined,” and then some charter-law cities, such as Modesto, conduct, for example, their run-off election for their city council and mayor offices, all-mail ballot, as a result of their charter.

Monterey County has specific statutory authority to conduct all-mail ballot elections. And the bill that ended up giving them that ability started as a bill to permit any county to conduct non-state elections by all-mail ballot.

Stanislaus and Placer Counties were given the ability in 1992 to conduct pilot, all-mail ballot elections. Placer chose not to but Stanislaus did. And because of the language of the bill enacting the pilot program, we’re able to consolidate a local election with a statewide special election in 1993 and reported an increase in voter turnout and a decrease in cost. There was an effort to extend that pilot program through subsequent legislation, but it was vetoed with a citation to the potential for fraud as the reason for veto.

I guess I’d like to just insert parenthetically that our office has been very involved in the last couple of years in issues relating to voting equipment. And really since 2004, there have been a lot of concerns raised about the security of touch-screen systems, security of the balloting system in general. And underneath all of the discussion about new technology is a consistent but sort of low-level and persistent concern about the security of the absentee voting system as well.

SENATOR BOWEN: Could you talk a little bit more about that? What is the concern and what’s your 20,000-foot view of the merits of the concerns?

MR. MOTT-SMITH: The concern is generally fraud, and fraud can take several different kinds of forms. It can be electioneering in the home; it can be somebody influencing a spouse, influencing another spouse; it could be a friend influencing a friend; it could be an employer influencing an employee. So electioneering in general—the involvement of campaigns in the delivery of voted ballots, where some of them do or do not make it back to the elections office—and then always the underlying issue. And there are ways of talking about the securities. But the underlying issue is, that in a system that permits registration without identification and voting without identification, that there’s an opportunity for people to pretend that they are people that they’re not or to organize efforts to—and I can give you specific examples, I guess. But again, I think that John Lindback from Oregon will have a lot to say about how that has worked in Oregon.

SENATOR BOWEN: I imagine our registrars can help us too.

MR. MOTT-SMITH: Yes.

SENATOR BOWEN: Although, actually, one of the things that surprise me is how little incidents of fraud we’ve had in California elections, generally. Maybe that’s an artifact of hailing from Illinois.

MR. MOTT-SMITH: It’s a…

SENATOR BOWEN: Historically. I don’t want to cast any aspersions on Illinois today.

MR. MOTT-SMITH: Right. I think California has a record of very clean elections. Some of what people think of as weaknesses in the absentee voting system may not be precisely characterized as fraud. For example, in the gubernatorial election in which Mr. Checchi and Ms. Harmon went at it, there was a saturation of the electorate with applications to vote by absentee ballot. I think something like 3 million applications or more went out. And the timing of that was such that the delivery back to the elections officials was late. Each of the campaigns made special efforts to send postcards saying, if you didn’t get it by this date, then go to the polling place. There was concern about disenfranchisement just on an administrative level, not only on a fraud level.

Alpine County has been voting entirely by mail ballot since 1993. Sierra County…

SENATOR BOWEN: Yet we should explain that Alpine County has a total population—I think it’s 1,250 people. And the number of registered voters is what?

MR. MOTT-SMITH: It’s about 850, I think. But at any rate, their precincts are all smaller than the 250 limit.

SENATOR BOWEN: I would imagine their greatest challenge is finding five people who consistently wish to serve on the board of supervisors.

MR. MOTT-SMITH: (Laughter) Well, I do remember visiting them many years ago, and I try and visit many of the offices. And you go to Los Angeles, for example, the week before an election, and you’ve walked through—they actually do a dry run—maybe you’ve been a part of that—but they do a dry run of the election, and it is logistically impressive. It’s like a mobilization of the military or something on that scale.

I went to Alpine County and asked to look around, and they took me into the courthouse and into one side room, and the side room was their elections office, including their warehouse, and the little 3x5 card file with flowers on it was their voter file box. I think they’ve upgraded since I visited sometime ago.

