Excerpts:
It was mid-morning on Election Day when Julie Mendel, a poll worker at a voting location at Mills College in Oakland, realized that something had gone horribly wrong.
A voter had approached her with a printout from a ballot-marking device, a machine that spits out a voter's choices onto a piece of paper (the voter's ballot) after they have made their selections on a touchscreen. The voter then submits the ballot into a collection bag.
For more than three days of voting, Mendel and her fellow poll workers had told voters that the piece of paper was a receipt, with the actual votes submitted electronically though the machine. She had heard the guidance from a higher-ranking poll worker at the location, and never questioned it until she looked closely at the piece of paper the man was showing her. It read 'Official Ballot.'
"We felt really awful just about the possibility that we had told these people to walk away with their votes uncast," said Mendel.
For the rest of the day, Mendel and other poll workers scrambled to contact the Alameda County Registrar of Voters Office, trying in vain to get clear guidance and help correcting their error.
"Nobody was like, 'This is really concerning, I'm going to try to figure out how to solve this problem and get back to you,' or, 'I'm going to send an employee to the site to talk to you and figure out what's going on,' " Mendel remembered. "It was like realizing we had made this giant mistake and feeling incredibly alone in trying to handle it."
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Problems in 2020 'More Systemic and Significant'
Voting rights advocates have slammed the county for a delay in setting up vote-by-mail drop boxes, and for failing to post sample ballots in multiple languages, as required by law.
"We have seen issues off and on in past election cycles, but they really came to a head this cycle and were more systemic and significant than we've seen previously," said Julia Marks, voting rights attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus.
The 2020 election provided a host of novel challenges for California counties and their election workers, who implemented changes to the voting process on a short timetable in the midst of a pandemic — with levels of turnout not matched in decades.
But the issues in Alameda County raise questions about the management of the registrar's office, and whether the state's seventh-largest county should continue to task their top elections official with simultaneously running the county's information technology department.
But the issues in Alameda County raise questions about the management of the registrar's office, and whether the state's seventh-largest county should continue to task their top elections official with simultaneously running the county's information technology department.
"There is no other county in California that is the size of Alameda County that does not have someone who is a full time registrar of voters," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. "It's a big job, and a county the size of Alameda has a lot of voters and many diverse voters whose needs they need to address."
Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis did not respond to requests for an interview for this story. (Full Story)