Scott Herhold’s Election snafu was obvious and avoidable in the San Jose Mercury News discusses some of the problems in Santa Clara County: poll workers had to photocopy 5,700 copies of the ballots, some of them at Kinko’s!

One reason why:

There are 170,452 “decline-to-state” voters in [Santa Clara] county, 24 percent of the electorate. Under party rules, those voters are allowed to vote in the Democratic primary but not the Republican contest.

Before the election, the registrar sent out notices to the 82,000 “decline-to-state” mail-in voters, asking whether they wanted a Democratic ballot. About 21,000, roughly a quarter, eventually said yes.

They used this 25% rate to predict how many ballots they needed, as well as predicting that only 25% of the votes would be in-person. In practice, demand was much higher than expected on election day — 45% of people voted in person. And many of the DTS voters wanted a Democratic ballot. So many sites ran out of Democratic ballots and had to photocopy them (some even at Kinkos!).

A likely conclusion from this is that most of the mail-in voters also wanted to vote for a presidential candidate, and even after they got notices, a bunch of people didn’t realize they needed to reply to do this. Depending on what pecentage wanted to vote, that could easily mean another 20,000 or more voters disenfranchised.

And in any case: Kudos to Santa Clara county for following up with mail-in voters on the confusing ballots (as they’re also doing in Pierce County, Washington). Shouldn’t in-person voters get the same treatment?

And shouldn’t people who live in LA County get the same chance to vote as people in Silicon Valley?

jon