Courage Campaign Alarmed by Los Angeles Ballot

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

This is disconcerting. Apparently the Los Angeles Decline to State ballot for those choosing to vote in the Democratic primary requires that one fill in a bubble that says "Democratic" in addition to the bubble for the voters' choice for president. The last thing anybody wants is an election outcome tarred by disenfranchisement and technicalities. The Courage Campaign is convinced that this policy is a violation of state election law and has been in contact with the LA registrar's office about the issue. Here's Calitics' David Dayen with more:

"Turns out that in Los Angeles County, if a DTS voter requests their Democratic ballot and casts their vote, but does NOT mark "Democratic" in the appropriate space, the vote will indeed not be counted. The ballot will go through the scan-tron machine, not register as a counted vote, AND will not spit back out for the voter to fix.  In LA County, they feed the ballot through the tabulator right in front of the voter, presumably to prevent errors just like this.  But this one doesn't get caught in all the tests.

This seems to me significant just as a voting rights issue. There are 776,000 DTS voters in LA County alone, which is ¾ of everyone who has voted in the first four Democratic primaries thus far. Setting up an additional hurdle for these voters if they want to participate in the Democratic primary, and then NOT INFORMING THEM if they fail to clear that hurdle, seems to me to be just completely unacceptable.

Here's the ballot, and you can see that there's virtually no reason to give people something else to screw up.  There's only one bubble to fill out, and it's already been implicitly "filled out" when they asked for the ballot in the first place."