Palo Alto residents voting in person at the polls today might not have noticed, but the name of city council candidate Doria Summa was omitted from the screen showing the other eight council candidates.
To find Summa’s name, a voter must press the word MORE and go to a second page that displays her name.
“This is a very unfortunate situation and it disadvantages one candidate compared to the others,” Mayor Greer Stone said in an email blast. “If you know anyone voting today, please let them know about this issue ASAP.”
“Unfortunately, there was only room for eight candidates on the screen and I got relegated to the second screen,” Summa said in an email.
No word yet from the Registrar of Voters about this mix up.
Such utter, er, nonsense! Of course they had to pick someone who doesn’t sing the city’s song to appear to omit. Talk about putting a finger or whole thigh on the scale.
Way to go, City Clerk. Haven’t you heard of alphabetical order???
There should be a full and complete investigation of this.
I’m sure our crackerjack Communications Team will be straightening this out with their usual stellar outreach.
Shouldn’t the candidates have been divided between two pages? SHouldn’t it have said “SEE A SECOND PAGE OF CANDIDATES.” instead of just saying “MORE?” My neighbors came home from voting telling me that Doria was not on the ballot.There is a woman employee at the Registrar’s office responsible for the formatting of the ballot. She should lose her job for neglect , incompetence and stupidity. Did she look at the ballot at all? She blamed it on the printer.
I am webmaster for Doria Summa and a number of people questioned what happened. This was my explanation and suggestions to them on Tuesday:
This problem does not affect those voters who used their paper ballots, although I could suggest that in place of the City Clerk doing a ‘random selection’ of candidates for the printed ballots, that the ballots be printed in small batches with the order of the candidates randomized for each batch. Then all the ballots are shuffled together and addressed. That way the voter gets a printed ballot with a random order of candidates.
1. As you are aware, there are 9 candidates for City Council, but the voting machine computer screen can only accommodate 8 on a page. There is a ‘more’ button at the bottom of the page to move to the next page.
2. When this problem was noted this morning, I sent an email to 20,000 voters in Palo Alto. This was immediately followed by emails from Pat Burt, Keith Reckdahl, and Greer Stone. When Lydia Kou offered to send to her email list I told her there was no reason because all voters with emails were already saturated.
3. I understand that the polling places have been requested to notify each voter about the problem as they register and to place signs next to the voting machines.
4. Obviously, a computer screen has only so much room on it, but the fact that it is a ‘paged’ screen rather than a ‘scrolling’ screen is an oversight.
5. Obviously, with a computer you can easily randomize the order of presentation of the names. With 9 candidates there are 362,880 (9!) possible arrangements. I think that in the future, this should be done in place of the City Clerk making a random selection of the order of candidates. In fact, it should be done for the national election candidates as well. How many Presidential candidates were listed this year?
6. For those who believe in ‘conspiracy theory’ I would like to believe that the order of candidates on the ballot is truly ‘random’ and not deliberately set to disadvantage any candidate.
7. I had 4,269 people (24.9%) who opened the email I sent out this morning. What is of real interest in the immediate future would be to do a timeline analysis of the voting patterns to see if the percentage of voters who voted for Doria changed between the 8AM to noon period and the noon to 8PM period after our emails went out.
“Shouldn’t the candidates have been divided between two pages? SHouldn’t it have said “SEE A SECOND PAGE OF CANDIDATES.” instead of just saying “MORE?”
CeCi above is absolutely right, especially since “MORE” can easily e confused with “MOVE” the command to move you to the next issue, not to the second page with “more” candidate(s).
Not only should she be fired but a full inveastigation should be launched about possible corruption.
What’s the latest on the results since this we still don’t know the results.
They’ll never know how many didn’t vote for her because they were confused by the more choice.