Fear & loathing at the ballot box

Like most California voters, I wasn’t terribly excited about last week’s election. If I received a sample ballot, I didn’t see it. And with my penchant for changing political parties in disgust, I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of ballot I’d even receive when I reported to the polls.

But c’mon, gimme a break, I’m not your typical uninformed, apathetic voter. I’m the SN&R’s news editor, for chrissakes, so I’m subject to more political propaganda and election-related press releases than a person can imagine. Don’t blame me for taking it easy just this once in my 10-year journalism career, not with this snoozer of an election lineup. I’d figure it all out at the polls. It would be fine.

Or maybe not.

Immediately, there were problems. Having voted in just one other Sacramento election since moving here, I’d forgotten about the wacky “Poll Star” ballots here. This is one of just nine California counties to still use the punch card ballots that were made so infamous in Florida when George Bush swung from those hanging chads right into the White House.

So there I was, holding a grid of numbers 1 through 312, without the foggiest idea what to do with it. The booth didn’t have any clues. Hell, it didn’t even have a curtain, not that anyone could look over my shoulder and tell who I was voting for anyway. I glanced back at the poll worker in desperation, but he just flashed me a vacant smile.

“Shouldn’t there be some names or something attached to this?” I asked, and he came to my relief with a Sample Official Ballot. I looked at it, and for the first time realized that I was officially a “Nonpartisan.” Nonpartisan? Hmm, I’d never heard of such a ballot designation, but it seemed appropriate enough.

Unfortunately, that label would only make things worse.

California-style democracy is changing, and not for the better. I didn’t need my experience at the ballot box to tell me that, even if that’s what truly brought it home.

We have more ballots than ever before, all manner of subtle tweaks in the rules of voting, an early election date that sneaks up on distracted voters, a hybrid somewhere between “open” and “closed” primaries, and a massive push to replace archaic voting machines with the latest high-tech wonders.

The changes have come from all quarters: the California Legislature, voter-approved initiatives, executive fiat and the courts. And never has it been as completely displayed in all its confusing glory as it was last Tuesday, when California coincidentally—or not so coincidentally—had its lowest voter turnout ever.

After election day, Al Fawcett of the Sacramento County Elections Office validated my confusion somewhat: “We had a lot more rules to play by this time,” he said, citing the myriad ballot types, the new 15-day registration deadline and changes in the primary laws as the most challenging for elections officials.

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, even wrote a song about this election, which begins:

Lots of things are different
Many rules have changed
So if you feel a little lost
Don’t think that you’re to blame

So who is to blame? Well, for the “slightly ajar” primary, as Alexander dubbed our open/closed primaries, the blame gets spread widely. First, the voters passed Proposition 198 in 1996, creating an “open primary” in which voters could cast ballots in the primaries of parties to which they didn’t belong.

Then the Democrat and Republican parties challenged the measure in court, where a judge ruled that parties have a right to decide who selects their nominees, effectively striking down open primaries. So the Legislature came around and modified the measure, allowing a modified open primary in which parties can formally opt into allowing outsiders to vote in their primaries—for every race other than the central committees.

Ironically, both the Democrat and Republican parties (as well as the American Independent and Natural Law parties) chose to opt in after their court challenge made a mess of this whole thing. So now, in addition to the “Nonpartisan” ballot, we have the oxymoronic “Nonpartisan Democrat” and “Nonpartisan Republican” ballots.

I stuck my ballot into the machine, placing “holes over posts” as instructed—simple enough—then proceeded to try to crack the electoral code. Oh wait, no, first I had to read the “New Law for Nonpartisan Voters” page, which informed me that “there is no longer an open primary,” but that a “new law gives you more options than voting a Nonpartisan ballot.”

I read that I could “request and vote a ballot” for one of the four qualified parties, but only one of the four. Obviously, having barely even gotten the sample ballot decoder to my ballot grid, I hadn’t made such a request, so it was a Nonpartisan ballot that waited in my machine. “A Nonpartisan ballot contains only the names of candidates for Nonpartisan offices, propositions and measures for the March 5, 2002 Primary Election.”

Being a reasonably intelligent guy, I took that statement to mean that I couldn’t vote in the governor’s race or any of the other partisan primaries. So I flipped back a few pages to confirm this finding and saw the full slate of partisan candidates, listed by party. Punch 6 for Gray Davis. Stefan “Watchdog” Stitch was number 83. It wrapped up with Natural Law insurance commissioner candidate Raul Calderon Jr. at 145.

