About 30 voters were turned away from Cal State Long Beach’s polling station after it ran out of ballots.
At around 8:35 p.m. Tuesday, a polling station worker at the Soroptimist House told a college-aged audience that if additional ballots didn’t arrive by 9 p.m., she would collect their names on provisional ballot envelopes. She promised to deliver the envelopes to the L.A. County’s registrar’s office in a complaint.
“I don’t know how else to do this,” the worker could be heard saying on a video.
Poll clerk Pam Hayes said 30 to 40 people were in line at the time of the announcement.
More ballots did arrive, but at the end of the night there were still about 30 provisional ballot envelopes left over, waiting to be sent to the registrar’s office for a complaint.
“It’s been really frustrating for us because we want everyone to vote,” Hayes said.
Hayes said it was the third time that night that the polling station had ran out of ballots. She said the problem was that nearly 700 people cast provisional ballots at the site, meaning they weren’t registered to vote at that polling station.
Meanwhile, Hayes said only about 15 people voted at the CSULB polling station who were registered to vote there.
“We weren’t expecting 700 people not registered here,” Hayes added.
Hayes referred back to the recent Associated Students Inc. voter registration drive that saw 1,226 CSULB students registered. She said that ASI should have told students to put down a CSULB address when registering. That way, election officials would know that the CSULB polling station would need more ballots.
Hayes also said a provisional ballot takes four times longer to process, adding that the station’s workers hadn’t had a break since 6 a.m.
“We barely could keep up,” she said. “It was just miscommunication on everybody’s part.”
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