SENATOR BOWEN: Now it’s a 4x6 file.

MR. MOTT-SMITH: (Laughter) Anyway, Sierra County recently joined Alpine, and they conducted both their 2003 recall election and the November 2004 election with an 83 percent turnout in November.

Interestingly, both the City of San Francisco with Measure W—my wife always tells me I have to say “w” correctly—from the November 1989 election and two subsequent elections, as well as the City of Los Angeles, Charter Amendment 1 at the April 1997 election, placed the question of basically, Should we do, or should we have the capability of doing elections by all-mail ballot in our cities? And in both cases, the voters rejected the proposition by about 60:40. And the materials in the sample-ballot materials do go back to that issue of fraud.

Early voting began in California in 1994, and it’s continued since that time. In 1994, it was conducted as an interpretation of Elections Code Section 3018, but that section was explicitly amended subsequent to that time to permit voting at satellite locations. And it should be noted—and I’m sure that Registrars will tell you, that early voting takes place in every one of the California counties 28 days before the election in their offices. But early voting, as it’s understood, is shopping centers and other remote locations.

I think the thing about early voting is that there are a couple of issues related. One is administrative complexity, particularly with a 15-day close of registration, adding another method by which people can cast a ballot. It is not insignificant in terms of the requirements for organizing and putting together the resources to pull it off. There’s also valid security. No matter what system you’re using, you have security over a longer period of time than you would at a polling-place election. And then there are—there’s also the issue of complexity due to the number of ballot styles. It’s difficult unless you have a touch-screen voting system to provide every single ballot for every voter which can literally be in the thousands of different styles.

On the plus side—and I have to say, so far, I’ve not seen anything that really indicates that early voting increases voter turnout. But on the plus side, it does seem to me to be a very strong vehicle, media-genic vehicle, to be able to promote the fact that an election is coming in your county and to draw attention to people that they have an opportunity to vote. It gets good coverage. People see voting going on, and I have to think, that at a minimum, more people pay attention. And even if they don’t vote, early voting, that they might remember to vote either absentee or at a polling place.

So I’m not going to really draw conclusions. I’ll be happy to give you some opinions, but I think you’d be best to listen to the real experts in this. But my singular advice at this point is that—and the point of all of that historical information was that elections has changed as we have changed. Things are getting bigger. The volumes that the counties have to process are increasing the number of ballots, the number of applications for ballots. Things are getting faster. Because they’re bigger, the systems that are used to process absentee-ballot applications and absentee ballots and count ballots have to be faster and are getting more complex because necessarily, to meet the bigger, faster test requires technology, and the technology, though it can handle volumes, includes an element of complexity that is a cultural change for the old days of the 3x5 box or whatever. So as you look for how to make it better and how to make things more convenient, I would also ask that you look for how to make things more simple for voters and for poll workers and for elections officials.

SENATOR BOWEN: All right. Thank you, Mr. Mott-Smith.

MR. MOTT-SMITH: You’re welcome.

SENATOR BOWEN: Let me call up the remaining panelists at this point. It’s my understanding that Tony Anchundo from Monterey County will not be able to be with us. But if we could have Freddie Oakley, Jill LaVine, Janice Atkinson—let’s have the voter gentleman back—Stephen Weir, Kim Alexander, Jacqueline Jacobberger, and Dan Kysor. And if I have murdered your name, I apologize. If you get the correct pronunciation to me, I will limit the error to once.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Do we have enough chairs or…

SENATOR BOWEN: I think we have enough chairs, yes.

What I’d like to do as people are coming up is sort of talk about, try to talk about one issue at a time because there are so many different aspects to the one set of issues. So perhaps if we begin with, if we set aside the issue of absentee voting for the moment and talk about early voting, centralized, or mobile voting, consolidated polling places, and the location of polling places, sort of the aspects of dealing with the more traditional voting, and then we’ll go to a discussion about absentee voting.

