Some bad news from the Courage Campaign:

The bad news?

In what the media is now calling “Double Bubble Trouble,” 94,000 “Decline-to-State” v otes in Los Angeles County — 50% of the total DTS ballots cast — are being rejected due to a ballot design flaw, despite the Courage Campaign’s discovery of the “double bubble” problem and official notification to the Registrar prior to Election Day.

Unfortunately, Dean Logan, the Registrar in charge of Los Angeles County, is refusing to conduct a physical hand-count of every “Decline-to-State” vote before the official vote is certified in just a few weeks.

Every vote must be counted. And time is running out. Please sign our petition to Registrar Dean Logan today demanding that he conduct a physical hand count of all “Decline-to-State” votes cast in the Democratic primary. The more names we add to this petition, the more likely it is that the Registrar will count every vote:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/CountEveryVote

Last weekend, lawyers for the Courage Campaign uncovered the “double bubble” problem — a shocking requirement that “Decline-to-State” voters fill in a redundant “Democratic” bubble (on a ballot clearly marked “Democratic Party”) as well as a bubble next to their preferred presidential candidate. Our legal team realized that — without the “Democratic” bubble filled in — the county’s optical scanners would void votes for “President of the United States,” regardless of voter intent.

On Monday morning, 24 hours before polls opened, we sent a letter from our lawyer to the L.A. ROV, threatening legal action if the Registrar did not rectify the ballot problem before the primary. Unfortunately, on Election Day, polling places across Los Angeles erupted as the votes of DTS voters were rejected, even though almost every one of these voters clearly intended to vote for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. According to the Los Angeles Times:

The registrar’s comments followed an uproar among decline-to-state voters in the county who discovered too late that they were required to mark a bubble on the ballot denoting which party primary they were voting in. Some complained that poll workers told them not to mark the bubble; others said they were unaware of the requirement, which is unique to L.A. County.
Had we not warned Dean Logan and the press on Monday, the numbers of disenfranchised voters could have been significantly higher. As a result of our threatened legal action, the Associated Press, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and several TV and radio stations jumped on the issue immediately and Logan issued a Public Service Announcement and last-minute directions to poll workers.

But now Mr. Logan is refusing to do everything in his power to count every vote cast by “Decline-to-State” voters. What does this say to DTS voters — who represent 19.3% of the total electorate in California? Please sign this petition to Dean Logan today and tell him to conduct a physical hand-count immediately. Then tell your friends to demand that every vote be counted as soon as possible. With only 26 days left before the L.A. County vote is officially certified, there’s no time to waste:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/CountEveryVote

We don’t know if this “Double Bubble Trouble” will change the number of delegates that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will receive. But we do know that we need to protect voter rights, increase voter confidence in our elections system, and prevent this from ever happening again.

We live in a democracy in which every vote is supposed to count. But, in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the votes of almost 100,000 Decline-to-State voters were rejected because they didn’t fill in an extra, irrelevant bubble.

Never again. Not in California. Not in America. Please sign our petition to Registrar Dean Logan right now:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/CountEveryVote

We know Secretary Debra Bowen is paying attention. And we have friends in Los Angeles who are focused on this issue as well– like Eric Garcetti, President of the Los Angeles City Council, and Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky — but they need your help. With hearings being set up by State Senator Dean Florez and the eyes of California voters converging on Los Angeles
County, there’s no time to waste.

Thank you so much for your activism, especially today.
Rick Jacobs
Chair

P.S. Please read this heartbreaking message that we just received from Julian H., a young man voting for the very first time:

“I’ve been following politics before I even hit my teens. And 2 weeks before this election, I turned 18, with my registration in weeks before. I knew the issues, the candidates, the propositions, and for the fist time in my life cast a ballot. I heard the next day about the double bubble. No one at the polls mentioned it, and I didn’t see instructions that even pointed to its existence. It’s not such a great feeling that you’re first close up experience in a system you’ve watched for so long at a distance could have amounted to nothing.”

If you know of any “Decline-to-State” voters in Los Angeles like Julian H., please send them to a special web page we have set up specifically for disenfranchised DTS voters:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/LosAngelesVotes