In the California Primary, More Ballots Remain Uncounted than the Total Number of votes for Hillary Clinton!

California's Uncounted Ballots, from several different sages, pundits, pollworkers, and commenters in California

compiled from extensive article by Michael Hertz in Los Angeles Progressive

First this: from Larry Wines

Official numbers from the Sec. of State as of 4:55 p.m. on Friday June 10:

Total estimate of uncounted ballots

2,423,607

Total votes counted

Clinton: 2,099,064

Sanders: 1,627,035

In percentages, counted ballots show:

Clinton: 55.8%

Sanders: 43.3%

Others: .9%

472,029 votes currently separate Clinton and Sanders in the stopped frame from the film that still needs to finish running.

Changing that momentary result means, of the 2,423,607 uncounted ballots, the first 472,029 must go to Bernie to draw them even. Then, the remaining 1,951,578 uncounted ballots would need to go 50 percent plus one to Bernie, meaning 975,790 votes, plus the 472,029. So. Bernie needs another 1,447,818 votes from the 2,423,607 uncounted.

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from Michael Hertz who writes:

I worked as a pollworker in North Hollywood on Tuesday (a long day starting at 6 a.m. and ending at 10 p.m.). I just read an article that asked how many ballots remained uncounted. I can only tell you that my precinct is a poster child for uncounted ballots.

First of all, my precinct had no counted ballots when they were delivered to the Los Angeles Central at around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night. Why? Because the machine we were given jammed at around 10 a.m. and couldn't be fixed. The remaining regular ballots voted were dumped into the ballot box with the machine counted ballots, so they would all have to be recounted.

I worked as a pollworker and I can only tell you that my North Hollywood precinct was a poster child for uncounted ballots.

On top of that, we had 139 provisional ballots. According to the Los Angeles Times article, there were 240,000 provisional ballots issued in Los Angeles County alone. Each one must be individually examined. Plus there are individual ballots delivered by mail, or dropped off in individual envelopes at polling places. Supposedly there were three million uncounted ballots in California as of Wednesday morning.

Two of my three pollworker colleagues at our precinct had experience in other elections, and they insisted that they had never seen so many provisional ballots issued. A large number arose from the fact that voters would show up at our precinct, insisting that they had voted there in years past, although this year their home address was not included in our directory. As a result, the voter would have to find a way of locating the proper polling place or else vote provisionally at ours. Almost all elected to cast a provisional ballot.

There were some long lines to vote, with waiting times of about half an hour for most people. Part of the problem was that many people were waiting in the wrong line, which meant that they had to start over again at a different precinct. A lot of that unnecessary delay could have been avoided if an address directory were available to the voters before they entered the line in the first place. It's sort of shocking that no complete address directory for the county was made available to the pollworkers or the voters at the polling place. Incidentally, I tried out the on-line address directory at the County Registrar internet site. I entered half a dozen addresses where I knew that there were registered voters, and yet the directory insisted that there were no registered voters at that address. I tried by own address and my daughter's address. No luck there either. Doesn't anything work?

The voter rolls weren't complete. Even when people showed up at the right precinct with timely registration, the voter rolls did not show them. I remember a man gave an address that showed only his wife's name as a registered voter, even though he had been registered at the same address. And there were many instances of people who had registered within the past month or so whose name were not included in the rolls.

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Stephen Fox says

June 11, 2016 at 9:02 pm

This is really quite important, and according to the petition author, Netra Halperin, a Bernie delegate and superb strategist, may be one of the most important petitions to sign, his "Hail Mary"! I agree, so take the time to share it widely. We should be able to reach the 100,000 signatures in a few days, if you will cut loose on this and put in on lots of group pages and friends pages, also!

Donald Goldmacher says

I am glad that people are experiencing the ugly nature of our undemocratic system. Not only must we have campaign-finance reform, we need actual reform of the entire voting system. There are election integrity activists in Los Angeles who are trying to observe the counting of the votes of both vote by mail and provisional ballots that are discussed in this article. For more information about election integrity issues in California go to countedascast.Org.

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Vickie J Anderson says

June 11, 2016 at 4:28 pm

Thank you for writing this article. It is so informational and, as you so clearly stated, it makes NO sense to count a state's election when such a statistically high number of ballots have not even been counted.

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Jim Spriggs says

June 11, 2016 at 3:09 pm

I agree with the article and many of the comments below it. Our "system" is broken. We need to get rid of these inherently corrupt party-run collages of dissimilar franchise regimes and replace them with a uniform nationwide electoral process.

But most of all, we need to get rid of these voting machines that can't be verified and optical readers that can't even see a black oval. We need to get rid of both electronic systems that are prone to hacks, tampering, and breakdowns. How stupid are these byzantine system where even an outside entity can't monitor them because of their opacity, complexity, and overall dysfunction? How stupid is it when we can't even recount votes if there is a dispute when they have been electronically tabulated and rendered untraceable? How stupid is it when we have elections year after year, where we don't even know if our vote is being counted at all?

Activists and journalists such as Bev Harris and Brad Friedman has been shouting to the rafters for years that we have a voting system that is broken, and the only thing that can make it work is going back to transparent, hand-counted paper ballots that can be verified by observers during vote tallies and recounts.

In spite of the corporate media and the DNC wanting to "move on" to their Hillary vs Trump zeitgeist pretense, Bernie Sanders knows that this Democratic primary isn't over because the California count isn't over. As Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog says:

Yes, democracy actually still matters, and that includes counting the ballots of all the legal voters who wish to vote, counting them accurately, and in a way that we can know they have been counted accurately. While we've been reporting this week, often exclusively, on the huge number of still untallied ballots -- both Provisional and Vote-by-Mail ballots -- here in Los Angeles County, ever since Tuesday's Presidential Primary, new data now reveals the totals are even higher than we've so far reported, both in L.A. and across the state. With some 3.5 million ballots now tallied in the Democratic Primary, and a 500,000 vote (appx. 13%) margin for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, there are still some 2.5 million ballots that have yet to be tallied at all.

