Election snafu under investigation
BY JAMES BURGER, Californian staff writer
e-mail: jburger@bakersfield.com | Thursday, Jun 8 2006 9:55 PM

Two senior members of California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson's staff arrived at the Kern County elections division Thursday with a list of hard questions about this week's problem-plagued local election.

The team came south from Sacramento in response to reports that Kern County voters were turned away from the polls Tuesday after glitches developed with Diebold touch-screen voting machines.

Kern County Elections chief Sandy Brockman said the two men finished talking with elections officials after 5 p.m. Thursday and headed back to Sacramento to digest the information and prepare a report.

"If voters were disenfranchised, that's unacceptable," said McPherson spokesperson Nghia Nguyen.

Secretary of State staffers traveled to Kern County, she said, "to find out what happened and work with Kern County to resolve any issues and make sure they don't happen again."

The two investigators should release a report to the public by the end of next week, Nguyen said.

Kern County Auditor-Controller Ann Barnett is preparing a report of her own. She has been directed to deliver it to county supervisors on June 20.

Barnett has been widely criticized for the problems that occurred on election day.

Supervisors Don Maben and Michael Rubio have suggested that the elections division no longer belongs under the control of Barnett, who also handles the duties of the county auditor, controller and county clerk.

Maben has even suggested that McPherson take over Kern County elections until legislation can be passed to separate the county elections division from the auditor-controller's office.

Rubio said he's glad McPherson's staffers are in Kern to help identify Tuesday's problems.

"An extra pair of eyes is always good," Rubio said. "But it is our duty as a board (of supervisors) to take action and make sure it never happens again."

Voting problems started Tuesday morning when election workers discovered many of the vote cards weren't working.

The cards, which record votes, hadn't been cleared and prepared to accept new data.

Many voters used paper ballots during the three hours it took to fix the problem.

But not all polling places had enough paper ballots to go around and some voters were asked to come back later to vote.

Then Tuesday night, vote tallies were delayed while county staff ironed out kinks in the computer system that counted ballots.

Both Nguyen and Barnett said Kern's technical problems did not keep votes from being recorded accurately.

"The integrity of votes cast is intact," Nguyen said.

Some poll workers rallied to support Barnett on Thursday.

"When we went through that training, I've never seen anyone work so hard as Ann did," said Mildred Crabtree, who helped voters at the Valley Baptist Church polling place. "She was just sweating blood to make sure everything worked right."

Barnett said she did much of the training of poll workers herself and hired former county employees to help complete training in the few short weeks before the election. Crabtree said none of the data cards at her polling place worked when the polls opened Tuesday.

Most voters there decided to use paper ballots, she said. Others said they'd come back later because they wanted to use the new touch-screen machines.

"Our day just went fine. We didn't lose anyone," Crabtree said.

Barnett did not return calls from The Californian on Thursday.

She said Wednesday that the Diebold corporation did not provide the county with the owner's manuals that told them that voting cards needed to be cleared of old election data before they could be used again.

Kern County paid about $5 million for the new electronic voting systems, Barnett said.

Nguyen said 19 other California counties used the same voting technology successfully on Tuesday.