http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/24/AR2007112401359.html

I love how this country rewards incompetence.

Nine percent? This is not what the Democrats need right now.

Though I thought that California rules were such that changing a largish Clinton lead to a smallish Obama one wouldn't actually allocate LA's delegates differently. Am I wrong about that too? Did Clinton get enough in LA to take all of their delegates?

Mr. Logan is a complete moron. California deserves what it gets for hiring the incompetent fool.

He was the biggest factor for getting Gregoire into her office, where she now toils in ineptitude.

They are a perfect pair...

In Mr. Logan's defense, the system used on their ballots is exactly like it was in previous elections: you had to mark D or R at the top before choosing your candidate.

When you get large numbers of people voting for the first time, and when you have lots of not-very-bright precinct election officials telling people the wrong thing, you get a lot of mistakes. This has always been true. It's only more noticeable lately because the races are closer and we're looking harder at the process.

I know this doesn't solve everything, but the whole country should go all vote by mail, using optical scan ballots. We'd eliminate all the issues with electronic/no-paper trail voting, and poll-place issues like intimidation, crappy equipment in the poor (read: minority) locations, as well as outdated punch-cards & lever machines.

Focusing all our attention on one single system, hopefully with national standards for security/operations, would do wonders towards improving things.

While we're at it, send people the security envelopes and a paper ballot, but also allow them to go to a web site, fill out their ballot online and print it at home. You only get one envelope, so I don't see how you'd vote multiple times or anything. The printed ballots would be "perfect" - eliminating problems like the one in LA, along with accidental double or under-voting, stray marks and "errors" (where you have to mark a big "X" through something and hope someone sees it).

What's not to like except that we don't all vote on the same day? Maybe down the road they'll figure out how do to true online voting in a secure fashion, but between now and then, print-at-home optical-scan ballots + secure envelopes + US Mail = better than what we've got.

Quick correction, Gregoire was elected in '04, not '02...

Were those GOP or Dem ballots?

If GOP, I can see how any self-respecting conservative would specifically not want to vote for any of the non-conservative candidates for the GOP nomination.

Don't you mean the Gregoire recount of 2004?

WiS, those were Democratic ballots used by DTS ("Decline-to-State") voters. IOW, people who hadn't previously declared a political party. For whatever reason, even though they had already asked to (and been handed) a Democratic DTS ballot, they still had to indicate that they were filling out a Democratic ballot. As Fnarf noted, this (silly and redundant) process has been used in Los Angeles County for many years.

Whether to open a primary to DTS voters is up to each of the parties. The Democrats did so, but the Republicans kept theirs closed.

Because these votes were cast entirely on paper opscan ballots, it would be trivially easy to correct the problem. Simply reset the scanners to ignore that extraneous "DEM" oval, then feed the rejected DTS ballots through again.

I have a slogan that will take us all the way through this election season - If you want real change, Vote Venus, Not Penis - not until we get a woman in the white house will we start to see some solid and immense changes.