County Insider

Voter registration’s a click away

You go online to post your vacation photos, buy birthday gifts and share your relationship status.

But if you want to use the Internet to register to exercise one of the most fundamental rights of American citizenship—casting a vote—you’ve been out of luck.

Until now.

The county is embarking on a project with the California Secretary of State to make online voter registration a reality here before the November presidential election.

The $270,873 county program, paid for by federal funds passed along by the state, is part of the California Online Voter Registration Project that seeks to make registration easier for the 9 million Californians—39% of the eligible population—who aren’t currently signed up to vote.

While it won’t change the requirement mandating registration 15 days before an election, it will make it easier for those who push it right up to the wire—like the thousands of county residents who tried, and failed, to register to vote in time for the last presidential election.

“In 2008, we received literally several thousand registration forms the day after the registration cutoff,” said Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan. “These were people who, at the point that they were engaged and interested in becoming active voters, the system in essence failed them, through an administrative deadline. It’s hard to measure the loss of that. You wonder, will they come back if they didn’t get to vote in the one election where they were interested?”

The system will allow would-be voters to sign their registration forms electronically using e-signatures on file with the DMV. A widget on the county’s voting website, www.lavote.net, will send them to the Secretary of State’s site to register online beginning in late August or early September, Logan said.

The move to electronic registration is part of a broader movement to modernize the nation’s voting systems and remove barriers to electoral participation. Only 10 states, including Washington, Oregon and Arizona, currently have online registration. California is in the process of becoming the 11^th, under Senate Bill 397 passed last year. Los Angeles, Orange and Trinity are the three counties that will be pioneering the process for their respective voting systems, before the whole state follows suit.

In a letter to the Board of Supervisors, which this week approved the county’s participation in the program, Logan and county Chief Information Officer Richard Sanchez said that younger voters between the ages of 18 and 25 are most likely to take advantage of the online registration option.

But Logan said it will also make it easier for anyone who moves within the state to keep their voter registration up to date.

Posted 4/17/12

 

 

Assessor hit for faulty forecasts

When it comes to forecasting the rise and fall of home prices, the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office needs to get its house in order.

That was the conclusion of a team of consultants hired by the county to investigate how the assessor came to produce two widely different predictions of money that would be generated by this year’s property taxes. In one fell swoop, the amount of growth forecast for property values plunged from $18.6 billion in December to $5.1 billion in April—an unwelcome surprise for financially-strapped local government entities, including the county, that rely on the funds.

An irate Board of Supervisors last month called the disparity shocking and unprecedented, and ordered a top-to-bottom audit of the office run by Assessor John Noguez, who already was under fire for allegedly giving special treatment to certain property owners, an accusation he has denied.

On Tuesday, the first phase of that audit was presented to the supervisors, and it did not paint a flattering portrait of assessor operations.

Consultants from the firm Rosenow Spevack Group found numerous flaws in how the two forecasts were reached—from failing to account for home price volatility at the close of last year to making errors in math. RSG, which was retained by the county’s auditor-controller, concluded that the December forecast of 1.77 percent revenue growth was too high and that the April forecast of .49 percent growth was too low.

Based on more complete information, RSG and the Assessor’s Office now agree that rate of growth in property tax revenue will be closer to 1.14%.

The most significant forecasting error, according to RSG, was the assessor’s failure to recognize, and account for, an unexpected decline in value for hundreds of thousands of parcels in the final quarter of last year. The assessor’s office had based its December forecast on information generated between January and September 2011, when prices were relatively stable, without examining available sales data or economic analyses for the latter part of the year. The result: an overly optimistic forecast, Jim Simon of RSG told the board.

Mistakes were also made in the April forecast, he said, including an overstatement of the estimated drop in the property tax roll because of “a calculation error.”

In a letter accompanying RSG’s report, Auditor-Controller Wendy Watanabe noted that, during the past several years, the assessor’s office has been hit with numerous retirements in key management roles, “which has resulted in significant turnover in the staff who prepare the roll forecasts.” Watanabe’s office is now examining the management of the assessor’s office, including whether it has been hurt by the controversies surrounding Noguez, who, along with other members of his staff, are under investigation by the District Attorney’s public integrity unit.

