California: San Francisco goes for the Guinness — 500-page ballot book blockbuster | San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco voters this fall will be treated to some extra reading in the form of a 400- to 500-page ballot guide, thanks mostly to a referendum on the height of the 8 Washington waterfront luxury condo development. “It’s going to look like a phone book,” said Department of Elections head John Arntz. That’s because under city law, the Nov. 5 ballot book, which is mailed to 500,000 voters, must include the “full text” of the referendum as it was presented during the signature drive that put it on the ballot. In this case, that means the city must include more than 500 pages of documents, including those from the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors’ hearings and even copies of studies on shadows that the condos may cast. And it is not going to come cheap.

California: ‘Super PACs’ negate spending limits in L.A. mayor’s race | Los Angeles Times

Strict limits on campaign contributions imposed by voters nearly three decades ago are crumbling in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, with big donors using loosely regulated “super PACs” to help candidates like never before in a citywide election, a Times analysis has found. Of the $17.5 million collected so far to support mayoral hopefuls Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti, roughly one-third — a record $6.1 million — has gone into independent political action committees that can accept contributions of any size. The rise of the parallel campaign finance system, awash in five- and six-figure donations that dwarf the limits approved by voters, has watchdogs of political influence sounding alarms.

California: Online voting registration’s influence set to expand in California | California Forward

As more and more data is analyzed from last November’s election, the impact of the recently-enacted Online Voter Registration (OVR) in California continues to crystallize. Paul Mitchell of Political Data, Inc. (PDI) is one of the most respected number crunchers in the state. He’s a bit like our own Nate Silver, except he specializes in reading the tea leaves after the fact instead of making predictions beforehand. In a recent blog post tied to the annual convening of California Democrats last weekend, Mitchell breaks down the OVR data that likely helped secure Dems their current supermajority.

California: Bills seek updates to voting, election systems | San Jose Mercury News

In use for the first time last year, California’s online voter registration system proved so popular that lawmakers want to build on its success this year. Wider promotion of the system and a push toward online voting are among several election-related bills under consideration as the Legislature approaches a midyear bill deadline. Other changes under consideration would shine more light on campaign financing and update how elections are run. About 800,000 Californians used the online registration system to join the state’s voter rolls, according to state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, who authored the original bill. An analysis of turnout figures by Political Data Inc. indicated that those who registered online were significantly more likely than other voters to cast a ballot last November. This year, Yee’s SB44 is proposing that all state websites link to the secretary of state’s voter registration page in an effort to publicize the system. Others want the state to move even further online and are pushing for a pilot program to test the casting of ballots over the Internet. Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, has put forward AB19 to review the security of online voting software and eventually create a pilot program for counties.

California: Democrats push voting laws that could broaden their reach | The Sacramento Bee

Fresh off their 2012 wins at the polls, California Democrats are looking to broaden their reach by advancing a new batch of bills aimed at expanding voter access and increasing turnout. Achieving that result would likely benefit Democrats, who historically fare worse in the lower-turnout nonpresidential elections, as they defend supermajorities in the state Legislature and competitive congressional seats won last year in the 2014 election. “We have work to do,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told delegates at the state party’s convention over the weekend in Sacramento. “We just got started.”

California: Success of mail-in ballots lengthens campaign, candidates say | Glendale News Press

More Glendale voters used the postal service to cast their votes than a polling center ballot box for the election on Tuesday, a trend that’s been on the rise in the city — and across the state — now for years. The shift, candidates and elections experts say, has meant harder and longer campaigns that must capture voters over a much longer period of time. “You have to make sure you get your message out there in time for the earlier voters,” said Lori Cox Han, professor of political science at Chapman University. City Council incumbent Laura Friedman’s campaign was a case in point. She timed her television ads, which ran on both cable and broadcast channels, to air around the time the sample ballots arrived. “The polls were open as soon as those absentee ballot were in their hands,” said Friedman, who, according to unofficial results released this week, recaptured her seat. About 62% of voters in Tuesday’s municipal election voted by mail, roughly the same as 2011, but up 5% since 2007.