Well, let me start with Freddie Oakley from Yolo County.

MS. FREDDIE OAKLEY: Madam Chair, good morning.

SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you for coming across the causeway.

MS. OAKLEY: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I have some materials which I’ll pass out later, give you to, if you want them.

Early voting, casting a ballot before election day, is permitted by the California Elections Code, beginning 28 days before any given election. Early voting may include casting an absent voter ballot through the mail or in the local registrar’s office. But it is most often thought of as casting an early ballot in person at a satellite location, and that’s what I’d like to discuss today.

Absent-voter-mailed ballots, popularly known as the absentee ballots, are used in every California county. Similarly, casting an early ballot in the registrar’s office is permitted in many, most, California counties. I have summaries of early-voting practices by county and also by state for you. What I will discuss here is the practice of allowing early voting in person at satellite locations.

Some of the positives of early voting at satellite locations are thought to be include greater convenience for voters, higher voter participation, and increased voter awareness of upcoming elections. Some of the negatives are thought to include the loss of degree of control over the voting process, increasing the occasion for voter fraud, trivialization of voting, creation of problems for campaigns—for example, when should we drop the mail is the perennial question, and insurmountable, technical challenges having to do with the voter file and recording votes.

SENATOR BOWEN: Can I stop you for a moment?

MS. OAKLEY: Sure.

SENATOR BOWEN: You and I both know, when should we drop the mail means.

MS. OAKLEY: Sure.

SENATOR BOWEN: But if you were listening to this conversation—

MS. OAKLEY: Oh, I’m sorry.

SENATOR BOWEN: --you might not know (laughter) for a campaign.

MS. OAKLEY: If you’re running a political campaign, you’d like to know when the majority of voters are going to cast their votes because you’d like to time your campaign so that you address the interest of those voters just previous to the time when they’re going to vote. So when we say drop the mail, we mean get those glossy brochures in the mail just a couple of days before people vote. If voting is spread out over a 28-day period, it’s very difficult to use that technique for addressing voters.

SENATOR BOWEN: Although some voters might think that’s preferable.

MS. OAKLEY: Absolutely. Some of us might.

With respect to the positives, I think they speak for themselves and address political values that I don’t think we need to debate. You either want higher voter turnout, greater convenience, and increased awareness of upcoming elections, or you don’t. Some people don’t. And certainly there are days when I could go either way. On a tough day, I just assume fewer people came around, but that’s not a good point of view to have, in my opinion.

The perceived negatives of early voting are more debatable, I think. By conducting voting that is more dispersed geographically and chronologically, we do lose some control over the process. You can make an analogy to 6^th graders on a field trip. If you let them decide where they’re going to go and when, it’s much more difficult to know that they’re all in line when they need to be.

SENATOR BOWEN: You know, we use Assembly members rather than 6^th graders.

MS. OAKLEY: Yes. I would never do that in this building. (Laughter) But you should feel free.

SENATOR BOWEN: I don’t want to do that either. My bills are going over there later this week. (Laughter)

MS. OAKLEY: And it’s also probably not polite to, you know, compare voters to 6^th graders, but it’s a good example of how hard it is to keep things line.

Some have expressed fear that this loss of control might lead to greater voter fraud by dispersing control authority and alertness. John introduced some of the issues that apply there. I think those are practical issues that we can address if we have the will.

The trivialization of voting by diluting what we think of as the sacredness of election day is a not-inconsequential issue to address for the reason that voters will bring it up. Our constituents care deeply, some of them, about whether or not we’re treating their votes as sufficiently sacred. And I have repeatedly heard complaints from voters, that by allowing voting by mail, by allowing early voting, we aren’t requiring of voters the discipline and the attention to ritual and sacredness that they think is important. I think we live in a culture where so many things that should be sacred are trivialized, that this is probably not an issue for politicians. It’s more like an issue for priests at this point, but it is an issue that will arise.

