Cal State Long Beach’s polling station should have never ran out of ballots on Nov. 2, one official said.
“Polling places should never run out of ballots,” said Efrain Escobedo, executive liaison for the Los Angeles Country Registrar. “If 2,000 [voters] show up, 2,000 should be able to vote.”
About 30 voters were turned away on Nov. 2 from the on-campus polling station after it ran out of ballots for the third time. Poll clerk Pam Hayes said that only 15 people voted at the station who were registered to vote there.
The rest voted provisionally, where their ballot is put into a provisional ballot envelope with their identification information written on it.
“We weren’t expecting 700 people not registered here,” said Hayes at the time.
Escobedo said that the L.A. registrar’s office has a system set up to ensure that polling stations have supplies.
He added that on-campus polling stations tend to have a high number of provisional voters. He said that the L.A. registrar’s office sent out additional provisional ballot envelopes to polling stations at University of Southern California and University California Los Angeles.
However, the CSULB polling station ran out of ballots, not provisional ballot envelopes. Voters turned away from the polling station wrote their information on the envelopes, so a poll worker could turn it into the registrar’s office for a complaint.
Escobedo added that when registering to vote, voters must put down the address of where they’re living.
Marcia Ventura, spokesperson for the L.A. County Registrar, said that students living on campus are allowed to put down their dorm address when registering.
Ventura said, “If the student considers that to be their primary residence at the time, then they would put that location down.”
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