California: School district sued over voting rights issues | Los Angeles Times

A school district in southeastern Los Angeles County is illegally diluting the voting clout of Latinos and barring them from elective office by using an at-large electoral system for school board races, according to a lawsuit filed this week. No Latino has been elected to the seven-member board in the ABC Unified School District since 1997, although the ethnic group makes up nearly one-fourth of adults of voting age, according to the lawsuit filed by MALDEF, a leading Latino legal civil rights organization, and the Los Angeles law firm of Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho. The district encompasses 30 schools in Artesia, Cerritos, Hawaiian Gardens and portions of Lakewood, Long Beach and Norwalk. Its students are 42% Latino, 26% Asian, 11% Filipino, 10% African American, 7% white and 1% native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

California: Los Angeles County Remakes How Its Citizens Will Vote | The California Report

Los Angeles County is re-inventing the nation’s largest voting system, which serves nearly 4 million registered voters. The goal is to build a more flexible, user-friendly system that could be licensed for use in other cities and counties around California. … The architect of all this is Dean Logan, registrar-recorder for Los Angeles County. He oversees a system that dates from the 1960s. The county uses ink-marked ballots and old IBM card-counting machines. The  50-year-old system is nearing the end of its useful life. After the presidential election in 2000, when voters complained they mismarked the controversial butterfly ballots used in a Florida county, Congress and state governments gave counties millions of dollars to replace old punch-card ballot systems with digital voting machines. Across California, counties adopted those systems, some of which now need updating. Los Angeles County resisted buying the machines, and still has $60 million of federal and state money to spend on a new system. Only five brands of voting machines are certified for use in California. Logan said the county doesn’t want them. They are too expensive and bulky to put in some 5,000 polling places. “There really is no existing voting system out on the market,” he said. “It’s a very limited market in the first place.”

California: Los Angeles County developing a voting system for the digital age | SCPR

Los Angeles County is re-inventing the nation’s largest electoral system, which serves nearly 4 million registered voters. The goal is a more flexible, user-friendly system that county officials hope will increase turnout. To design the system from scratch, county officials started in 2010 by surveying voters and stakeholder groups. They added observations from poll workers. The county registrar of voters also co-sponsored a design challenge on a crowdsourcing website that drew responses from all over. Cansu Akarsu, a designer from Turkey, suggested a computer tablet that helps poll workers interact with disabled people to select the right voting method. A person could use the system to select polling place accommodations days in advance. Tina Lee, a U.S.-based designer, suggests a tablet app that lets the voter decide the pace of the ballot display or the order in which contests would appear. Some other suggestions included a van that travels to voters, voting kiosks at grocery stores, and a two-week voting period.

California: Stanislaus County Clerk’s $4K recount charge includes staff prep time | Modesto Bee

Former Mayor Virginia Madueño’s supporters said the Stanislaus County election office shouldn’t charge them for staff salaries for the week before ballots were recounted in the November mayoral race. Madueño is contesting an itemized bill showing that Registrar of Voters Lee Lundrigan charged almost $4,000 for her time spent on the December recount. A Madueño supporter who asked for the recount was billed $10,217 by Lundrigan’s office for an effort that lasted 5½ hours before it was called off. In addition to a required $2,400 deposit to start the Dec. 10 recount, county elections sent a bill six weeks later seeking payment of an extra $7,817, based on staff time to prepare for the tally. According to the invoice, Lundrigan worked 30 hours preparing for and conducting the recount, at a rate of $131.42 per hour. Time sheets show a total of 108 hours worked by 11 other employees on Dec. 10 and the previous week.

California: Report shows online registration drive draws broader voter base | UCB News

California’s new online voter-registration system, which premiered last fall, generated some striking results, including that more registrants come from low- and middle-income neighborhoods than expected, says a new University of California, Berkeley, study. Researchers Lisa García Bedolla, a UC Berkeley associate professor of education and of political science, and researcher Véronica N. Velez, a postdoctoral research fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Latino Policy Research, just released their report for the center about California’s entry into online voter registration. California opened up its voter registration process last fall, and UC Berkeley researchers have found some interesting results. “Given voters in California are, on average, significantly more affluent than the general population, this study suggests that online voter registration opened up the … process to a wider range of voters in terms of their socioeconomic status,” García Bedolla and Velez reported.