And with respect to creating problems for political campaigns, I don’t know of a single registrar in California who doesn’t think those guys can look out for themselves, you know. They’ve got all the money in the world now apparently, so let them figure it out.

In Yolo County, we were historically stymied by the technical challenges of early satellite voting. Since we use a paper-based voting system that does not link automatically with our database—and we look forward to replacing that system with an optical scan system that will likewise not link automatically with our database, it takes several steps for us to record whether a voter has cast a ballot and several steps to access that record. And none of those, that recording or access, is done over the internet or is linked to telephone transmission of any kind. We don’t have T-1 lines out to the Capay Valley and the remote regions of Yolo County and we will not have. We don’t have the capacity to do that.

Before the November presidential election, we were approached by UC Davis students who wanted to provide early voting on campus. Their thinking was that a significant number of students in particular missed the opportunity to vote on election day because their class and lab schedules are inflexible, and their polling places are unfamiliar to them and therefore challenging to locate. I think that is undeniably true. It is very hard for these kids who are essentially guests in our town to locate their polling places. I don’t think it’s impossible. I do think it’s difficult. You know, if you say to the parent of any six-year-old in Davis, California, You’re voting at Birch Lane Elementary School, they know what you’re talking about. There is, you know, a college junior who’s in their third year in that town will not know similarly where that is, and I think that’s a problem.

So I have been appalled and shocked and dismayed by low voter turnout in our mostly student precinct, and I was anxious to experiment with a solution. And so our department computer scientist in our Elections Department developed a system to prevent double voting. In spite of our old-fashioned paper-based system, he is a genius, and he did a great job for us. The system is very elegant and very simple, and so we were able to establish an early voting location for five days before the election in the student union on campus, and we made it available to any Yolo County voter. This was for the primary—I’m sorry—for the presidential general election. We did not have the gigantic proliferation of ballot types that other counties have. Steve Weir, for instance, can tell you, in Contra Costa County, I shudder to think how many ballot types you had in that election, but I guarantee it was a gigantic multiple of what we had.

So we were able to place all those ballot types at the polling place and make that polling place available to any Yolo County voter. What we found was that…

SENATOR BOWEN: What kind of ballot were you using at that time?

MS. OAKLEY: We use a data-vote ballot which is a computer card with a mechanical punch that pokes a hole in it. They’re pretty—it’s great technology, and it makes it easy to have a lot of ballot types there. They’re compact; you just put them in their envelopes and put them in a file folder and you’re good to go.

The result was an increase of over 1,500 votes cast on campus attributable to mostly student precincts. So that was in our county of 90,000 voters. That was a substantial increase in student voting. And we’re going to expand the experiment to other areas in the county, in our next election. We’ll do it in West Sacramento also. We also have—we have early voting already in our office in Woodland. This provides a site in Davis; we’ll provide a site in West Sacramento; and we will consider providing a site in rural Yolo County. We have some pretty far reaches there. There are areas of Yolo that are pretty remote, and we would like to be able to provide early voting in a grange hall or something out in one of those areas.

SENATOR BOWEN: Technologically, how do you deal with the problem of the potential for duplicate votes as you expand the number of locations?

MS. OAKLEY: For us, it translated into a personnel issue. What we did was, we had the polling place open from 10:00 in the morning till 3:00 in the afternoon. We cheated. I mean this is such an elegant solution. I don’t know why computer guys think of this and the rest of us don’t. We just had them vote absentee ballots so that they signed it and we researched it. When it came back to the office at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, by 6 o’clock in the evening, we were done researching all of those ballots. We had recorded the vote history to the voter so that they were, you know, if they cast another ballot, they would be in the exact same position as any absentee voter casting another ballot. It worked fabulously. If we increased the number of voters voting that way by even a factor of ten, it would just be a matter of increasing the staff we’re assigned to research those ballots between 3:00 and 6:00 in the afternoon, and that is not a complex project. That’s something we could train simple, you know, people off the street to do, in ten minutes. So we’re pretty pleased with that solution. I don’t know why we never thought of it before.