That a controversy over forecasts could even flare seems unique to Los Angeles government.

According to RSG, it appears that no other assessor in the state is producing multiple forecasts like Los Angeles. For 20 years, the L.A. County assessor has been producing three of them as a way to help the county’s Chief Executive Office prepare the county’s preliminary budget. Under state law, an assessor is only required to produce an annual forecast in May, if asked to do so by a governing body of a taxing agency.

“Their primary function is to be assessors” evaluating properties, Simon said, “not forecasters.”

Still, with the likelihood that multiple forecasts in Los Angeles County will continue, Simon’s team suggested a number of ways for the assessor to increase accuracy. They include: using the most current data available; evaluating properties on a more geographic-specific level, obtaining input from economists and other experts, and providing a range of values in forecasts, instead of settling on a specific number.

Posted 5/16/12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E-stockpile found at assessor’s office

As Los Angeles County was tightening its belt in recent years, its assessor’s office was sitting on a cache of more than a half-million dollars’ worth of brand-new electronics equipment it had stockpiled but never used, a newly-released county audit found.

The auditors discovered some $654,000 worth of never-used equipment, ranging from laptops to laser jet printers, languishing in storage at the Hall of Administration after it was purchased between fiscal years 2001-2 and 2009-10.

“A lot of the equipment was still brand-new, still sealed with the original vendor tape,” said David Aldava, an intermediate accountant-auditor who was part of the team that looked into technology in the assessor’s office.

Aldava’s team also made another unusual discovery: The department had improperly stashed pallets loaded with other computers, printers and tech equipment—some still functioning, some headed to the junk pile—in an unlocked, leased storage facility in Signal Hill, where the county-owned equipment shared space with the landlord’s car, bicycles, refrigerators, mattresses and even a bar sign or two.

The equipment ended up in the storage facility—next to the assessor’s South District office—after employees initially told auditors that the department had no surplus electronics. Eventually, though, the staff “told us that they had previously moved the surplus items from other locations to the storage building in an attempt to hide the equipment from us,” according to an April 13 report from Auditor-Controller Wendy Watanabe.

In a response to the audit filed last month, the department concurred with virtually all of the auditor’s 25 recommendations, most aimed at tightening accountability, record-keeping and security and ensuring that IT equipment is purchased only when needed.

Assessor’s spokesman Louis Reyes said the office is “fully cooperating” in correcting problems uncovered in the audit. “The assessor wants to address these concerns fully,” he said.

Assessor John R. Noguez was elected in November, 2010, and was not in charge during the period in which the new equipment was stockpiled, Reyes noted.

The audit comes as a separate, broader review, ordered by the Board of Supervisors, is underway to examine how the assessor’s office operates across the board. The office has come under fire for allegedly granting preferential treatment to some property owners. Noguez also shocked the supervisors recently when he disclosed a large, unprecedented disparity in property tax projections that could leave the county with a $50 million hole in its budget.

The technology audit, conducted last year and provided to the Board of Supervisors last month, offered its own set of unexpected discoveries.

“This warehouse issue really took us by surprise,” Watanabe said—especially when employees initially refused to let the auditors into the Signal Hill facility, claiming it would take a month to reach the landlord and get his permission for access. “That really piqued our interest.”

It turned out that an effort was underway, apparently, to thwart auditors from discovering an abundance of surplus equipment, which is not allowed under county policy. “They started to dump everything to Signal Hill…We finally did get in and saw stacks and stacks of used computers,” Watanabe said. “They didn’t want us to see it, to cover up that they’d initially lied.”

Even as the used computer equipment was piling up, the department was also acquiring the stacks of new and unneeded electronics—apparently part of a use-it-or-lose strategy of spending IT funds at the end of fiscal years rather than allowing unspent money to revert to the Chief Executive Office’s overall county budget, the audit found.

Beyond the cost of the equipment itself, the department overpaid by not waiting to buy the items until they were actually needed. Because technology prices tend to decrease over time, the assessor’s office ended up paying at least $93,000 more than it should have, the audit found.

