http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/07/MNHUT7FPT.DTL&tsp=1
SFGate
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Counting S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writer
(11-06) 21:03 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco's election
for mayor went surprisingly smoothly Tuesday, if you don't count the two weeks
or more it's likely to take to tally all the ballots and come up with a final
result.
Scores of extra election workers were on hand Tuesday
evening to begin counting the tens of thousands of ballots cast at the polls in
a painstaking, state-mandated manner that could drag on until Thanksgiving.
"It's going to be a challenge," admitted John
Arntz, the city's election director. "But we have an absolute mandate from
the secretary of state to do this in a certain way."
That means that not a single ballot cast anywhere in the
city Tuesday showed up in the vote totals released Tuesday night, which
included only 48,104 absentee and early votes at City Hall. As the votes are
tallied, the latest results will be released each day at about 4 p.m. until the
count is complete.
Arntz hopes to have 65 percent of the absentee ballots and
75 percent of the polling place ballots counted by Friday.
The record slow count can be blamed on a long-running battle
between the secretary of state's office and Election Systems and Software,
which manufactures the city's voting equipment.
A 2006 test by the state showed that the ES&S equipment
used in San Francisco was unable to read some ballots that were marked in
anything other than dark pencil or black or dark-blue ink. When the city was
unable to bring in a replacement system in time for Tuesday's election,
Secretary of State Debra Bowen reluctantly certified the ES&S machines, but
with conditions that slowed the vote-counting process dramatically.
In years past, voters marked their ballots in ink and then
fed them into a machine at the polling place that electronically tallied the
results and stored them in the machine's memory pack. When the polls closed,
one team of deputies picked up the ballots at each polling place and took them
to Pier 29 for preliminary processing. Another team grabbed the memory packs
and took them to a nearby modem center, often a police station, where those
results could be electronically transmitted to the election center in the
basement of City Hall.
"Our primary focus was capturing those memory packs and
getting that information," Arntz said. "That's how we could get the
results to make public on election night."
But if the machines couldn't be trusted to read the ballots
properly, there was no way to tell if the information in the memory packs was
accurate, so Bowen banned the use of the packs. Instead, each ballot had to be
individually inspected to ensure that pencil or the proper ink was used. Then
the ballots had to be put through one of the four vote-counting machines at
City Hall.
So instead of dealing with one memory pack from each of the
city's 580 precincts, with the votes already counted, election officials will
be forced to hand-check more than 100,000 ballots, then run them through the
counting machines.
That completely changed the Elections Department's emphasis.
The actual ballots still went from the polling places to Pier 29, where
election officials checked them in and ensured that the ballots from every
precinct were accounted for. But they quickly had to send those bags of ballots
to City Hall.
"Our focus now is to get those ballots to City Hall so
that we have votes to start counting," Arntz said.
The first smattering of ballots wasn't expected to arrive at
the election headquarters until 10 p.m. Election officials planned to work
through the night - and through future nights - to get the votes counted.
The city's problems didn't end there.
Under San Francisco's ranked-choice voting system, voters
can - but don't have to - list three choices for mayor. But because of concerns
about the voting machines' reliability, Bowen ordered that any ballot which
didn't include three choices for mayor had to be kicked out by the vote
counting machines. Election officials not only had to examine each of those ballots,
but they also had to physically remake all of them, transferring the choices on
the original ballot to a new ballot, which would then be counted.
That takes time. And because an astounding 94 percent of the
absentee ballots processed by Monday had to be remade because voters didn't
list three choices for mayor, it has taken a lot of time.
"I was amazed by how many of absentee ballots
were" kicked out, Arntz said. "If that 94 percent holds with the
polling place ballots, we're buried, man."
At polling places throughout the city, under-voted ballots
were spit back by the machines, so that voters had to either fill out the list
for mayor or ask the poll workers to override so their ballot could be tallied.
