Why Obama Didn't Take California
Or more of it, at least.
I heard many Los Angelenos who typically don't vote in the primaries say they were voting in this one -- to do as I did: to vote against Hillary.
I'm an independent (actually, a fiscal conservative, secular govermentist, libertarian/personal responsibilitarian), but after my deadline, I trotted my ass over to the polling place and got a ballot for an Independent voting as a Democrat. I don't particularly identify as a Democrat, but, first and foremost, I don't vote for people who believe Adam and Eve saddled up the dinosaurs, and who'd like to see bits from the Bible dropped into the Constitution.
The ballot was very confusing -- easy to miss the fact that you actually had to ink in two spots to vote for president: One to say you were voting for a presidential candidate from a particular party, and the second to actually vote for the candidate. If you missed filling the first bubble, your vote in the second bubble, for the candidate, didn't count,
Now, I'm wondering exactly how many of those not counted votes there were. The AP's Don Thompson wrote:
Concern over the county's so-called double-bubble ballot arose on Election Day, when the Courage Campaign, a Beverly Hills-based voting rights group, challenged the balloting process for independents.The group has been inundated with complaints from independent voters who said they were not told to fill in the second bubble and fear their votes might not be counted, chairman Rick Jacobs said.
"People took the trouble to vote and they deserve to have their votes counted," he said Thursday.
He has asked the Los Angeles County Registrars Office for a full review of the ballots where the presidential race was rejected because the extra bubble was not filled in. There are about 94,500 such ballots.
Any review would not change the outcome of the race - Clinton beat Obama by 396,168 votes statewide and 162,745 in Los Angeles County. But it could affect the allocation of delegates, which is done on a proportional basis by congressional district.
About 190,000 ballots were cast by decline-to-state voters in Los Angeles County. About half of those voters correctly filled in the extra bubble.
County elections officials will now sample 1 percent of the flawed ballots to see how many were supposed to be counted in the Democratic or American Independent presidential primaries.
If the number is significant, there may be a way to count some of those flawed ballots, said Eileen Shea, a spokeswoman for the county elections office.
"We take it very seriously," she said.
Yeah, right. Next time, take it seriously before hundreds of thousands of people vote.