Verifying CA's supposed paper trail elections law (Shallow Thoughts)

Verifying CA's supposed paper trail elections law

Our story so far: the nice lady at the Secretary of State's office pointed me to the PDF for Shelley's Diebold decertification as the proof that the upcoming election will allow voters to request a paper ballot. That PDF says that it modifies Division 19, Chapter 1 (commencing with Section 19001) of the Elections Code and Government Code section 12172.5. My goal is to make sure that this hasn't been superceded by subsequent recertification or other lobbying.

First I tried Leginfo, searching the Government and Elections codes for various combinations of the words paper ballot option election machine That gives lots of links (which I need to explore) which don't include 12172.5.

Searches on leginfo, I notice, always return exactly 20 results (two pages of ten), no matter what you search for. Somehow this doesn't give me a feeling of confidence.

To get directly to a numbered law, leave the search field blank to go to the table of contents for Government or Elections. Then wait a while.

It turns out that Government Section 12159-12179.1has nothing to do with voting procedures or technology, and doesn't have a .5. Hmm.

Well, let's try 19001 and see if it's related. Oops, the table of contents skips from 18993 to 19050 (which is something to do with making General Appointments, anyway).

The Election code, on the other hand, skips from 12113 to 12200, missing 12172.

The 19000s of the election code do, finally, seem to relate to the issue of technology used in polling. But nowhere in the 19000s can I find any mention of paper ballots.

A google search of "paper ballot" option on site leginfo-ca-gov returns no hits.

Is leginfo behind? Or was the lady at Shelley's office wrong about that provision still being current?

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 13:09 Oct 08, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]