California: Popularity of vote-by-mail adds extra complication to counting votes accurately | California Forward

Are absentee ballots the new hanging chads? More than 4 million presidential votes were lost in the 2000 election which was notoriously plagued by the hanging chads fiasco. Although voting technology has since vastly improved, the steady rise in absentee voting may undermine any gains in accuracy. Why is this important in California? Because last year’s presidential election was the first statewide general election in which a majority of Californians, 51 percent or 6.8 million to be exact, voted absentee. By comparison, less than 3 percent of California ballots cast in the 1962 general election were submitted by mail.

California: Nonpartisan Districting Ousts Life Incumbents | Bloomberg

In the 1980s, a joke that ran through California political circles was that more turnover occurred in the Soviet Union’s Politburo than in the state’s U.S. House delegation.  The laugh-line still worked well after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. From 2002 to 2010, the partisan re-election rate for California House seats was 99.6 percent. Only once in 265 House races in general elections during those years did a district’s representation flip parties, going from Republican to Democratic. That stability ended last year after California (STOCA1) voters in 2010 gave a citizen’s panel the power to redraw the House districts. The impact, combined with a new primary system, was immediate. One out of four of the state’s 53 congressional incumbents departed through retirements or defeats in the 2012 primaries and elections. “You’ve had voters shoehorned into districts for the sake of maintaining incumbency and we aren’t doing that in California anymore,” said Kim Alexander, founder and president of California Voter Foundation. “It was a big shakeout. That’s probably what would happen everywhere if you had fair redistricting.”

California: New Bill Would Allow Counties to Create Own Voting Systems | Central Coast News

A new bill would allow California counties to create their own public voting systems across the state. The idea is an effort to modernize the voting process and make it more efficient. Some California counties have voting equipment that’s more than 30 years old. Currently, most California counties purchase their voting systems from one of 5 private vendors. Those companies have trademarked their technology and limit public access to operating the systems. If the equipment malfunctions, the companies have no legal obligation to notify election officials and the public. The legislation would give counties the power to develop, own and operate voting systems. Los Angeles County is spearheading the idea and could one of the first counties to create such a system.

California: Path toward online voting stymied by fear of hacking | California Forward

While we can do just about everything on the Internet these days, like buy groceries, pay bills, and most importantly, waste hours watching cat videos, we can’t yet cast a ballot online. But the idea of e-Voting, as it’s called, isn’t so far-fetched. Eight years ago the small Baltic country of Estonia became the first country in the world to allow voters to cast ballots over the Internet, and it has actually worked rather well. After the successful launch of online voter registration last year, which allowed roughly 600,000 Californians to register online in the final 45 days before the 2012 election, electronic voting would seem like the logical next step. Furthermore, it’s reasonable to believe that California, home to Silicon Valley and birthplace of the Internet revolution, would lead the charge toward cyberspace voting. Don’t rush out and buy an iPad just yet; it’s unlikely that you’ll be voting for president, governor, or mayor on one anytime soon. In fact, voting security experts like Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to safeguarding elections in the digital age, hope to slow any expansion to Internet voting, for now anyway. Smith warns that online voting is a “dangerous idea” as there is currently no way to guarantee the security, integrity, and privacy of ballots cast over the Internet.

California: Will California Counties Develop Public Voting Systems? | GovTech

On Feb. 25, California Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) announced a new bill that would let counties in the state develop, own and operate their own public voting systems. SB 360, which would subject such systems to approval and certification by the California Secretary of State, would allow California counties, most of which purchase their voting systems from one of five private vendors, take control of public voting technology, according to a press release. Because the vendors offer a variety of systems and upgrades, the result is a complex system of various technologies throughout the state. The private vendors also consider their technology proprietary; they limit public access to both the operating software and hardware. This means that state election officials and the public are dependent upon these companies, which are not required to notify federal election officials or the public when their voting systems malfunction, or have vulnerabilities or defects.

