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Registrars defend ballots In the six counties still using punch cards -- central to the federal appeals court ruling -- local elections officials said they've had few problems with the ballots over the years, and that they are confident they could run a fair election using them three weeks from now. Unlike the 2000 election debacle in Florida, where elections officials were hampered by ``hanging chads'' and held ballots up to the light trying to determine voter intent, several California registrars said they have run clean elections with punch cards for at least a quarter of a century, and that results and recounts have held up in court. ``There has never been an issue of having a poor election process due to the punch-card system,'' said Jesse Durazo, Santa Clara County registrar of voters, adding that the county would have continued to use the system had the state not ordered it replaced by March 2004. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday to postpone the recall until March, pending appeals, because the punch-card voting systems to be used in October in Santa Clara, San Diego, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Solano and Mendocino counties could result in as many as 40,000 votes not being counted. Because the plaintiffs sued the secretary of state and not the counties, local registrars never had a chance to testify about potential problems -- or lack of them. ``In this case, no counties had the opportunity to be heard,'' said Conny McCormack, Los Angeles County registrar of voters. ``The secretary of state doesn't conduct elections. There's a huge disconnect between the people conducting the elections and the court ruling.'' All California counties must eliminate punch-card voting by March, according to a 2002 agreement between the state and plaintiffs in another federal lawsuit. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, among the plaintiffs in both cases, is arguing that error rates from punch-card systems will disenfranchise voters in the recall, particularly blacks and Latinos. Forty-four percent of current California voters would use punch cards in the October election. With the system's error rate, as many as 40,000 votes would not be counted, argued the ACLU. The six counties with punch card systems have 46 percent minority voters, compared to 32 percent for non-punch card counties. As a result, black and Latino voters were more likely to have their votes not counted, the plaintiffs argued. Witnesses presented data in the 2001 court case to show that with punch-card systems, about 2.2 percent of votes go uncounted because of hanging chads or other problems with punch-card ballots. Los Angeles County had one of the highest uncounted vote rates at 2.7 percent. By comparison, less than 1 percent of votes go uncounted because of technical problems with optical scan or electronic touch-screen voting systems, the plaintiffs argued. ``Why is it under-votes go dramatically down when change from one system to another?'' said Henry Brady, University of California at Berkeley professor of political science and public policy, who compiled a statistical analysis for the plaintiffs in the case. ``The data are unequivocal, and that's what this case is about.'' But registrars in the six counties dispute the way the plaintiffs counted non-votes, which occur if a voter chooses more than one option per race (over-voting), or makes no selection in a race at all (under-voting).
``That 2.7 percent is a combination of over-voting and under-voting,'' said McCormack, the Los Angeles registrar of voters. ``Under-voting is not an error. It's people choosing
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