"There's probably a whole lot more interaction than
usual between voters and poll workers today," Arntz said Tuesday.
Although results will be updated daily, Arntz expects to
have a preliminary vote tally by Nov. 16 and all the votes, including the
expected 5,000 to 6,000 provisional ballots, counted by Nov. 21, the day before
Thanksgiving.
If none of the mayoral candidates has 50 percent plus one of
the votes when every ballot is tallied, the city will then run the
ranked-choice system, eliminating the lowest-ranking candidates and reshuffling
their second- and third-place votes until someone has a majority.
But even that final total doesn't mean it's over for city
election workers. Because of the concerns about the ES&S machines, Bowen
has ordered the city to hand-count 10 percent of the city's precinct votes and
25 percent of the absentee votes to crosscheck the results of the vote-tallying
machines. In a typical election, only 1 percent of the precincts are
hand-counted.
The tallies, rechecks and hand counts all have to be
finished in time to meet the state's Dec. 4 deadline for the final statement of
the vote.
"It's tight," Arntz said. "We'll max out,
easy."
The expected low turnout probably saved the city some of the
estimated $300,000 added cost of Bowen's requirements. Although the city was
ready to run the election office 24 hours a day last week, it only took a
14-hour schedule to keep up with the absentees.
Counting the votes
In San Francisco, the tough part of the election comes after
the polls close. Most of the times and dates are estimates provided by the
Department of Elections:
Tuesday night: After the polls closed at 8 p.m., the city
stopped counting absentee ballots that arrived in the mail on Tuesday or were
turned in at the polls. The count will resume after the polling place ballots
are tallied.
Ballots were taken from polling places to Pier 29 for
preliminary processing. From there, they were to be taken to City Hall.
Counting is scheduled to run 24 hours a day until completed.
Today and beyond: At 4 p.m. daily, the latest vote counts
will be released, with final results expected by Nov. 21. The daily counts will
be available on the Elections Department's Web site,
www.sfgov.org/site/elections.
E-mail John Wildermuth at jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/07/MNHUT7FPT.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco
Chronicle
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
San Francisco election clerk Donna Hopkins examines absentee ballots for
missing signatures in the Department of Election office at City Hall on
Tuesday. Chronicle photo by Chris Stewart
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
San Francisco election clerk Donna Hopkins (cq) examines absentee ballots for
missing signatures in the Department of Election office at City Hall on
Tuesday. Chronicle photo by Chris Stewart
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
San Francisco election clerk Joyce Geronimo arranges absentee ballots in trays
in the Department of Election office at City Hall on Tuesday. Chronicle photo
by Chris Stewart
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
San Francisco absentee ballots with discrepancies await further processing in
the Department of Election office at City Hall on Tuesday. Chronicle photo by
Chris Stewart
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
San Francisco election clerk Donna Hopkins carries a tray of absentee ballots
after examining them for missing signatures in the Department of Election office
at City Hall on Tuesday. Chronicle photo by Chris Stewart
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
Emeryville resident Heston Liebowitz seals his ballot envelope at the
Emeryville voting station located in the old metal shop of the high School on
47th Street on Tuesday. Chronicle photo by Lance Iversen
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
Belvia Bach feeds absentee ballots into a box at City Hall on Monday. Chronicle
photo by Lea Suzuki
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
Marjorie Johansen finishes filling out her absentee ballot at City Hall on
Monday. Chronicle photo by Lea Suzuki
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
Steven Ku and Rachel Gosiengfiao upright a polling booth that fell over at City
Hall on Monday. Chronicle photo by Lea Suzuki
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
Belvia Bach (rear) helps Theresa Guerrero at the City Hall polls on Monday.
Counting
S.F. ballots will take a record amount of time
Clerks count absentee ballots in the Elections Department office at San Francisco
City Hall before the polls closed at 8 p.m., when they had to switch to
counting polling-place ballots. Chronicle photo by Chris Stewart