California: Hundreds Of Uncounted Vote-By-Mail Ballots Discovered Months After November Election | CBS Sacramento

Hundreds of uncounted ballots were discovered from November’s election last week. CBS13 learned that more than 400 vote-by-mail ballots were found three months after the election because they were misplaced and forgotten until last week. “Some of the ballots from one of the precincts came back in a supply bag,” said Sacramento County Registrar of Voters Jill Lavine. Uncounted votes are supposed to be in a pink carrier; however, the 407 ballots wound up in a red supply bag which was tossed onto a storage rack. “As we were going through and cleaning up from the election, we found this bag full of ballots,” said LaVine.

California: Sticker shock: Siskiyou County clerk presents special election expenses | Siskiyou Daily News

Siskiyou County Clerk Colleen Setzer revealed at the Feb. 5 meeting of the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors that the Jan. 8 special election for District 4 State Senator cost the county over $100,000 – a very large expense for a rural county already struggling with severe cutbacks to its budget and a weak economy. Setzer appeared before the board primarily to present the certified election results for the board’s acceptance, but the election’s high price tag ultimately dominated the board’s discussion. Setzer told the board, “This was a special election, so six months of work was actually consolidated down into one month.” She said her office faced a long list of challenges in addition to the shortened time frame, including heavy snow, holiday scheduling conflicts and widespread staff illness. “We did it. We did it well. And I’m glad that it’s over,” she added.

California: Lawmaker proposes letting California teens ‘pre-register’ to vote at age 15 | SanLuisObispo.com

California teens could submit paperwork to get on the state’s voter rolls three years before they are allowed to cast a ballot under legislation introduced this week. Senate Bill 113, by Democratic Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, would let Californians “preregister” to vote at age 15, giving the state the nation’s youngest minimum age for submitting an affidavit of registration. While the teens would not be able to vote until turning 18, the Santa Barbara Democrat said she hopes the change would increase the number of active voters by linking the “positive experience” of getting a learner’s permit at the Department of Motor Vehicles with registering to vote. Teens could also use the state’s new online registration system under the measure, which is sponsored by Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

California: Lawmakers try to curb anonymous political donations in California | Los Angeles Times

State lawmakers are moving to curb anonymous political donations in California after a national election in which nonprofit groups secretly poured hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns. Legislators have proposed greater disclosure by donors, higher fines for violations and new powers for officials to investigate suspicious contributions to certain groups. Other measures would boost disclosure requirements for political advertising and campaign websites.

California: More young voters register unaffiliated | SFGate

Young adults in California flexed their muscle in the voting booth in 2012, registering in record numbers and increasingly choosing “no party preference” to the two major political parties, a new study shows. The study by the UC Davis Center for Regional Change and the California Civic Engagement Project also showed that Democrats reaped big numbers this year among voters 18 to 24 with the start of online voter registration – a trend that could shape future elections and campaigns.

California: Mail ballots hit an all-time high in California general election | Sacramento Bee

California saw a record share of general election voters opt to cast their ballot by mail this year, with 51 percent of the state’s 13.2 million participants using mail-in ballots. The general election record, which still trails the state’s all-time high of 65 percent mail-in ballots set in this year’s primary, was announced today as Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s released the official statement of vote. The numbers include vote-by-mail ballots dropped off at polling stations as late as Election Day.

California: Santa Maria Election Decided by Defective Ballots? | The Santa Barbara Independent

The difference between second and third in the race for two seats on the Santa Maria City Council was two votes. Out of 19,404 total votes, that’s spectacularly close, a statistical tie. And as fate would have it, three City of Santa Maria residents inadvertently received ballots without the city council election on them. Who knows who the voters are or if they would have made a difference — they evidently didn’t notice the problem, or at least notify election officials, who didn’t notice themselves until a closer look. But it means current Councilmember Bob Orach squeaked past Etta Waterfield for the second open seat on the council. Terri Zuniga, a Democrat who ran and lost in 2010, claimed the top spot.