I emphasized that Yolo County has a voter file of 90,000 people, which is a pretty small county compared to the other folks at the table here. It allows us to perform experiments like this and to fool around with our systems in ways that other folks can’t do. I mean there’s just no way Connie McCormick ?? can do this.

Certainly, if you’re using, if a county were to use an electronically based voting system, and were willing to transmit or capable of transmitting results over the internet or over T-1 lines, which many counties are willing and capable of doing, then early voting and multiple-ballot types would not be a challenge. Then it’s just a programming issue. It’s not a practical challenge of any other kind. The question of whether early voting should be allowed, the question of whether vote totals should be transmitted over the internet, are two other questions, and those are ones that will have to be addressed in connection with this issue. Our personal experience is that we were very excited to have an increase in student turnout, and we would hope to expand that to an increase in turnout in other populations by doing early voting for other populations.

SENATOR BOWEN: All right. Thank you.

Jill LaVine, Sacramento County.

MS. JILL LaVINE: Yes. Thank you for this opportunity. We’ve tried early voting twice. We’ve had different experiences each time. Of course, we have it in our office, right before the election, the 29 days before the election. In November of 2002, we worked with the Secretary of State and tried an early voting experiment down in their office. However, at that time, we were using punch cards, and you have to have the correct ballot, like Freddie was referring to. You have to have the ballots needed for the voter. So we had to keep all these ballots on hand. Quite often, we were running back and forth from our office downtown with another ballot type. You know, we only had two of those, and we needed three of them and back and forth. The other problem is keeping these ballots secure. Thank goodness, working, say, with the Secretary of State, we had an opportunity to lock the ballots up and do the accounting each night.

Then there was the one day that everybody at the convention center decided to come over and visit us, and we were just, had lines out the door. All total for that—we ran about five days with about 1,200 voters for this early voting. We didn’t do a lot of advertising. We were just trying to get our feet wet at that point.

The second time we tried early voting was part of an RFP process. We were looking for some data and some experience with one of the vendors that didn’t have any onsite experience. So we tried in November of 2002—this is with Avante; we tried it with the paper audit trail. We have five locations out in our county. Things worked well because it was an electronic ballot. We did not have to worry about running out of ballots, running back and forth. But we still had the problem of securing the system every single night because some of these were in a shopping mall, so that was difficult. We did do a little bit of advertising. And at this particular time, we got about 1,600 voters.

We have not pursued the early-voting system or trying that out because we are a paper-based system. We use an optical-scan ballot. You have to have that particular ballot type to vote on, and voters come from all over the county wanting their particular ballot type. Such as in the primary election, we would have approximately 100 ballot types, times 11 different parties, times the two different languages, so you can see the stock we would have to have on hand. The general elections are a little bit easier. We only have about 200 different ballot types with only two languages at that point. Any paper-based system will have problems with this early voting unless you can print the ballots as needed. There is the technology from the vendors now, what we call the ballot on demand. With that, it brings a couple of other problems, such as, if you’re going to be a ballot printer, you have to meet the Secretary of State’s requirements, so you’ll have to make sure that your spot or your location has met the certification of security and storage. So definitely, a paper-based system is very much disadvantaged, and an electronic system does have the advantage at this point.

SENATOR BOWEN: All right. Thank you.

Janice Atkinson, Sonoma.

MS. JANICE ATKINSON: Thank you. Good morning.

Sonoma County has not done any early voting outside of our office location. We are a paper-based ballot, as Jill was mentioning. And although we don’t have as many ballot types as Sacramento, for the size of our county, we have a sizeable number. We had 125 ballot types in the last general election. Of course, the problems are, how do you get that many ballot types out to an early-voting location?

