County Insider

L.A.’s ballot box language boom

The nation’s most linguistically diverse ballot is about to offer even more ways to say “I voted.”

This June, when the polls open for the 2012 primary elections,Los Angeles County voters will be able to cast ballots in three new languages and receive oral translations in two more.

The addition of written voting material in Hindi, Khmer and Thai, and the planned recruitment of poll workers who can give bilingual assistance in Gujarati and Bengali, will bring to eleven the number of languages—other than English—in which L.A.County citizens will be able to vote.

Ballots and voting literature have been available for at least a decade in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Spanish and English.  Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan says the additional voting material and recruitment could cost up to $1 million, but is necessary to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act.

That law generally requires language assistance for voters when a non-English-speaking minority exceeds 10,000 voting age citizens or 5 percent of a jurisdiction’s electorate.

“It’s a federal mandate that unfortunately does not come with federal funding, so we have to absorb it into our own budget,” says Logan. “It’s a challenge, but it’s also a great opportunity to ensure that we’re getting information to people in ways that they can access and comprehend.”

Efrain Escobedo, executive liaison forLogan’s office, attributes the need to a number of factors, including an increase in the number of naturalized citizens from India and Southeast Asia, and the migration of Asian-American voters from other states. Escobedo added that this year’s mandate required extra analysis because it was issued not by nationality, but by ethnicity and race. 

“They gave us two categories—Asian Indian and ‘Other Asian Non-Specified,’ ” says Escobedo.  “But India has over 122 recognized languages and 22 official languages. So when you tell us ‘Asian Indian,’ that doesn’t really help.”

Meanwhile, a search for non-Indian “other” Asian groups that weren’t already getting bilingual assistance yielded more than 80,000 residents of L.A. County with a half-dozen different national origins.

Eventually, Escobedo says, county analysts narrowed the list with the help of targeted census data, community groups such as the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and the Artesia-based South Asian Network  and analysis from the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California.

In addition to leading to the new languages on the ballot and in polling places, the county’s research yielded a rough sketch of the county’s dynamic immigrant populations. For instance:

• Los Angeles County now has more than 1.35 million people who identify themselves as Asian.

• The county’s largest Asian community is non-Taiwanese Chinese, which represents nearly 372,000 people or about 27.5 percent of the Asian community.

• Filipinos run a close second with nearly 329,000 residents, or about 24.3 percent of the county’s Asians. Another 216,000 or so residents are Korean, making up about 16 percent of the Asian community.

• More than 76,000 county residents identified themselves as Asian Indian in the 2010 Census, representing roughly 6 percent of the county’s overall Asian population. More than a third were naturalized citizens.

• About 20,000 of the county’s Asian-Indians are registered voters and more than two out of three have a college degree. The vast majority reported fluency in English, but about one in ten said that they don’t speak it well.

• The county’s immigrant population now includes more than 32,000 Cambodians, 23,000 Thais, 10,000 Indonesians, 9,000 Pakistanis, 6,100 Sri Lankans and 3,000 Laotians.

• Four out of every ten Cambodians are naturalized citizens, and more than a third of the county’s Cambodian population is registered to vote. But nearly 40% of Cambodians over age 25 in the county lack a high school diploma, and a third of the county’s Cambodian population speaks English poorly or not at all.

• The county’s Thai community also reports a 42 percent rate of naturalization. But only about 25 percent reported poor skills in English and more than four in ten have college degrees. 

• Los Angeles County’s Thai communities are clustered in Cerritos, Glendale, L.A.and Long Beach. Cambodian clusters can be found in Long Beach, Signal Hill, Lakewood and Pomona. Meanwhile, Asian Indians are concentrated in Artesia, Cerritos, Diamond Bar, Walnut and L.A.

Posted 1/31/12

Crowdsourcing the vote

How do you design a secure, reliable, accessible system of voting for a place with 4.3 million voters, 4,500 polling places, 10 languages and more square mileage than two Delawares?

That’s the challenge as Los Angeles County works to update its aging voting system in time for the 2015 elections. Fortunately, a 21^st-century innovation—crowdsourcing—just made the job easier.

In a novel approach that is being closely watched by local governments around the nation, the county this week put out the call for public input on how to improve L.A.’s system of voting.

No suggestion is too large or too small, amateurs are as welcome as experts and even off-the-cuff brainstorms are welcome, says Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan.

Anyone with an inspiration, from shorter ballots to voting by cell phones, can respond before March 22 by searching for the accessible elections challenge at www.openideo.com or by clicking here.

“This is just to get peoples’ creative juices going,” Logan says.

The initiative is part of a larger movement to make elections more secure and participatory in the information age. For more than two years, the county has been laying the groundwork for an overhaul of its voting system, the core of which dates to 1968, when the county installed a then-state-of-the-art punch-card system to count ballots.

