Update: Turns out that I didn’t read the post very carefully. This is only the Los Angeles ballot. But if you know anybody down there in the DTS party, you might want to warn them.

If you’re not registered with a party and you want to vote in the Democratic Party presidential primary, you have an extra box to check. If you don’t fill in that additional oval, your ballot will not be counted!

You have to ask for the primary ballot and you have to check the appropriate oval. This could have a serious impact on a close election.

If you hit the link above you can read a letter from an attorney retained by the Courage Campaign calling upon the LA County registrar to count ballots regardless of whether that first oval is filled. I don’t know why it isn’t being directed to Secretary of State Debra Bowen, but I imagine there will be legal action if the votes aren’t counted. Still, if you’re reading this post you have no excuse.

And again, because I know we’re going to lose voters tomorrow, if you’re in the Garberville precinct jurisdiction, go to the DMV building to vote. Redway, as always, is at the Healy Center.

If anybody in the Garberville/Redway area needs a ride, please call me at work. We’re in the phone book. I may not be able to pick you up right away, but we’ll work something out.

Oh, and I guess this answers the questions about which parties independents can vote for. Either the Democratic Party or the American Independent Party (a right wing party which was born out of the George Wallace campaign of 1968). The Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, etc. – those are all off limits to you in tomorrow’s primary.

Addendum: Slightly off topic, but the word is that California won’t have a delegate count final until Friday.

Second addendum: This ballot situation in Los Angeles could turn out to be a nightmare. I imagine there will be a manual recount as the scanner won’t record any vote with the missing bubble. From the blog:

I’m going to try and clarify this a bit. LA County has an “inka-vote” system. You get a scan tron sheet and then line it up at the voting booth, and then fill out the ballot that you see above. At the end of the process, you have a scan-tron sheet with a bunch of dots filled out on it. So that gets fed into the feeder in front of you, and if it’s OK it’ll say “ballot successful”.

DTS voters and Democratic voters have the same “ballot” but DIFFERENT TYPE SCAN-TRON SHEETS. For a DTS voter who didn’t fill out that bubble, they won’t find out at that time because the ballot feeder doesn’t count the undervote.

This was figured out by a law student over the weekend, nobody on any campaign or the elections officials caught it.