We’ve also found—and I hope to speak more extensively on permanent absentee voters—because we have such a high percentage of permanent absentee voters in our county, we don’t seem to have any pressing need to do early voting in the community. I believe that the majority of the voters who would take advantage of this are already sitting at home with their ballot in hand in Sonoma County.

We do have for voter convenience in our office, however—you know, we do, of course, do absentee voting, the 28 days before the election. And we have probably the only, in the State of California, a drive-up window, which I want you to know gets constant use during that 28-day period for people who are coming by to pick up their ballots. And it’s a lot of fun. The voters get a kick out of it, and it has helped things at our county complex. I don’t know how many other, the county complexes, have the severe parking issues that Sonoma County seems to experience so we’re able to…

SENATOR BOWEN: So you can drive up and order up your ballot?

MS. ATKINSON: That’s correct. You drive up; we give you an application; and you fill out and sign it; we get your ballot for you. If you want to vote right there, we usually suggest that they pull down and use the parking lot and mark their ballot and come back around so that we don’t have lines into the street. But our voters seem to love it; it’s convenient for them, and it has been a little fun, innovative thing we’ve tried in Sonoma.

SENATOR BOWEN: Yes. I can imagine that. Do you get requests for fries? (Laughter)

MS. ATKINSON: Every election. Generally, once a day.

SENATOR BOWEN: All right. Interesting.

Let me hear from Kim Alexander, Jacqueline Jacobberger, and Dan Kysor at this point, sort of your feedback on the early-election experience and what you think has been left out of the conversation so far, if anything, and where you might agree, disagree, or have other remarks.

MS. KIM ALEXANDER: Good morning. I’m Kim Alexander with the California Voter Foundation. My comments are going to focus primarily on absentee voting, as was mentioned earlier, it’s increased quite a bit just in the last 12 years. The rate has doubled from 17 percent in 1992 to…

SENATOR BOWEN: Let me do this. If you’re going to focus on the absentees, let me ask you to hold…

MS. ALEXANDER: Okay.

SENATOR BOWEN: …because I want to hear from the registrars on that.

MS. ALEXANDER: Do you want me to share my comments on early voting?

SENATOR BOWEN: If you have early vote, sure. Let’s do that.

MS. ALEXANDER: Okay. A couple of issues. There are some ballot secrecy concerns with early voting because early voting is taking place in public areas, and my experience as an early voter in Sacramento County was in a shopping mall. I also went to Las Vegas to view their new touch-screen system with a voter-verified paper trail that was also in a shopping mall. It’s taking place in a public area. There are people around. I heard some reports of some people videotaping voters while they were voting in Las Vegas which is some concern. We have a law in California that prohibits videotaping in polling places. But if we have voting going on in shopping malls, it might be a hard thing to enforce.

I wonder, as a voter educator, if early voting sometimes is taking place too early. Having people voting 30 days before the election day means that, not only may they not benefit from some of the mail that they might not get. But more importantly, things change in elections very quickly. And as you recall during the recall election, there were a lot of candidates on the ballot. By the time the election day actually came around, several of those candidates had dropped out of the race. And we heard from a number of voters who were disappointed that they had already voted, either absentee or early, and had cast their vote, and their favorite candidate had decided not to continue to pursue the election at that point. I’m a little concerned about early voting in shopping malls and other public places where people are coming into vote, coming into to shop, and then see the polling stations and say, oh, well, I’ll get my vote in while I’m here. They probably won’t have their booklet with them. They may know how they want to vote on a couple of races on the ballot. But as we all know, we have very long and complex ballots in California, and it requires a lot of homework. And so I’m somewhat concerned. I’d love to hear what the registrars’ experience has been with this, that people may get into an early-voting site, start voting, realize that they’re not prepared at that point to make every decision that they want to make on the ballot, and then want to withdraw from voting but not be able to because of procedural or security concerns with the ballot.

