BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
A big mistake by the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters may possibly change the composition of the Palo Alto City Council.
While most people vote by mail, a certain number go to polling places and cast ballots electronically. If you voted in this manner in Tuesday’s election, you were confronted with a computer screen that showed only eight of the nine candidates. In order to see the ninth candidate, you had to press “more” to go to the next screen, where the name of candidate Doria Summa was shown.
There was no other indication that another person was running for council.
The page also had a “next” button, which takes the voter to the next category on the ballot, skipping Summa’s name altogether.
On Election Day, when this problem came to light, a handful of Palo Altans jumped into action. I first learned about it from a reader, and we immediately began working on a story for our webpage, padailypost.com.
Mayor Greer Stone, who was among the eight candidates on the first page of the electronic ballot for council, sent out an email blast to alert those who hadn’t voted yet.
“If you are supporting Doria Summa, please be sure to hit that MORE button to be able to select her name,” Greer wrote. “This is a very unfortunate situation and it disadvantages one candidate compared to the others.”
Pat Burt and Keith Reckdahl, two other candidates who were on the ballot, also sent out email blasts to their supporters.
It was a magnanimous gesture on their part considering that a vote for Summa could be a vote one of them would lose, although there were four spots on council up for election.
The Registar of Voters office in San Jose didn’t seem concerned about this error that cheated Summa out of votes. “The limitation on the number of candidates visible at a single time on the touchscreen is necessary due to the limited size of the screen and the need to preserve a minimum font size for readability. It is a regular occurrence for the number of candidates in a single contest to exceed the number able to be viewed on screen at a single time, causing the need for the ‘More’ buttons to allow scrolling up and down to appear,” the Registrar’s press spokesman, Steve Goltiao, said in a statement emailed to the Post.
“Because of the system design, the screen will always display the maximum number candidates possible and require the scroll for additional candidates, whether the maximum is exceeded by one candidate, two candidates, or more,” Goltiao said.
He added, “We are not aware of any complaints about this issue.”
In other words, this isn’t a big deal because nobody else is complaining.
But as the votes were counted, Summa was just a few votes away from one of the four places on council. As of Saturday, the most recent count had her just 12 votes from a council seat. Reckdahl was in fourth with 9,591 votes and Summa had 9,579 votes.
Matt Moreles, the acting Registrar of Voters, should appear before the Palo Alto City Council and explain what he is going to do about this.
Re-doing the election isn’t fair to the candidates who won. But how do you make it fair to Summa?
One idea is to have council members pass a resolution saying that if a vacancy occurs on council in the next two years, they will appoint the fifth place candidate as the replacement.
Even though Moreles is a temporary head of the vote-counting agency, he should get moving on fixing this problem before the next election. Make sure the computer screen shows all the candidates at the same time. The fact that this slipped by his office — that nobody did a trial run to see how the ballot would look — is an embarassment.
In the last election campaign, many Palo Altans talked about the importance of upholding democracy when it comes to elections. They were referring to the presidential vote. But they should place equal emphasis on the local process of counting votes and pressure the county to never let this happen again.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
Computer screen limitation is a pathetic excuse.
(1) Since it is a computer screen, the names could have been randomized so that whoever gets bumped is chosen at random. Each candidate gets bumped to second page 1/9 of the time. (2) The single word “more” is the weakest possible signal there are more candidates. How about using “more candidates” as a label. 3. I do not have a screen shot of screen but it is entirely possible that the vertical space used by the “more” link could have been replaced by Summa’s name.
Ny neighbors returned from the poll telling me that DORIA SUMMA WAS NOT ON THE BALLOT. So they voted for someone else.
Voting for someone else skews the numbers.
The Ballot fiasco is unforgivable. There is an employee at the Registrar whose responsibility is to ensure the paper ballot is clear, fair, and unambiguous. It was anything but. they should lose their position.
The ballot is supposed to be identical to the mailin ballot yet they differed. That is illegal.
In this age when there is distrust of the ballot and therefore our democracy, it is even more imperative that a legitimate error be rectified.
We need a revote. We need a revote. We need revote.