Jim Sylvester says

June 11, 2016 at 12:05 pm

The election process has been shown to be utterly corrupt, and easily cheated. The sophisticated means of doing so indicate that this has been going on for years. They really know how to do it.

The most important task we face as a country, and as an electorate, is to get the money out of politics, and get rid of the crazy quilt jumble of state and local election polices, which have largely been designed to encourage cheating.

WAKE UP, AMERICA!

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Adrienne Brietzke says

June 11, 2016 at 3:33 pm

Oh foolish one! Surely you don't expect our media to act like REPORTERS OR JOURNALISTS? That would require RESEARCH and LEARNING. They much prefer to have Hills campaign media dept. give their paymasters deliver their reporting bullets and "discussion" points. Thanks for the break down. Now my stomach is tight again!!! Hope springs eternal.

The key now is going to being shoring up morale and encouraging the Bernie or Bust to hold strong. That's the biggest leverage we have going into convention-Bernies pledged delegates + Hillary the criminal + Bernie can easily defeat Trump/Hillarys national numbers have gone down on a consistent trajectory and she's begun polling below Trump (Re: "if you really don't want Trump, you need to vote Bernie;" + she's likely to come under indictment; + --THIS IS WHY WE NEED TO STAND STRONG: we represent 43% of the electorate -- far more than the Dem party -- we can assure she will LOSE. That's why I don't like Bernie folks saying they'll settle.

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Karen Wingard says

June 11, 2016 at 10:33 am

Of course the Tuesday night count was short. VBM Ballots potmarked by June 7 and received within 3 days weren't included yet. Also registration deadline had bern shortened, thus allowing greater numbers to participate. But an "open" primary is no panacea. The so-called jungle primary for down-ticket races disenfranchises third parties and wreaks mischief on the ability of the two major parties to nominate representative candidates for the general election. If voters can't figure out which party comes cloer to representing their interests" I despair. The differences are pretty obvious, even if none may be a perfect match.

Michael Worley says

June 11, 2016 at 8:40 am

Los Angeles County has been bad for years- the rest of the state is far better. Part of the problem is that La County has more people than Georgia but does not have the same budget for Elections.The first thing County residents could do is make the Registrar of Voters an elected position instead of just another Supervisoral flunky.

Maureen Cruise says

June 9, 2016 at 3:44 pm

Last case was truly egregious. A relative who voted in Santa Monica brought in an unmarked VBM dem crossover ballot"because coffee had been spilled on it. The poll worker insisted that she could only issue a provisional ballot. The voter refused the provisional and insisted that by law she was entitled to a dem crossover ballot upon surrendering an unmarked VBM . There ensued more discussion before another poll worker intervened and agreed that the law allows for a dem crossover ballot in those circumstances of turning in a dem crossover VBM ballot unmarked. The misinformed poll worker said she had been issuing provisional ballots all day for this situation. Saga not over"..

Upon using the ballot just issued, that ballot was rejected by the machine as "invalid". This happened three times, once with the poll worker in the booth observing. Another voter had the same problem"the machine rejected her ballot as "invalid". A third voter used the same booth with no problem. My relative then surrendered her ballot to the poll worker who said they would fix the machine and run her ballot through once repaired. The poll worker called her at work later that day to say her ballot was cast. Who knows? Highly irregular".illegal?

We need to junk those expensive unreliable machines "which can also very easily be programmed to drop or switch votes. I believe there are only less than 200 voters per precinct. The local high school counts their 2,400 ballots for student body elections in a day. We need go back to paper and pencil, publicly observable counting of the ballots with a public registering of the count at each poll.

What we have is completely open to fraud in addition to the very expensive breakdowns and malfunctions. A pencil sharpener, paper, erasers and a small team of poll workers observing are the answer. And open registration for all citizens using the same ballot is the other answer.

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Michael T. Hertz says

June 10, 2016 at 2:45 pm

I thought we were very honest poll workers. We could have easily counted the Presidential and Senatorial primary results while we were working. No machine needed. If we needed to have someone watching us, so be it. The provisional ballot issue is hard to solve, though. With all the electronics at our disposal, we should be able to eliminate most the issues that give rise to the need for provisional ballots.

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Amy says

June 11, 2016 at 10:23 am

I want to mention that the experience Maureen's friend had in Santa Monica was the exact same experience my son, who is a newly registered NPP voter, had there too. He also had his Dem cross-over ballot rejected by the machines three times as "invalid". The poll workers had no idea what to do and tried to call someone for advice. Finally, after waiting for about 15 minutes, I asked if they could please give him a regular Dem ballot. They gave him one, and the machine finally accepted it.

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Ron Vrooman says

June 11, 2016 at 1:09 pm

I'm all for going back to paper ballots and to counting votes by hand, as long as we have enough workers and observers at each polling place. I always thought that the whole idea was to tabulate all ballots accurately, and I'm willing to wait until the next day, if that's how long it takes for the process to be completed properly.

The emphasis on speed has been entirely misplaced, and I've always been distrustful of electronic voting machines which can be reprogrammed or mis-programmed. An honest and accurate vote count should be the only consideration when we elect our leaders and make decisions on important issues.

See also: Voting Process for California Primary was 'Chaos'

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Based on LA Times article: