By Mike Rosenberg
mrosenberg@mercurynews.com
Posted: 05/27/2011 06:16:24 PM PDT
Updated: 05/27/2011 11:09:33 PM PDT
Santa Clara County election officials sent more than 7,500 mail ballots to the wrong addresses during last June's election, unwittingly canceling votes cast by some South Bay residents even as those living out of state received ballots.
A report released Friday from the county's civil grand jury concludes the Registrar of Voters does not follow the proper procedures to avoid errors when mailing out ballots to people who have recently moved.
The findings stem from the grand jury's investigation into the June 2010 primary election, when about 550,000 of Santa Clara County's 825,000 voters received their ballots through mail.
The vendor the county election's office hired to mail the ballots erroneously forwarded 7,668 ballots to former South Bay residents who had recently moved, the grand jury found in its investigation.
Of those, the vendor mailed 2,030 ballots to people who moved outside the county -- some even outside the state -- and were thus ineligible to vote in the local election. The vendor caught the error in time, however, and the county told the grand jury it voided those ballots.
An additional 3,124 ballots were incorrectly sent to voters who had moved to a new ZIP code within the county, which changed the local contests they could vote in, such as school board races and city tax measures. The county had to void all those ballots and resend new, correct ones.
The grand jury found, however, that the election office didn't clearly inform those voters that their first ballot was voided and that they needed to mail back a second one. Some of those voters most likely never sent their second ballot, the grand jury concluded.
"Thus, for some, without their knowledge their votes may not have been counted," the report concludes. "In a close election, such as the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District Board of Trustees, where one candidate won by just two votes, every vote matters."
The final 2,514 ballots were sent incorrectly to people who had moved but were still in the right voting district. Election officials simply updated their addresses and counted their ballots as valid.
Although less than 1 percent of mail voters received an incorrect ballot, the report concludes that the elections office needs to improve its policies to prevent the error from happening again. It recommends new policies, such as ensuring the mailing vendor signs a document indicating it has updated its address list.
"This doesn't surprise me at all -- nobody's checking their work," said Sharon Sweeney, a member of the citizens advisory commission on elections.
Election officials could not be reached for comment late Friday, but they told the grand jury that their normal checks-and-balances process was thrown out of whack because of the error made by their vendor.
Still, the grand jury found the registrar does not have clear contract provisions requiring the vendor to properly handle address changes.
It's only the latest hiccup for the registrar.
Election officials had to work overtime during November's election cleaning smudges off more than 100,000 mail ballots that initially could not be read by their ballot-counting machines. The company that produced the ballots, ProVoteSolutions of Porterville, took responsibility for that problem. The vendor responsible for the June 2010 error was not named in the grand jury report.
In 2008, the department ran out of ballots at some precincts, discovered some electronic voting machines weren't working and that dozens of precincts did not have bilingual materials.
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_18158042
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