Voters given wrong polling place
It is a basic ingredient to being able to vote: a polling place to cast a ballot.
Los Angeles County sent nearly 1,200 ballots with a polling location in La Puente. That would have been perfect — had the voters lived in La Puente and not Pomona.
The mistake, attributed to an elections worker, sent county employees scrambling to alert voters about the correct polling place in time for Tuesday’s election.
“This shouldn’t have happened. Things like this lend themselves to have some sense of mistrust and concern about the results of this election,” said Councilwoman Cristina Carrizosa, who represents voters who received the wrong ballot address.
Carrizosa said she first learned of the problem when she heard of a constituent worried that “he wasn’t going to be able to go vote that far away.” She alerted officials of the problem when she discovered that many people in the neighborhood had an incorrect polling location.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles County registrarrecorder/county clerk, Aaron Nevarez, said the agency was sorry for the printing error, which affected the sample ballot for one out of the county’s 5,000 polling locations. Nevarez said no one in the registrar’s office could recall the last time such a mistake was made.
The mistake directed voters in the precinct to vote at Sunset Elementary School at 800 Tonopah Ave., but did not list a city. It refers to a poll site that is 15 miles away, or a 20- to 40-minute drive depending on traffic on the 10 and 60 freeways.
The error comes as Pomona on Tuesday will vote on a contentious measure that would lift a ban on new billboards that voters approved in 1993, and allow the installation of 10 new electronic or printed billboards along several freeways. In return, the city would receive up to $10 million in revenue over the next 40 years, according to the city attorney’s analysis.
Nevarez, said the county learned of the problem from the Pomona city clerk May 25, and, two days later, mailed out postcards alerting the 1,180 voters in the district that: “You have a change of polling place!” The postcard was followed up by 469 robocalls to household landlines, 297 live telephone calls to cellphones and 206 emails to voters who wrote down a telephone number or email address when they registered to vote.
Poll workers in La Puente have also been told to notify Pomona voters at the affected precinct, No. 5250069A, of the real location of their polling site, which is at Philadelphia Elementary School at 600 E. Philadelphia St. in Pomona.
Pomona voter Mike Suarez, 60, doesn’t live in the affected precinct, but he said the county should have done more to contact the voters who received the wrong information. The county should have knocked on the doors of each voter to hand them a corrected sample ballot with the correct poll address, he said. Voters might ignore a postcard and just focus on the sample ballot and may not want to go to a polling place that is so far away after returning home from work, he added.
The mistake “stifles the vote of a minority community,” Suarez said. “In a close election, every single vote counts…. It’s a sad situation when this happens in a crucial election and in a vulnerable and minority community like Pomona.”