California: Special election could cost $1.7 million; officials look for ways to improve efficiency | Redding Record

When it’s all added up, the special election to fill the state Senate seat vacated by Doug LaMalfa, who has moved on to Congress, could cost north state counties more than $1.7 million. … County boards over the next few days will be asked to spend additional money to hold the special election. The amounts range from $35,000 in Colusa County to $362,000 in Butte County. The extra expense in Butte County, the most populous county in the district, takes into account, among things, the cost to hire poll workers and set up polling sites. It does not factor the costs for the regular elections staff.

California: All Bark, No Bite: How California’s Top-Two Primary System Reinforces the Status Quo | State of Elections

During the November 6 general election, the state of California saw the effects of one fascinating component of its electoral system:  its top-two open primary. Over two years ago, California voters proposed and passed Proposition 14, a ballot initiative that drastically reformed the state’s primary system. Prior to Prop 14, California conducted closed primary elections, which meant a voter could only vote for candidates in his own political party. The candidate with the most votes from each “qualified” political party—the Democratic Party, Republican Party, American Independent Party, Americans Elect Party, Green Party, Libertarian Party, and Peace & Freedom Party—advanced to the general election where he would face the candidates who advanced from the other parties. In a sense, the old system guaranteed that a third party or independent candidate could secure a spot on the November general election ballot. Proposition 14, approved by 53.8% of California voters, established a top-two primary system.

California: Is California Ready for Online Voting? | KQED

It sounds logical enough. If we can buy stock, see medical records and book flights online, we should be able to cast ballots online as well. And at least one politicians thinks California should move in that direction. When State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) announced on Monday that he is running for secretary of state in 2014, he said online voting is one of the primary planks in his platform. … That made me wonder exactly why I am still showing up at the basement of a church in my neighborhood to fill in bubbles with a pen. The answer, according to Johns Hopkins University computer security expert Avi Rubin, is that there is no way to guarantee an accurate vote count online. “I’m pretty disgusted to hear that someone is running for secretary of state with this platform,” he said.

California: Thousands of ballots won’t be counted | news10.net

Thousands of vote-by-mail ballots throughout California sit in county registrar offices right now and will never get counted. Some signatures on ballot envelopes don’t match the one on the voter registration cards, other ballots are from previous elections, but the most common reason ballots don’t get counted is that they were not in the county’s hands by 8 p.m. election night. An Election Day postmark is not good enough and many counties don’t notify voters their ballot won’t be counted.

California: City Hall sends faulty voting materials to Malibu | Santa Monica Daily Press

City and county election officials are imploring Malibu voters to stick to their county-issued voting materials when they mark their ballots after it was discovered that numbers in Santa Monica-issued materials did not correspond to Malibu ballots. The problem is confined to two voting groups in Malibu who participate in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District election. Vote-by-mail ballots include a voter guide that shows the names of candidates or measures and a corresponding number. To vote for that candidate or measure, a voter bubbles in an oval next to the number that indicates their choice.

California: UVote voter registration system registers fewer students, centralizes process | Stanford Daily

Stanford’s pilot partnership with UVote, a voter registration program created at Northwestern University, registered 786 students and faculty to vote this year. The California voter registration deadline passed on Oct. 22. The new voter registration program replaced less centralized student group efforts from past years, but did not register as many voters. According to Lindsay Lamont ’13, president of the Stanford Democrats, one of the most effective methods used in past years was having “dorm captains” in each residence responsible for asking students if they were registered to vote. Lamont estimates that approximately 1,000 students registered to vote in each of the 2008 and 2010 election seasons. Sixty-six percent of new voters at Stanford this year registered to vote in California. UVote staff also helped out-of-state students fill out absentee ballot requests and mailed these forms when possible.

California: State makes it easier to vote, unlike many other states | San Luis Obispo

California is bucking a national trend this election season, making it easier for people to vote while many states are making it harder. Those forms you may remember picking up from the library or post office are no longer necessary to register to vote. With a few mouse clicks, Californians can now register or update their registration. Because of a law Gov. Jerry Brown signed last month, state residents also should be able to register to vote as late as Election Day by the next presidential election in 2016. Over time, experts believe, the changes will add many new voters to the rolls – especially those who are young or non-white, groups less likely to register now. Compare that with other parts of the country, where lawmakers are reducing registration opportunities or establishing new requirements that voters show photo identification at the polls.