“Our current system has served us well and with integrity, but the vote-tallying system is based on outdated software,” says Logan. “It’s difficult to get parts and maintenance, some of the equipment isn’t even made anymore, the card readers are becoming obsolete and on the software side, the language doesn’t have the flexibility to be modified.”

Los Angeles County is so vast that none of the commercially available voting systems now on the market can accommodate it, says Logan. Touch-screen voting machines have raised security concerns, he says, and tend to be expensive and logistically unwieldy in a county with 4,500 polling places. Meanwhile, existing paper-based systems being used in other jurisdictions present their own sets of problems when they’re forced to accommodate a system with millions of voters speaking multiple languages and spread across more than 4,000 square miles.

The county had already gone back to the drawing board, surveying poll workers, city clerks, tech experts, stakeholders, vendors, scholars and, of course voters, when Logan was approached several months ago by a federally funded voting project and asked to participate in a so-called “open-innovation challenge” aimed at creating a voting system that would be universally accessible by voters regardless of literacy, language or disability.

The result, he says, was an opportunity to cast a wide net for ideas while continuing the county’s own efforts. The Accessible Voting Technology Initiative, underwritten by a grant from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission and issued by the county and the Washington, D.C.-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, will take input from anyone with an idea.

Logan says the county faces a number of challenges in developing its own system; for one thing, federal and state regulators will have to approve any system that is developed. Also state legislation will have to be tweaked for the county to spend money on anything but a system now on the commercial market.

“We hope this challenge will accelerate the idea process,” says Logan. “By the end of summer—and granted, by then we’ll be doing the 2012 elections—we hope by then we might even have some prototypes.”

Posted 1/26/11

Spot a pothole? Give it “The Works”

If you’ve ever wished you could zap a pothole or wipe out some graffiti, the county Department of Public Works has a message for you: the power’s in your hands.

Or, to be precise, on your iPhone.

The department’s new “The Works” app offers a point-and-shoot approach to cleaning up quality of life nuisances in county territory, including illegal dumping and street sweeping issues.

Once the free app is downloaded, you can use the camera on your iPhone to send Public Works an instant image of the problem, get a ticket number and keep tabs on how the issue is resolved. (It’s also possible to send a message about the problem without including a photo.) If the location is not within the county’s jurisdiction, the app detects that and directs the customer to the appropriate agency. Jesse Juarros, the department’s chief information officer, said the “end game” is eventually to get all cities within L.A.County to join up so that reports can be forwarded seamlessly to the right place.

Since it was launched Oct. 18, the app has been downloaded 700 times—with more than 330 service requests received, including referrals to other cities.

“Most of them are for potholes, as you’d expect,” Juarros said. “The other one that ranked up there was illegal dumping.”

The new app is “definitely” contributing to quicker graffiti removal, Juarros said, because notifications go directly to clean-up contractors, who can take action right away.

Droid or Blackberry users can take advantage of the same services through the department’s mobile site. And they’re available to all via the regular DPW website.

Posted 11/9/11

 

Sergeant to the stars calls it quits

The photo captions dub him the “unidentified man,” whether he’s escorting Lindsay Lohan through a blizzard of golden confetti or guiding Mel Gibson through a gauntlet of paparazzi.

But everybody who’s anybody in Los Angeles County courthouse and government circles knows that the tall, broad-shouldered figure in those pictures is Steve Wheatcroft.

The veteran county sheriff’s sergeant has long been an unsung but essential player on the front lines of L.A.’s celebrity-media circus, bringing decorum and safety to the courtroom comings and goings of America’s most photographed.

He’s been responsible for the security of judges like Lance Ito, who presided over O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. He’s made sure that defendants like Lohan, Gibson, Phil Spector and Dr. Conrad Murray made it through media scrums and into courtrooms with a minimum of chaos. And whenever a threat is made against a Los Angeles County judge or member of the Board of

Supervisors, Wheatcroft and his team have jumped into action.

But now, after more than two decades of rubbing shoulders with L.A.’s famous and infamous, Wheatcroft is ready for a little family time.

“As they always say at the Super Bowl, I’m going to Disneyland,” said Wheatcroft, 54, who will retire in the next few weeks after more than 32 years on the job.

Instead of heading up the sheriff’s Security Operations Unit—which assesses threats on public officials, helps manage high-profile trial logistics and provides protection to supervisors and judges—he’ll be hanging with his eight (soon to be nine) grandchildren and cruising around in his black ’59 Corvette.

Leaving the job is kind of like leaving the family business for Wheatcroft, whose brother and son also work for the sheriff’s department.

More than anything, he said, he’ll miss the camaraderie of the eight-member unit that he joined back when it was just a two-man operation run out of the county marshal’s office. When the marshal’s office merged with the Sheriff’s Department in 1994, Wheatcroft’s unit took over protective services for the supervisors as well as the judges. As part of the job, he has served as sergeant-at-arms for the Board of Supervisors’ meetings and helped with logistics for visiting dignitaries ranging from Muhammad Ali to Kirk Douglas.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, the supervisors gave Wheatcroft a big send-off.