Despite the huge build-up in excess tech equipment being stored, the assessor’s office still had plenty of electronic devices to go around, it appears. The audit found that 324 of the department’s 1,425 employees had at least two computers assigned to them—and 57 had three or more.

“To us, this is just ridiculous,” Watanabe said. “There’s really no business reason to justify why someone would have three or more computers.”

The employees themselves admitted as much to county auditors when asked about those second or third computers.

“Oh, yeah, it’s just sitting in my trunk,” some said when questioned about laptops they’d been issued, according to Watanabe.

Having an unused laptop lying around the house or car has hidden costs, too, Watanabe said, since the county pays virtual network fees of $600 a year for each employee who logs onto the network from outside the office—whether a device is being used or not.

Then there were security lapses. The audit said that the assessor’s department disposed of some surplus equipment without first erasing county information from the devices’ hard drives. It also found that 22% of the department’s computers didn’t have any working anti-virus protection.

Although Watanabe said no fraud was uncovered, the audit found a system of lax controls and a cavalier attitude toward safeguarding county property.

As for the surplus devices stashed in Signal Hill, those have all been junked or donated since the audit, or will be soon, according to the department. And employees in the assessor’s office have begun working their way through that unused stockpile of new equipment.

Posted /3/12

Science with a seriously cool streak

Meet Su Oh, the Natural History Museum’s in-house impresario.

Perhaps the only L.A. County employee whose job combines musical cool-hunting, scientific showmanship and a strong sense of theatrical occasion, Oh has been masterminding the museum’s “First Fridays” series for the past five years, presenting programs that combine top-notch lectures with cutting-edge live music.

Thanks in large part to Oh’s efforts, a species once endangered in the museum environment—the young adult—is approaching critical mass.

“At first, people were mainly coming for the concerts,” said Oh, Director of Education and Programs at the museum. “Now, they are coming for the lectures, too. The talks are really starting to rival the music in popularity.”

Oh, 40, formerly worked as an awards manager for the Recording Academy, which produces the Grammys. Five years ago, she decided it was time for a career change, but wasn’t quite sure how to use her entertainment industry experience to her advantage. She hadn’t had science-related experience since college, when she worked at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

It just so happened that the Natural History Museum was seeking someone to take over First Fridays and work on boosting attendance. Oh tapped into her music industry experience to identify and book up-and-coming acts. The events began to pick up credibility among young people with an ear for innovative sounds.

Nowadays, the lecturers she schedules are rock stars in their own right, from the astronomer who “killed” Pluto to this week’s Pulitzer-winning presenter, Dr. Jared Diamond, widely known for his scholarship on everything from the birds of Papua New Guinea to the causes of global inequality. Diamond is perhaps best known for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.

To Oh, great content is always the most important thing. Everything else follows.

“People may not know the bands and they may not know the scientists, but they trust that we are going to find good stuff for them, worth exploring at least,” she said.

Oh, whose duties also include outreach to schools and events like the annual Bug Fair, views First Fridays as “happenings” rather than just concerts or lectures. She has used projections, installation art and even a 14-foot T-Rex puppet to expand the audience’s experience while uniting them with the unique museum environment. Whatever the hook, it appears to be working. First Fridays increasingly draw large crowds, often nearing or reaching capacity.

Those crowds are not likely to dwindle soon. When Phase 1 of Exposition Light Rail Line opens on April 28, it will give the public a new route to the museum’s doorstep.

The stage is set for the Natural History Museum to celebrate its 100^th birthday next year. Oh will take a more managerial role on First Fridays after this season, so she can focus more on the big picture. She envisions outdoor events that could host larger crowds while bringing nature lovers and conservationists into the fold.

That inclusivity is a hallmark of Oh’s programs. It’s also what drives her.

“I like connecting people, especially if they are not in each other’s normal realms,” she said. “The bigger gap there is to bridge, the more interested I am in it.”

You can see what the buzz is about at the latest installment of First Fridays this week.