So now I was really confused. And I wasn’t the only one.

“I’m still not too sure about these Nonpartisan ballots,” the poll worker said to another voter, scratching his head and seeming to psychically feel my pain. Their conversation continued as I tried to solve the puzzle. “I don’t like how you can only vote for someone in your own party,” the female voter said. I was tempted to tell her about how I could vote for anyone from any party on my ballot, but I still wasn’t sure that I legally could and didn’t want to sound stupid.

I decided to just start voting.

My ballot began with a choice between numbers 185 and 186: Julius M. Engel versus Joe S. Gray for Superior Court judge. I’ve never liked voting for judges. But being as this was my first decision of this election, I wanted to make a good-faith effort, and flipped back in the book to look at their candidate statements.

“Pursuant to Proposition 34 effective January 1, 2001, the following State Legislative Candidates who have accepted voluntary spending limits are eligible to submit a candidates statement at their own expense in their party’s Voter Information Pamphlet,” the book read, before listing 15 regional legislative candidates.

Of those, only Assemblyman Dave Cox had a statement. This was followed by Judge Joe Gray, Supervisor Roger Dickinson and the two candidates for sheriff. That’s it. No Julius Engel. If there was a method to this madness, I didn’t see it.

So I went back and cast my customarily uninformed vote for judge. Then came superintendent of schools, the unopposed candidates for the Board of Supervisors, assessor and district attorney, the sheriff’s race, the six state propositions and three local measures.

As I used my little hole puncher—which to me seemed more like a weapon you’d see in the prison yard than a tool of democracy—to press the chad out of number 257, indicating I wanted the “right to have vote counted,” I really wondered whether mine would be.

Alexander had a great line— one she gave to both me and the Bee reporter—for making the point about how unnecessarily confusing voting has become and its stifling effect on democracy: “This year, I felt like voting was more like doing my taxes than participating in a great civic ritual.”

I found it to be a widely shared observation. Fawcett laughed a little too hard when I asked if the Legislature should try to clarify and simplify elections, agreeing once he’d caught his breath. Jim Knox, executive director of the campaign reform group Common Cause, also joined the chorus.

“When I went into the polling place, nobody was able to give me advice,” he said. “The poll workers didn’t seem to know which ballots did what.”

At times like these, we Americans have turned to new technologies and that’s exactly what we’re doing now, with a little help from Proposition 41, which barely squeaked by with 51.5 percent of the vote to make $200 million available to help counties “purchase modern voting equipment and replace outdated punch card (chad) systems.”

Yet even here, there is confusion, concern and acrimony. Brought into the national spotlight by the Florida presidential election fiasco of 2000, elections officials across the country struggled to upgrade their systems.

California Secretary of State Bill Jones in December announced that he would decertify the punch cards, but not until after the 2004 presidential elections, ostensibly to make sure all the bugs get worked out of the new touch screen voting system most of us will supposedly be using instead. But Common Cause and other groups sued, and last month U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that California had to get rid of its punch card voting machines before 2004. “It’s going the way of the Edsel,” Knox said of the chad, although Jones is weighing an appeal of the ruling.

But groups like the California Voter Foundation have their concerns about high-tech manipulation of the new systems, with Alexander noting, “there is no voter-verified paper trail with these systems.”

And so it goes.

Originally, Sacramento County used the Vote-o-Matic system. That’s the one I was familiar with from other counties, the one where you punch the chads out from next to the preferred names on the ballot. But in 1992, with dozens of ballot machines overwhelming the old system, Sacramentans changed to the Poll Star grid.

After pulling mine out of the measures, I examined it for hanging chads and found none. That was a good sign. Then I held it up to the light, examining my strange clusters of holes like they were some ancient constellation.

There were a dozen columns of chads. Columns 8-12 were peppered with holes I punched confidently—even stabbing them a few times each for good measure—and columns 1 and 2 contained my votes in the partisan races. I’m still not sure whether or not they counted.

Was my vote for John Garamendi for insurance commissioner one of the 505 invalidated “overvotes” recorded for that race in Sacramento County? If I wasn’t supposed to be voting at all, would it even count as an overvote? Did my vote count?

I may never know.