Summa leads in mail-in votes but fails in the in-person contest where her name doesn’t appear on the main page. Huh? Why doesn’t the County just come clean with this error/oversight? Do they think we are going to bite them? Going forward put five folks on one page and four on the other, with clear instructions. And the idea of appointing Summa in the very rare case of a vacancy is a nice nod but doesn’t really solve anything. Are there any folks who voted in person who could come forward with their experience? Did they know there was a page 2? Thank you PADP for writing this up for us.
It is such a travesty that this happened. Many people were surprised that Doria was “no longer on the ballot.”
A friend of mine in Southern CA said she had to hit “more” to vote for Trump. You would think Trump and Harris would be listed at the top. As far as Doria I hope she gains the fourth spot. Tech savvy people would probably know that “more” meant more candidates on the next page, especially if the person they wanted to vote for wasn’t listed on the first page. Not everyone is tech savvy.
This wasn’t an error. This happens, including happening to me before I started voting absentee. “More candidates” makes sense.
And even with all that, has anyone gotten a single response from anyone to whom we sent emails protesting this travesty?
At least an acknowledgement would have been special.
Why you’d think the FPPC was in charge of the order of the candidates.
Note – the council candidates WERE listed randomly, with Doria last as the luck of the draw would have it. Templeton would have been last is in alphabetical order.
Also – supposedly the last name in a list picks up more votes (from less informed voters who just want to vote the maximum) than those in the middle.
Randomly for each voter, not the order for all voters in one selection.
One person who is must be happy Doria was screwed out of a council seat was Julie Lythcott Haims, who once called Doria the “Jim Crow” of Palo Alto politics.
Palo Alto should have a revote of Doria Summa and Keith Reckdahl. The counts are too close and given the whole ballot fiasco, appointing Doria if a 5th seat opens up is rediculous.
To be honest, Julie Lythcott Haims should step down given how she was dishonest when she ran for Palo Alto City Council and didn’t disclose why she was fired from Stanford University.
How about Julie Lythcott Haims resigns given her dishonest and abuse of power in her affair with a Stanford Undergraduate student while working at Stanford, and we let Doria Summa take her seat.
Another vote for Julie to resign. She keeps lying and never apologizes even when caught. She never apologized to Doria for her disgusting “Jim Crow” lie about Doria. She never apologized for repeatedly calling her neighbors “racists” who left notes on her door BECAUSE she refused to meet with them about their comments about her totally out-of-scale home while it was being built and when changes could be made — like considerate neighbors have done in Palo Alto for decades.
She never retracted her absurd and laughable lie that PASZ – a LOCAL group — was “the loudest voice in the room” — way more powerful and richer than the National Association of Realtors with its 1,500,000 dues=paying members, than the Chamber of Commerce and the YIMBY’s with their local, state, national and global chapters endowed by tech billionaires — all of whom gave her as a FRESHMAN City Council candidate the biggest campaign war ches — and the most non-resident backers.
Were her self-serving political lies not bad enough, she rallied her acolytes to attack the student with whom she had an affair while a Stanford dean after knowingly gambling if she’d get caught having the affair.
Then she claimed she “resigned” to pursue her “passion for creative writing” she got caught. Just like she “resigned” when forced off 3 committees dealing with kids and with Stanford.
What has she — a Harvard=trained lawyer done but a) try to overturn the limits on outside income she knew about when she ran knowing she was violation of those limits, b) object to Council dinner times because she couldn’t eat with her family, c) demand a raise and d) demand an intern –as if she could be trusted around an intern any more than her student lover.
Give me a council member who cares more about PA as a community than herself and selling us out to the highest bidders.
What is the purpose of voting machines anyway? They do not appear to lower costs or make the election process any more efficient – the three west coast states have still not finished counting votes! Machines with wifi connectivity are also more vulnerable to tampering and thus election fraud. And don’t get me started on mail-in ballots, absentee ballots and early voting.
All elections should be conducted in-person, by hand-marked paper ballots, in person, with photo ID, on the same day, and all ballots counted the same day. No absentee, mail-in or other schemes that enhance voter fraud. Anyone who cannot physically show-up to vote in person…well too bad. The only exception should be to overseas military personnel and diplomats…and even that issue would mostly disappear if we had a non-interventionist, more humble foreign policy. Personally, I would close all foreign military bases.
The navigation buttons should have said “More candidates for Palo Alto City Council” and “Next item” rather than just “More” and ‘Next”. A limitation like screen size should be a challenge to create a proper user interface, not an excuse for creating an unfair election.