Posted 3/29/12

Board orders audit of assessor’s office

Los Angeles County’s assessor came under tough criticism from the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday for producing alarmingly divergent property tax forecasts that could create unexpected headaches for hard-pressed municipalities, school districts and public safety agencies that rely on the funding.

“It’s perplexing, it’s confounding and it’s unprecedented in my time here,” said board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky, who, with Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, authored a unanimously approved motion ordering an immediate top-to-bottom audit of the assessor’s office.

Assessor John R. Noguez had disclosed to supervisors last week that the county’s 2012-2013 property tax roll would likely generate only a fraction of the net increase he’d forecasted in December, dropping from $18 billion to just $5 billion. On Tuesday, testifying before the board, Noguez blamed the disparity on what he said was a surprising plunge in property values during the final months of last year, with an average 5% tax reduction expected on more than 500,000 parcels.

But Noguez’s explanations, along with those of his chief of staff, seemed only to fuel the supervisors’ concerns about the performance of the assessor’s office, which in recent months has been confronted with allegations that it gave special treatment to certain property owners. Noguez, a 25-year veteran of the assessor’s office who was elected to the top job in 2010, has insisted he’s acted properly and said Tuesday he welcomes a comprehensive review of his office by the county’s auditor-controller.

During the board meeting, Noguez was not asked directly about that controversy. But the tenor of the questioning—and the wording of the audit motion itself—suggested that the supervisors had broader concerns than the revenue forecasts.  

“It is imperative that the Board of Supervisors, the governing bodies of other local public agencies and the public have confidence in the Assessor to accurately, efficiently and impartially administer the property assessment process,” Yaroslavsky and Ridley-Thomas wrote in their motion. “The public must be ensured that adequate controls are in place to safeguard the reliability and integrity of the system.”

Although it’s not unusual for variations to exist among property tax forecasts, what made this one so “shocking,” in the words of Supervisor Don Knabe, was that differences between the projected revenue increases were so big—from 1.77% in December to .49% this month. For the county, that represents a potential drop of more than $50 million at a time when the county and other municipalities are hammering out their budgets.

“It’s not simply a matter of numbers but, in fact, real impacts that could adversely affect real human beings,” Ridley-Thomas said.

Chief Executive Officer William T Fujioka, who called the size of the disparities “unprecedented,” said the new audit could show that the assessor’s office got it wrong and that the spread is smaller than currently predicted. “I’m confident [that] through the auditor-controller’s efforts that we’ll get a more accurate picture,” he said.

If the $50 million drop in revenue should hold true, Fujioka said, “I’m confident we’ll be able to address this without any significant reduction in county services.”

That may not be the case elsewhere, as Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich pointedly noted. “This,” he said, “is going to be a severe tsunami to the schools and cities.”

The city of Los Angeles’ chief budget official, Miguel Santana, said in an interview that the difference in forecasts means a potential loss of more than $18 million—“a significant change in terms of how tight our budget is…We’re trying to find solutions to mitigate that gap.” The city is confronting a budget deficit of $222 million.

Santana, like L.A. County officials, said he learned belatedly about that gap only after contacting Noguez for an update. Veterans of the city’s budget office, he said, were stunned by the sharp variances between the earlier and latest forecast. “This is the first time they’ve seen anything so dramatically different.”

Posted 4/10/12

Some bookmark artists who love to read

Harry Potter, watch your back.

The imaginative visual artists who just won L.A.County’s 32^nd annual bookmark contest are an eclectic bunch when it comes to reading.

While J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard remains a favorite, the bookmark winners report enjoying fiction ranging from French existentialism (The Stranger by Albert Camus) to fantasy from Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin.

Whoopi Goldberg has a following—both her Big Book of Manners and Sugarplum Ballerina series made the kids’ reading list. Roald Dahl continues to be a popular choice. And magic, in all its forms and at all reading levels, remains incredibly popular, from Magyk to the The Magic Tree House series (and, of course, the Harry Potter books.)

Funny titles—from Dork Diaries to Scumble to My Sister the Vampire—were singled out for mention. So were serious works like The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. One student listed the Bible as her favorite book.

