Entries from November 2007
November 30, 2007 · 1 Comment
Today’s papers were swimming with stories about a Field Poll released today which shows that the number of Vote by Mail voters in California – and in the Bay Area especially – just keeps going up.
We’ll get to the growing numbers of Vote by Mail voters in a minute. But first we want to bring your attention to some interesting demographic trends of Vote by Mail voters that the survey found, which, even more interestingly, San Mateo County doesn’t quite follow.
Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Field Poll, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the demographic of Vote by Mail voters is “very different from the overall population of voters,” and that they “are more likely to be older, whiter, richer and Republican than other voters.”
That’s not entirely so in San Mateo County. While our voter registration rolls don’t track income or race, they do track political party affiliation and date of birth. And contrary to the Field Poll’s findings, our Vote by Mail voters are overwhelmingly middle-aged Democrats.
Almost 50 percent of our 137, 846 permanent Vote by Mail voters are Democrats, nearly double the number of Republicans (28 percent). More than half of the county’s Vote by Mail voters - 55 percent - fall between the ages of 37 and 66. The biggest category of Vote by Mail voters in San Mateo County belongs to Democrats between the ages of 47 and 56, who make up a full 10 percent of the total.
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Categories: Reform · Vote By Mail · Voter registration · Voting
Tagged: California, Democrats, Field Poll, permanent, presidential primary, registered voters, Republicans, Vote By Mail
Tuesday marked the nearly there point in closing the chapter on the Nov. 6 Consolidated Municipal, School and Special District Election.
That’s because our Chief Elections Officer Warren Slocum put his John Hancock on the Statement of the Vote, certifying the results of the 41 local races and ballot measures. It’s a pretty weighty document, 147 pages in all, but it’s yours for the viewing.
Certification marks the end of the required one percent manual recount, which took about three days to complete last week.
Elections Manager David Tom said the recount revealed nothing out of the ordinary, with small discrepancies requiring reconcilliation that are common in every election.
“The machine votes were perfect,” Tom said, referring to recounted votes that were cast on eSlates, our electronic voting machines. “The paper ballots, there’s room for interpretation. One here, one there. It’s typically what we find in any election.”
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Categories: Results · Vote counting
Tagged: certified election results, manual recount, Statement of the Vote, Warren Slocum
Thousands of tally marks and repeated calls of candidates’ names have been the order of the day around these parts. And that would be because the one percent manual recount, required in the 28 days following Nov. 6′s Consolidated Municipal, School and Special District Election, got started Monday and continued through today.
Teams of four were busy following strict procedures for manually recounting all the votes cast in 18 of San Mateo County’s 400 precincts that were randomly selected early Tuesday. See how 10-sided dice helped us determine the precincts.
Votes were recounted whether they were cast on Vote by Mail ballots, eSlates, provisional ballots, paper ballots or at universal voting centers before Election Day. Election folk worked at tables in teams of four to count votes, and it all sounded something like this:
Person A: “Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince.”
Persons C and D: “10″
Person A: “Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince.”
Persons C and D: “20″
Riveted? Perplexed? Bored? Wondering who Vince is?
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Categories: Ballots · Results · Vote counting
Tagged: calling out votes, Elections Office, eSlate printers, manual recount, precincts, tally marks
Craps, anyone?
With the dice a-clinkin’, there was a little bit of Vegas at elections headquarters this morning.
Much like its Sin City counterpart, there was chance in the rolling of each die. But in this edition, it was all about using the three ten-sided dice to randomly determine the identity of precincts that will undergo a manual recount of the votes cast in the Nov. 6 Consolidated Municipal, School and Special District Election.
It’s a requirement of California Elections Code that, in the 28 days following the election, a one percent manual recount of votes is conducted to ensure the election’s overall accuracy. It’s part of the Official Canvas of the Vote; see our previous post.
Rest assured, no betting or the beating the house here. Not nearly so glamorous, we know. But hey, it’s important.
True to patriotic form, our dice are red, white and blue. They’re 10-sided, technically called pentagonal trapezohedra for you role-playing game buffs. In fact, legend has it we had to buy the dice from one of your hobby stores.
Precinct numbers consist of four digits, with the first identifying one of the county’s five supervisorial districts. Because we select precincts in district order, we rolled only three die to complete the precinct number: the red die for the second digit, the white die for the third and the blue die for the fourth.
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Categories: Elections Office · Results · Vote counting
Tagged: manual recount, precincts, random, ten-sided dice
November 14, 2007 · 1 Comment
Ah, this is Warren Slocum’s most favorite time of the year.
Come again? The election is over, and I know who won my city council race. I’m moving on to making my plans for Thanksgiving.
But oh, in his world, the fun has just begun. Welcome to the Official Canvass of the Vote.
“The canvass is the least understood, most important part of the elections process,” Slocum, our chief elections officer, is apt to declare.
Not to be confused with the Official “Canvas” of the Vote, which we’ll leave for our budding artists to figure out. No, this is canvass with two s’s, as in political canvassing.
The canvass is actually a 28-day period following the election in which vote tallies are completed and ballots and votes are reconciled. A manual recount of at least 1 percent of the votes cast in each race verifies that votes cast by voters are correctly reflected in results reports.
“Performing the canvass is the way that elections offices can be certain that all the vote counting systems are accurate and, ultimately, that the votes are accurate,” said Elections Manager David Tom.
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Categories: Ballots · Elections Office · Results · Vote counting
Tagged: 28 days, Ballots, canvass of the vote, certified results, Elections Office, manual recount, reconciliation, votes
Voters in El Granada, Princeton and Moss Beach were not turned away when the power went out on Election Day at the two precincts (#3314 and #3301) located at the Pillar Ridge Mobile Home Park. Poll workers didn’t shut the doors – and voters didn’t stop voting.
