Features

How smoothly last Tuesday’s recall election went in the city of Berkeley depends upon which end of the process you observed. Poll workers reported a nearly flawless experience by voters using the Diebold touch-screen voting machines throughout the city. But there were glitches in the vote compiling process. 

And while Alameda County preliminary vote totals were available early Wednesday morning, precinct or even city results weren’t—even as late as Thursday afternoon. 

Elaine Ginnold, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Registrar of Voters Office, said that county election officials were delaying the printing of the precinct result report because of its unusual size, which she estimated to be at 1,000 pages. 

Ginnold said that the enormous number of pages was needed because the vote totals for each gubernatorial candidate—all 135—had to be listed for 1,092 precincts in the county. 

But Ginnold said that she was at a loss to know why compiled city results (such as the number of votes for each candidate and for or against each issue in Berkeley) were not available two days after the election. She said that such results are normally available to the public on the night of the election. 

At Berkeley City Hall on election night, four Diebold voting machines were set up to upload Berkeley’s precinct results to the county election headquarters in Oakland. A county election worker explained at the time that while only one regular machine was actually needed to upload the results, four had been supplied by the county “in case we get really busy and have to transmit on more than one machine at a time.” It ended up being a fortunate bit of foresight. Three of the voting machines malfunctioned, leaving only one to transmit the data. 

Ginnold said she had no information as to why the Berkeley machines malfunctioned, but said that in other upload centers in the county, some of the uploads failed when workers plugged the modem into the wrong slot. 

But around the city, voting itself went on without major problems. Berkeley City Clerk Sherry Kelly and local NAACP spokesperson Denisha DeLane both said they’d heard of no significant election difficulties by either voters or election workers. DeLane, however, said that this report was preliminary. 

Janet White, who worked at the North Berkeley Senior Center on Hearst, said that the recall election went smoother than last year’s general election. However, White said she noticed a larger amount of provisional ballots this year, a fact she attributed to “a lot of lost souls who weren’t picked up by the online registration process.” 

Provisional ballots, which are filled out by voters by hand, are required when a voter says that they have registered for a particular precinct, but their name does not show up on that precinct’s registration list on election day. White said that her precinct had “a box full of these ballots.” 

Barbara Allen, a first-time poll worker who worked at the Redwood Gardens Community Hall on Derby Street, was bubbling over about the experience. “It was so exciting to see 18-year-olds come in and vote for the first time,” she said. “Some of them said they were going to tell their grandchildren about the experience.” Talking before the election results had been released, Allen called the recall election “historic, no matter how it comes out.” 

At the Berkshire Retirement Home on Sacramento Street, a poll worker reported only one problem, an elderly voter “who insisted that I read off the names of every one of the people running for governor to him.” 

“All 135?” 

“All 135,” he said, with a grimace. Otherwise, the worker said he detected no problems with voters using the touch-screen voting machines. “This is Berkeley, after all,” he said. “We’re used to computers.” 

Precinct workers at Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue on Bancroft Way and the University Christian Church on Le Conte Avenue also reported no problems with the election. 

Spot checks at various precincts across the city—including the South Berkeley Branch Library on Russell Street, the Berkeley Unified School District Building, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Lobby (Precinct 207600)—all showed steady voting throughout the day. 

The greatest number of problems appeared to occur in precincts serving the UC Berkeley population, probably a combination of the consolidation and changing of precinct locations and a mobile—and forgetful—student population. At the Westminster House on College Avenue, where two precincts were consolidated, crowds of student voters were being screened by two workers who had never operated polls before. 

The major confusion concerned voters who could not identify their voting precinct, including students who reported that they were registered as far away as San Jose. A poll worker at the YWCA on Bancroft Way called the process at her precinct “incredibly confusing. This is the first time they’ve consolidated two precincts like this, and some of the people who voted at this location last November are not supposed to be voting here now.” 

City Clerk Kelly said that Berkeley had 70 voting locations during the Oct. 7 election, a reduction from the 110 voting locations open during normal elections. Voting locations were consolidated all over the state because of the short amount of time available to organize the recall election. 

The city clerk said that the county registrars office attempted to make up for the reduction in voting locations by increasing the number of voting machines in some locations. She said that seven voting machines were in operation at City Hall during the Oct. 7 election, up from the normal number of four. 

Around the city on election day, electoral activity was low-key. An elderly Asian man in a straw hat mounted himself on an upturned bucket on top of a wooden folding chair at the Sproul Plaza entrance to UC Berkeley, surrounded by a slew of barely readable signs, working his fingers in and out and calling out over and over “Yeah! I’m Arnold! I groped them! I squeezed them! Vote for me!” Little different than any day on campus. 

As for pre-voting in the two weeks before the election, Kelly said that it “went smoothly,” with more than 500 citizens taking advantage of the opportunity to cast ballots at City Hall. Pre-voting was allowed at City Hall from Sept. 15-26. 

Kelly said that 66 ballots were cast on the first day of early voting, dropping dramatically to 12 on the second day from the confusion that resulted after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threatened to halt the recall election. 

She said that early voting later picked up, with 100 ballots cast in each of the last three days of pre-voting. 

The Elections Division of the California Secretary of State’s office reported that as of the afternoon before the election, close to 85,000 absentee ballots had been turned in from Alameda County, and about 100,000 from Contra Costa County.