Why? I thought paper ballots were better than electronic. Of course dems can cheat using any system.
Among the factors expected to slow California’s tally:
— Late-arriving absentee ballots will be tallied only after the precinct ballots are counted, and then only after a painstaking verification process. The sheer number of late-arriving ballots could leave registrars unable to call races until Wednesday, or later.
— A switch back to paper ballots has forced four of California’s most populous counties—Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Santa Clara—to count ballots centrally, often with too few high-speed scanning machines to tally the votes rapidly. Los Angeles and Sacramento also will haul their ballots back to a single location.
— A lack of optical scanning machines at individual polling places means precinct workers will not be able to catch errors made by voters and have them correct their ballots. Any ballots that are incorrectly filled out will have to be reviewed, and in some cases hand-copied, at central counting locations.
“We’re working as late as we can to get them all counted,” Kathi Payne, the registrar in San Bernardino County, said Monday.
A shortage of high-speed scanners has left that county—with 723,661 registered voters—predicting the preliminary counting will go into Wednesday morning.
The return to paper ballots in 21 counties came after last year’s security review of electronic voting machines by the secretary of state’s office. The review found many of the machines could be hacked.
In Riverside County, a printing error scored as many as 60,000 absentee ballots so deeply that they fell apart when voters removed them from envelopes. That problem was slowing a team of 16 election workers, who were painstakingly hand-copying the last of roughly 35,000 ballots onto intact ballot cards Monday night.
“We’ve been able to streamline the duplication process so it should all be solved by tomorrow,” Registrar Barbara Dunsmore said.
About 6,000 voters requested replacements.
Sacramento County officials also were dealing with an unexpected software glitch that caused their precinct scanning machines to reject some versions of the ballot, prompting the registrar to abandon them entirely and mandate central counting. That will stretch tallying into Wednesday morning, assistant registrar Alice Jarboe said Monday.