According to Precinct Inspector Joe Toschik, who is a librarian at the Half Moon Bay Library in real life and was assigned to be the head poll worker at the trailer park, the lights went off a little after 6 p.m. and it was pitch black.
The building didn’t have emergency lights.
“We only had a couple of flashlights between us, so one of the poll workers parked his car so that his headlights would beam onto the step and through the big glass window in the front of the building where we were set up,” Toschik said.
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Categories: Election Day/Night · Poll workers · Training · Voting · eSlates
Tagged: El Granada, eSlates, Moss Beach, Norman Rockwell, Pillar Ridge Mobile Home Park, Poll workers, Princeton
November 7, 2007 · 1 Comment
Think we can wash our hands of Election Day? I mean, it is Wednesday evening already.
Sorry to report, but Wednesday, the day after Election Day, means that our work has just begun. This election is not over until we say it’s over, days of the calendar notwithstanding.
We’re still counting a lot of remaining ballots. There were Vote by Mail ballots that arrived at the Elections Office on Monday and Tuesday, Vote by Mail ballots that were dropped off at polling places on Election Day, and provisional ballots cast at the polls. Signatures must be checked and provisional ballots carefully reconciled, all of which takes some time.
So that means that we’re still reporting race results. We posted new results on our Web site at 5 p.m. today and will do so again on Friday, the 9th at 5:00 pm and again on Tuesday, the 13th at 5:00 pm.
Some races will be affected by our continuing count. Case in point, San Bruno’s Measure F, which is currently going down by one vote. Yes, one vote. That one vote was counted today – our latest results release around 1 a.m. this morning based on votes counted yesterday showed the measure in a dead tie. Stay tuned to the bitter end; every last vote matters for this one.
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Categories: Ballots · Election Day/Night · Results · Vote By Mail · Vote counting
Tagged: counting, Election Day/Night, election results, provisional ballots, San Bruno Measure F, Vote By Mail, voter turnout
It’s nearly 1 a.m., and we’re still here plugging away at election headquarters to get your votes counted. It was (and still is) an action packed night, with hundreds of people on hand to make it happen. A few pictures are worth a few thousand words, so we’ll go heavy on the photos this time. You can feel that Election Night frenzy in the air…
Fourteen receiving stations throughout the county brought van loads of paper ballot boxes and Judge’s Booth Controllers, which contained the electronic record of votes made on the eSlates, to elections headquarters for processing.
Ballot boxes were scanned to confirm their arrival at headquarters, loaded into laundry carts, and moved off to be opened and their paper ballots manually scanned.
Judge’s Booth Controllers were scanned to confirm their arrival at headquarters (followable in real time on our Precinct Tracker). Note the hustle.
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Categories: Ballots · Election Day/Night · Results · Vote counting · eSlates
Tagged: Election Night, frenzy, Judge's Booth Controllers, processing, Results, scanning, Vote counting
We’ve been getting with the 21st century in more ways than one around here. Besides the blog and electronic voting machines, we’re unveiling a new more dynamic and transparent section of Shape the Future for reporting race results on Election Night and beyond.
Gone are the days when all we mustered on our Web site was pages and pages of static results for you to scroll through to find what you were looking for.
Welcome to the next generation of election results reporting. This is not your grandma’s Election Night.
Some new-fangled highlights:
Track a Contest. Only interested in following the races that matter to you? Later, scroll bar. Using a drop-down menu, chose the race that you’re interested in, click the “Track Contest” button, and voila! Instant results specific to that race. Results are broken down by voting method, and you can even see how a specific precinct voted. The page also stores your history, so you can easily toggle between races.
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Categories: Election Day/Night · Elections Office · Results · Shape the Future
Tagged: Election Night, precincts, race results, real time, reporting, tracking, webcam
November 6, 2007 · 1 Comment
Election Day is upon us!
Poll workers were at their polling spots by 6 a.m. today to prepare for opening, but an even heartier group beat them to the punch by an hour, arriving at elections headquarters at 5 a.m. bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
They are a little-known but critical group of 104 of behind-the-scenes helpers who ensure that Election Day goes smoothly at the county’s 400 polling places. Half are field technicians, who are well-trained in all things eSlate and are dispatched to the polls to help resolve incidents and make sure that poll workers have everything they need. The other half are their assistants, called ride-along coordinators, take care of the logistics: phone calls, incident logs, directions.
Many are county employees who take a day away from work to lend a hand. And if today was any indication, they’re a mighty helpful bunch.
We spent this morning with one husband-and-wife field technician and ride-along coordinator duo – Matthew and Shirley Chidester - who were responsible for five polling spots in San Mateo and Foster City.
Most of Matthew’s field technician work involved replacing jammed printers attached to eSlates, which give you a verifiable paper trail of your vote before you cast your ballot. eSlates at two polling places required new printers, but it wasn’t anything Matthew, who works as a real property manager for San Mateo County, couldn’t handle himself or with a phone call to a help center staffed with eSlate gurus at election headquarters.
“As far as technology goes, you can’t get any simpler. Everything is spelled out for you,” Matthew said after replacing an eSlate printer at the polling place at George Hall Elementary School. “It’s very easy to do. I’ve never done that, and I did it.”
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Categories: Election Day/Night · Poll workers · Polling place · Voting · eSlates
Tagged: Election Day/Night, eSlate, Field technician, incident, poll worker, Polling place, ride-along coordinator