SENATOR BOWEN: It sounds like that wouldn’t be an issue with the way you did it in Yolo County because, if it’s an absentee ballot, you’re not required to turn them in right at that moment, right?

MS. ALEXANDER: Right. And it was also five days prior to the election when people probably were more likely to be better prepared to vote than they might be a month before the election. Early voting in California, my sense of it was that it was introduced in large part to introduce voters to electronic voting, and there’s no doubt that electronic voting is a much better system to use for early voting than paper-based systems.

One of the security concerns that the California Voter Foundation has with early voting is that, in order to ensure, as you were asking earlier, Senator Bowen, about how do you make sure there isn’t double voting, the best way that I’m aware of right now to do that is to have your early voting sites networked back to your county election office. That requires using the internet or phone lines to continuously update your databases and make sure all of your remote sites are being continuously updated. And I’m not at all confident that the counties that are engaged in satellite voting sites and using that kind of technology—primarily, Los Angeles is the one that I’m aware of—have covered all of the security bases that ought to be covered to make sure that that database updating is happening in a secure way and that the databases can’t be tampered with.

I think that we might want to consider, in general, and we’ve talked about this before, moving to high-tech voting centers and having early voting take place in a shorter timeframe, maybe, you know, the four days prior to the election rather than 30 days, and combining it more with absentee voting and having places where people can go and bring a paper ballot or cast an electronic ballot that’s backed up on paper and give voters more convenience to vote early but not so early that they end up not being able to make informed decisions about everything they might want to vote on, on the ballot.

We do need to improve the technology to make that happen and make sure that those databases of voters are continuously updated so that we don’t have over-voting or duplicate voting. And it’s important not only that we do that in a way that’s technologically secure but also in a way that gives voters confidence, that people aren’t going out and voting twice. A lot of the security concerns that voters have in California are hypothetical, and we may not have reports coming out that people are committing fraud or people are being coerced. But there’s a perception that those, because our system is rather liberal and there’s no ID requirements, that those kinds of things can happen, and we have to make sure that not only are the procedures are in place but that voters are informed of the procedures. Even if they’re not early voters themselves or absentee voters, all voters need to be made aware of the security concerns in place for all balloting systems so that all voters can have confidence that everybody is voting only once and voting their own ballot.

SENATOR BOWEN: And I think that voting your own ballot is certainly a concern to it. And that’s a concern, whether you’re dealing with electronic or paper ballots. But I think it’s an experience, particularly, I think it’s Orange County, where there were a number of voters in the last election, didn’t get the ballot that was appropriate to their situation, so they didn’t have the opportunity to vote for certain offices, and they did wind up voting in a district in which they didn’t live in certain races. So I think I want to kind of back up from this issue of the number of ballot types that various people have referenced.

And, Kim, maybe you can help explain to people who are watching or listening why we have so many ballot types. We all think of elections, and we think, Okay. We vote for governor or president, and we have a few initiatives. Why do you have 100 ballot types?

MS. ALEXANDER: Well, one of the reasons, of course, is redistricting and who draws the district lines. And we have district lines now following the 2000 Census that are very complicated, and that’s made the job for the county registrars much more difficult than when we had districts that were nested and more compact.

We have—you know, voters in California live in lots and lots of different districts. I personally have 22 different people who I elect to represent me at the state, federal, and local levels of government, and that’s everybody from, you know, my county sheriff to the school board to the president. And so every county election office has to deal with all these different ballot styles to make sure, that when you go and vote at your precinct, that you’re getting the ballot that is native to all of the districts that you vote in. And it’s challenging for the voter, and it’s extremely challenging, I’m sure, for the county registrars who, the bigger the county, the more districts they have, the more ballot styles they have. And it’s one of the reasons why electronic voting, quite frankly, has become quite attractive for the larger counties because, as you add in languages and the language requirements under the Voting Rights Act to that complexity of the districts, it becomes almost an impossible administrative task to generate all those different ballot styles. And then you add in also, of course, the primary and that additional layer of complexity to having different primary ballots, different language ballots, different districts.

