Election Section

The recount of Berkeley’s Measure R ended Jan. 10, with the Alameda County Registrar of Voter declaring this initiative had failed by 161 votes. However, inefficient counting methods, denial of voter intent, and flawed machinery combined to make this recount meaningless. Americans for Safe Access, a Berkeley based patient’s rights group, along with several individual voters, are contesting this count with a motion filed in Superior Court. 

Measure R, a medical marijuana voter initiative, was too close to call on election night. It took 20 days of counting, which were observed by concerned patients and caregivers, before the Alameda County Registrar of Voters declared a loss by 191 votes. Observers had reported widespread problems throughout the original count, so supporters of the immediately requested a recount. 

Sadly, the recount was equally flawed, and supporters are no closer to a final vote total. Here are some of the problems observed: 

• The system used to verify registered voters in Alameda County does not work properly due to a lack of consistency in data entry resulting in difficulties with subsequent searches. Berkeley votes were disqualified without a complete search of this database. Of special concern are University of California students, as there were approximately 1,000 votes disqualified from campus polling places.  

• People who chose to use paper ballots at polling places instead of the touch screen machines may not have had their votes counted. There are hundreds of Berkeley votes that were left uncounted because voters did not correctly complete the provisional voter forms. These mistakes were found in several Berkeley polling places. Further investigation is merited to determine if this was a due to voter error or misinformation given by poll workers.  

• The Diebold electronic voting machines used in Alameda County do not allow for a meaningful recount. It is impossible to recount individual ballots cast on these machines, and there is no voter verified paper trail to back up the totals. Votes cast on these machines are converted into delicate electrons, and then put on hardware that is vulnerable to tampering and malfunctions.  

• Observers witnessed electronic voting machines malfunctioning throughout the reprint of election night data, including system crashes and difficulty getting machines to register touches correctly. This likely happened during the election, but supporters were denied back up data and audit logs from the machines used in Berkeley. 

• Provisional and absentee ballots were improperly cataloged and stored after the election. Tamper proof seals were broken on ballot boxes, batch totals were missing, misplaced, and tallied incorrectly, and the chain of command records were not intact on some boxes. Ballots are still missing, and have not yet been recounted. 

• Registrar staff is allowed to remake damaged hand ballots into “duplicates” in order for them to be counted with the optical scanners. During the recount, there were damaged original ballots that could not be matched to a duplicate ballot, as well as left over duplicates without matching originals. These ballots were not counted during the recount, and it is impossible to determine if their matches were lost or counted correctly. 

Vote totals changed in nearly every Berkeley precincts. Failure of the optical scanners to count the initial votes correctly accounts for some of this discrepancy, as the Diebold machines used in Alameda County miscount from 1 percent to 3 percent of the vote. However, no further effort will be made by the Registrar’s office to audit discrepancies, find missing ballots, or improve the damaged systems that led to these problems.  

People with serious illnesses depend on the initiative process to guarantee safe access to medical marijuana. Measure R would have implemented a sensible policy with lasting benefits for patients and caregivers. We still do not know the intent of Berkeley voters, but on March 2 the California Superior Court will have a chance to determine who really won Measure R. 

Debby Goldsberry is on the board of directors of Americans for Safe Access. 

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