“All I can say is this is the sweetest cop you will ever meet,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina. “But that doesn’t take away the kind of commanding presence that he has had here at the board.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky saluted his professionalism and ability to “defuse situations that could have gone the other way,” including threats made against the supervisor or his staff. “You put me and my family at ease during those moments,” Yaroslavsky told Wheatcroft.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich thanked Wheatcroft and also singled out his work in the courts. Ticking off a long list of celebrity defendants the sergeant has escorted, he noted: “You could see him in all the movie magazines.”

Which is true, actually, but doesn’t seem to have gone to his head.

Over the years, the “unidentified man” in all those photos has had the chance to observe a lot of famous people under difficult circumstances.

Lohan, Wheatcroft said, is “just kind of a confused girl” who told him she “likes to party.”

Nicest celeb? That would be Rod Stewart, whom Wheatcroft accompanied during a week-long civil proceeding at the courthouse. The British rocker was, in Wheatcroft’s words, “a humble, appreciative person.”

Close followers of the O.J. Simpson case may remember the time the jury, lawyers and judge in the so-called “trial of the century” took a field trip to Simpson’s Rockingham Avenue estate. Wheatcroft arranged it. He did the same with an excursion to Vitello’s restaurant during the Robert Blake case.

And—as if Los Angeles County didn’t have enough of its own well-known defendants—Wheatcroft has been called in to advise officials elsewhere in the U.S.and Canada on how to handle high-profile proceedings. He’s written on the subject in Officer magazine.

By his side throughout has been his high-school sweetheart and now-wife, Wanda. After the board send-off Tuesday, she said her husband had often shared tales from his star-studded work over the years.

“But only in an entertaining way,” she said, “never in a complaining way.”

Posted 11/30/11

Coroner cleans up at awards time

Los Angeles County appreciates efficiency, and the coroner has the evidence to prove it.

After DNA revolutionized forensic science, criminal cases that had been “cold” for years suddenly got warmer. Law enforcement agencies formed special units to take fresh looks at them, and coroner’s Evidence Control Unit, which keeps material from more than 60,000 homicides, found itself flooded with requests.

Before 2008, that evidence was stored warehouse-style, each piece catalogued numerically. Evidence from one homicide could be spread across several rooms within piles of other evidence, which made gathering it a time-consuming chore. Before the widespread use of DNA testing, the evidence unit received very few requests from police, so easy access wasn’t a priority. In most cases, law enforcement agencies didn’t even know the evidence was there.

Enter Michelle Sandberg. In 2008, Sandberg, who was working as a toxicologist, was chosen to bring the unit into the new era, to meet the new demand. Due to budget constraints she could not hire extra hands, so she enlisted volunteers from universities and the military to help her and two other staffers come up with a new way of doing business.

Their efforts paid off. On October 19, the evidence control unit makeover will be honored as one of the ten most innovative programs in the county at the 25^th Annual Productivity and Quality Awards luncheon. The top three programs among them will win Bronze, Silver and Gold Eagle awards. Winners can then submit applications for awards from the California State Association of Counties and the National Association of Counties.

This year’s other honorees range from a groundwater reclamation program that saves an estimated $236 million annually to a free-for-taxpayers high school STD prevention program that has health and educational benefits that aren’t easily monetized.

The awards are presented by the county’s Quality and Productivity Commission. Over the past 25 years, the programs it has recognized have saved taxpayers an estimated $3.6 billion. Winners are also highlighted in an annual multimedia report, which promotes “best practices” countywide. (See last year’s report here.)

Ruth Wong, executive director of the commission, said the goal is to inspire copycats. “What we are hoping is that all or part of these projects will be picked up by other departments. We want them to spread.”

Already, news of the evidence unit’s success is spreading. The National Institute of Justice sent a representative to have a look at Sandberg’s shop two weeks ago. Sandberg, now acting supervising criminalist, and the director of the coroner’s office, Anthony T. Hernandez, have been invited to Washington, D.C. this March to address the Working Group for Medicolegal Death Investigation, which establishes nationwide standards for evidence management.

She will explain how her team tackled the problem, organizing the evidence in “kits” for each case. Each was labeled with a case number and a list of contents, and added to a computer database shared by 145 agencies nationwide. The Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County Sheriff now work closely with the unit, lending staff and advice.

Sandberg’s system has become so efficient that she has started contacting law enforcement agencies herself so they can “come get their stuff.” Out of the 280,000 pieces of evidence her unit housed, only 30,000 remain. As a result of that effort, 41,000 cases have been processed in two years, and decades-old murders and rapes have been solved.

Recognition for her unit’s transformation is great, Sandberg said, but even more gratifying is the sense of contributing to those successful investigations. “It is rewarding because of the work the detectives have done on the cases, using the evidence,” she said. “There is justice for the victims’ families and for all the people who have worked so hard to get it.”

Posted 10/6/11

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