SENATOR BOWEN: I think that will be helpful. I mean I think many voters don’t think about their school board, their reclamation district, their flood control board, the sheriff, the city attorney, the whole host of various kinds of elected offices that may all show up on the same ballot and where voters just have different, live in different districts next to each other sometimes.

So early voting. Anything else?

MS. ALEXANDER: That’s it.

SENATOR BOWEN: We’ll come back to you for absentees.

MS. ALEXANDER: Thanks.

SENATOR BOWEN: Let me turn to Jacqueline Jacobberger with the League of Women Voters.

Thank you for joining us this morning.

MS. JACQUELINE JACOBBERGER: Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Of course, the League of Women Voters is very concerned about voter turnout and participation and that’s, you know, one of our core issues. We have had experience with early voting sites, and we feel that they do provide voters with an opportunity to vote ahead of time. We found that local leagues, in staffing their telephones, had many inquiries at the last minute from somebody who had to go out of town, and what am I going to do? And so that we were able to direct them to early-voting sites and where—you know, they could go to the county registrars, but it was a long distance to that. Having something more centrally located for them was a plus, and people were very thankful.

SENATOR BOWEN: It sounds to me like that’s an issue that’s much more of a concern during the, sort of five-day window that Freddie Oakley was talking about and less of a concern 27 days before the election. I think, as we talked about, the complexity increases with the storage and security, the longer you have to maintain that. So having that experience report, I think, is helpful for us to understand who wants to vote early and can’t use a typical absentee ballot because that’s a way to vote to solve this, and we’ll talk about that next.

MS. JACCOBBERGER: And I’ve been in the Elections Department, say, on the very first day that absentee balloting was allowed and seen people who are going on a trip, standing there, casting their ballot and being delighted that they can do it and not have to worry about whether it was going to get in the mail and get delivered. So I think some of the alternatives that we’ve heard about, setting up the early-voting sites on college campuses, and I think when the technology, you know, is ready to allow that, it would certainly be a plus. One of the other things I’ve heard is setting up an early-voting site, say, in a large workplace, say, in San Mateo County, at Sun Micro Systems. And that would take definitely advances in technology for the people to be able to get those various ballots. But it could be a plus in the few days before the close of election. You could have it over several days.

I mentioned, when citizens use those alternatives, such as early voting, it does provide a challenge, as far as the mailing out of materials. The League gets a lot of calls saying, I don’t have my sample ballot. It didn’t come in the mail. So making sure that the materials are mailed in a timely fashion; I think I don’t have as much sympathy for the campaigns, but I also think that it is a challenge for volunteer groups, such as the League where we do candidates forums and, of course, have election publications of being able to get things prepared early, and I know Leagues are having their candidates forms earlier and so that people have that access to the candidates in a timely manner. And, of course, I think the increased use of electronic technology, such as we’re doing with our smart voter website, where the candidates could put their information on early and it would be available, so you could direct candidates, I mean, voters to that, as a source.

SENATOR BOWEN: When you were talking about the sample ballot, I was thinking that probably, generationally, much of that problem disappears before too long because the generation who are about to begin registering are pretty used to getting whatever it is. I had student in government yesterday say to me that she couldn’t imagine how she could do an historical report without Google and, if she had to go to the library and get books out, she just didn’t know how she would do it. It was a very big generational gap around the table. But I think it tells us something about that. But that doesn’t solve the problem that Kim Alexander referenced about the fact that things change during the course of an election. And reading a printed statement from a candidate is very different than dealing with a voter, a League of Voters forum, for the same position and the job that the media and now the bloggers do in looking at the details of some of what’s happened. And the information that’s available to voters is obviously richer as the time grows shorter.