The students, whose bookmark illustrations were chosen from among 11,000 entries, were surveyed about favorite books, hobbies and dreams for the future before their appearance at the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday. The contest was open to students from kindergarten to 12^th grade; entries were judged in separate categories according to grade level.

The winners from the 3rd District are Francesca “Frankie” Lane Manera (Malibu Public Library), Josias Salvador (San Fernando Public Library,  Hunter Blaze Pearson (Agoura Hills Public Library) and Irina Tsoi (West Hollywood Public Library.) For a look at all the winning bookmark creations, click here, or stop by a branch of the Los Angeles County Library this spring.

Posted 2/14/12

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

Looking out for shelter pets

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week weighed in on a narrow-but-emotional debate over euthanasia in animal shelters, urging the governor not to repeal a suspended law requiring shelters to wait more than three days before euthanizing abandoned pets and strays.  

The mandate, suspended since 2009, is one of more than 30 that Gov. Jerry Brown has sought to eliminate in the wake of the state’s budget crisis.

Signed into law in 1998 by Gov. Pete Wilson, and named for its sponsor, former Santa Monica state senator Tom Hayden, it has extended the lives of lost and stray animals by requiring shelters to hold them from four to six days, rather than the 72 hours under the prior law. Local governments are supposed to be reimbursed by the state.

As California’s economy has struggled, however, the shelter law has been a target. In 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger briefly tried and failed to repeal it, and five years later, it was suspended as part of a deal to balance the state budget.  At the time, animal rights groups feared that shelters would begin euthanizing animals more quickly, but they continued to abide by longer waiting periods, making up for the lack of state reimbursement out of their own budgets.

In Los Angeles County, for instance, the Department of Animal Care and Control has spent about $600,000 a year of its $33 million budget to hold animals for five days before euthanization, says Chief Deputy Director David Dijkstra. 

“As long as we have the ability, we like to make animals available for adoption or owner redemption for as long as possible,” Dijkstra says, noting that the county impounds about 90,000 animals a year and euthanizes fewer than half of them.

Some animal rights activists have argued that Hayden’s Law has worsened conditions for shelter animals because so-called “rescue holds” by hoarders and well-intentioned but disorganized animal lovers force shelters to house aggressive and diseased animals for weeks at the expense of more adoptable pets who then end up being euthanized for lack of space.

The state also points to a 2008 report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office that found no proof that the Hayden Law had led to an increase in pet adoptions, and therefore recommended repeal.

Still, Brown’s proposal to save more than $23 million a year by taking the mandate out of the state budget has drawn a fresh round of protest from some pet lovers and animal rights groups. Hayden recently spoke out  in a YouTube video, and the Humane Society of the United States this week asked members to write to Brown.

The Board’s response, led by Supervisor Michael Antonovich, a longstanding advocate for pet adoptions, took the form of a 5-signature letter asking that the law not be repealed.

Quantifying the local impact of Hayden’s Law has been difficult because so many variables are involved in pet adoptions. For example, in recent years, Dijkstra says, shelters have become more crowded because owners have had difficulty caring for pets in this economy. Moreover, many of the 40,000 or so animals euthanized each year in county shelters are animals such as feral cats that can’t easily be placed for adoption.

However, he notes, by the most available measure—dog impounds—the suspension of Hayden’s Law has not increased euthanasia. In 2008-09, the county impounded 45,903 dogs, with 54 percent adopted or returned to their owners. In 2011-12, the projected number of impounded dogs stands at 48,823, with 57 percent returned or adopted. 

About 80 percent of pets are claimed by their owners within the first three days, he says, but last year, about 1,100 lost pets were reunited with their owners on their fourth and fifth days in the shelter. In the past year, he adds, the county also has begun putting abandoned pets up for adoption sooner than they might otherwise have been made available.

“It’s very rare that an owner shows up after we’ve made a dog or cat available for adoption,” he adds, “but that has happened on a couple of occasions, and in those cases, the new owners are contacted and asked if they’ll give the pet back.”

Posted 2/8/12

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

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