The Fresno Bee tries, and fails, to predict how Prop. 14 would change things
The Fresno Bee is running an article today which claims to examine how the general election might be different if the open primary rules had been in effect in June.
Unfortunately, it’s doing it wrong.
The Bee appears to be looking at the actual number of votes cast per candidate and saying, hey, the second-place Republican got more votes than the Democrat, so under Prop. 14, the general election would be between two Republicans.
That’s a ridiculous approach to the issue, for two reasons: (a) it fails to account for the number of crossover votes which would have been cast by members of one party for candidates of another party, and (b) it fails to account for how turnout would be different under Prop. 14.
Both of those are probably impossible to predict with the data we currently have, meaning they’re impossible to account for. But without accounting for them, the ‘analysis’ is worthless; there’s no good reason to assume that the numbers are zero. Moreover, to be intellectually honest, the Bee should at least address the issue … which they haven’t, instead choosing to invest themselves in a facile analysis rather than a robust one.
The Fresno Bee is running an article today which claims to examine how the general election might be different if the open primary rules had been in effect in June.
Unfortunately, it’s doing it wrong.
The Bee appears to be looking at the actual number of votes cast per candidate and saying, hey, the second-place Republican got more votes than the Democrat, so under Prop. 14, the general election would be between two Republicans.
That’s a ridiculous approach to the issue, for two reasons: (a) it fails to account for the number of crossover votes which would have been cast by members of one party for candidates of another party, and (b) it fails to account for how turnout would be different under Prop. 14.
Both of those are probably impossible to predict with the data we currently have, meaning they’re impossible to account for. But without accounting for them, the ‘analysis’ is worthless; there’s no good reason to assume that the numbers are zero. Moreover, to be intellectually honest, the Bee should at least address the issue … which they haven’t, instead choosing to invest themselves in a facile analysis rather than a robust one.
Apparently 20,000 absentee ballots in Riverside County weren’t counted because the post office lost them.
This is a result of a bug in the state elections code: the law places the responsibility on the voter to make sure that the ballot is received by 8pm on election day, putting voters who mail their ballots late at the mercy of the post office. Since many people procrastinate, this leads to people mailing their ballots too late to be received.
According to the article, Sacramento County’s elections office has implemented a partial fix: they contact the post offices on election day and send runners to retrieve any ballots still in local post offices. That’s a good thing; it reduces the number of lost ballots (although it won’t catch things mailed from out of county). If the legislature isn’t going to change the law, other counties should follow suit.
But really, the Legislature should just change the law – a rule requiring the ballots to be postmarked by the closing of the polls and received within one week of poll closure would dramatically reduce the number of uncounted ballots while still ensuring that all ballots are received in time to be counted before the final canvass.
What happens if the county elections office misspells a candidate’s name?
A Peace and Freedom party candidate for Governor is upset – and rightly so – that the state misspelled his name in the printed voter’s guide. It is too late to fix the problem without enormous expense, so the state isn’t going to; the window of opportunity for that has passed.
This brings to mind a more serious question, though: what is the effect if the name is misspelled on the ballot?
Section 13103 of the California Election code requires that the ballot contain “the names of all qualified candidates”, and Section 13104 requires the old name to be used when the candidate changes his name within one year of the election, unless the name change was the result of marriage or a court order.
Section 18401 makes it a misdemeanor to prints or circulates such a ballot a misdemeanor, but this isn’t helpful: the state isn’t going to prosecute all of the poll workers in the district for the ‘crime’ of handing out the ballot which the county elections office told them to hand out, and the punishment for a misdemeanor is hardly a deterrent to the kind of human error which could lead one to confuse ‘Mohammad’ and ‘Mohammed’.
This evidently hasn’t been an issue yet; I wasn’t able to find a single reported case in California in which a court ruled on the ballot misspelling of a candidate’s name.
Could a candidate who discovered this misspelling before the election sue, looking for an injunction ordering the ballots to be reprinted?
Could a candidate who discovered the misspelling after the election sue to void the election result (assuming he could demonstrate that voters were actually confused by this?)
Ideally you’d want both of these outcomes, but the Elections Code doesn’t seem to call for them; could a court, using equity power, interpose them anyhow?
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