Advocates claim many election failures

Letter sent to registrar says the violations affected hundreds of voters

A coalition of voting rights advocates is calling on Alameda County to fix a variety of problems it says led to the disenfranchisement of voters — particularly immigrant Californians — including some instances in which the county allegedly violated state election laws.

The Asian Law Caucus, ACLU Foundation of Northern California and Oakland Rising — among other groups — sent a letter to the county’s registrar of voters, Tim Dupuis, on Thursday, laying out what they say are failures by the county that include not providing proper access to ballot information for non-English speakers, delayed installation of ballot drop boxes and inadequate training of poll workers, which, the groups say, deprived between 100 and 200 people of their right to vote.

One instance happened at the Mills College voting site in Oakland, according to the Asian Law Caucus, which sent volunteer monitors to counties across Northern California to check on how elections were being run.

Like other sites, the Mills College site had two options for people voting in person: to mark by hand a preprinted ballot or use an electronic device. But although the electronic option produces a printout that voters then must hand to poll workers for their ballots to be counted, some poll workers mistakenly told voters that it was their “receipt” to take home.

By the Asian Law Caucus’ estimate, that affected 100-200 people before it was remedied, and the organizations are calling on the county to reach out to those who voted at Mills College using the electronic ballot-marking device to notify the office if they took home their ballots — mistaking them for receipts — and to see if other voting sites could have had similar problems.

In a written response to the allegations, Dupuis, the registrar, noted that the number of voters who mistakenly took their ballots home was at most 160 and that office staffers immediately began contacting the Mills Col

lege touchscreen voters in an effort to collect the ballots, receiving 22 such ballots to date.

Dupuis said that given the training poll workers receive, he’s not sure how the situation occurred but said, “No information indicates this anomaly arose at any other vote center.”

He did not address other allegations made by the advocacy organizations.

Julia Marks, a staff attorney for Voting Rights and the Census at Asian Law Caucus, said the organization does not typically send a letter or publicize every irregularity it sees in monitoring California elections but that the problems in Alameda County appear systemic, based on their discussions with poll workers, and need to be fixed with proper training and better practices countywide.

“We do recognize it’s very difficult to administer an election,” Marks said in an interview Friday. “But as an organization that advocates for immigrant Californians, we think providing language access is just as important.”

The groups’ poll moni

tors found that for at least 21/2 days of early voting, the county did not provide all the language services that Alameda County voters are entitled to under state election law.

California Elections Code requires that for each county or precinct where 3% or more of voting-age residents need language assistance to vote, the county provide voters “facsimile” ballots in certain languages for voters to reference when casting their ballots.

Alameda County is required to provide those facsimile ballots in Korean, Cambodian/Khmer, Punjabi, Burmese, Hindi, Laotian, Mien, Mongolian and Telugu — thanks to a change brought by a lawsuit from the Asian Law Caucus that has expanded the language requirements.

However, though county voting sites posted signs about the language services, they did not put out the facsimile ballots for reference or provide copies for voters to take to the ballot marking machines, or train poll workers on what the facsimile ballots were at multiple sites, according to Asian Law Caucus’ poll monitors.

Though the advocacy groups repeatedly called

the office to remedy the situation in early voting, it took more than two days to get a response from the county.

“While this matter was resolved in a way that was satisfactory enough to avoid litigation, your office’s failure to properly train poll workers exposes a deficiency in how your office runs elections; refusal to take swift action to ensure compliance with state law demonstrates a disregard for the rights of Alameda County’s ( limited- English proficient) voters; and, unresponsive posture towards organizations that advocate on behalf of voters points to a concerning lack of transparency,” the letter to the registrar says.

T he organizations also found that A lameda County did not have the number of ballot drop boxes it was supposed to provide under its consolidated polling place model. The county was required to have at least one ballot drop box for every 15,000 registered voters by Oct. 6 but still was missing 38 of the required 63 ballot boxes Oct. 7, according to the Asian Law Caucus.

The letter also criticized the county’s practice of not posting the ranked- choice

voting results publicly. The county’s website instead instructs readers to contact the registrar’s office if they want to see the breakdown of how voters voted.

Ranked- choice voting, used in Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro, can affect the results of an election in a big way because even a leading candidate can lose a race if he doesn’t secure a majority of firstchoice votes initially, kick

ing off the ranked- choice cycle of splitting up second- and third- choice votes among candidates.

T he let ter a sk s the county for a response and to remedy the election results and the ballot problems immediately. Though the language access issue is essentially moot now that the election is over, Marks said the coalition demands the county improve its process for future elections and wants the county to allow representatives from their organizations to sit in on future training of poll workers and election staff.

“The Alameda County Registrar of Voters cannot ignore his legal obligation to provide equal access to the vote,” said Angélica Salceda of the ACLU of Northern California.