Californian exclusive: More voting boundary goofs emerge
| Thursday, Aug 05 2010 07:00 PM
Last Updated Thursday, Aug 05 2010 07:00 PM
The Michael Rubio boundary problem isn't the only one out there.
There are at least two other instances in Bakersfield -- one affecting hundreds of voters -- where people have been unknowingly casting ballots in the wrong school district or city ward for years.
The discrepancies were brought to The Californian's attention after the revelation in late June that Kern County Supervisor Michael Rubio didn't live in the state senate district Democratic voters had just nominated him to represent.
Rubio has since moved into the 16th Senate District and nobody has officially challenged his right to stay in the race.
The boundary problems in part stem from government being in a slow, tedious transition from paper maps to interactive computer mapping systems that allow users to tailor geographic data to their needs.
But, for the most part, the mistakes are born out of simple human error.
Elections officials are trying to fix the two new problems forwarded to them by the newspaper -- and to find other potential problems.
SCHOOL HAZE
In 1999, the boundary line between the Fruitvale and Rosedale elementary school districts was changed to accommodate new housing. The Kern County Committee on School District Organization signed off on a new boundary line and the Kern County Board of Supervisors approved it with a routine vote.
But sometime after that vote, the exact location of the boundary was blurred by the lack of a detailed map and a bad reading of the line's legal description, which was written in complex surveyor-speak.
When Kern County elections officials looked for the right place to put a voting precinct boundary in the area, they pulled the best information available -- and got it wrong, said Registrar of Voters Karen Rhea.
So for nearly a decade, voters in the Polo Grounds development west of Calloway Drive lived in one school district and voted in another.
Rhea said the fact the Rosedale and Fruitvale school district boundaries overlap inside a single voting precinct throws a small cloud over a Fruitvale School District board election held in 2002.
Fruitvale Trustee Kevin Burton narrowly edged out candidate Abel Hernandez for one of three seats on the board by 36 votes. But Rhea said only 21 Rosedale voters cast ballots in the Fruitvale election that year -- not enough to change the results.
In the other three school board elections, she said, the margin of victory was even larger. And a 2006 vote on Measure C, a $29.8 million Fruitvale school bond, would likely still have been approved, Rhea said.
BLURRED LINES
It hasn't been easy to fix the Polo Grounds problem and return voters to the right school district. No one seemed to know for sure where the line that split the two districts between Hageman and Noriega roads actually was.
Maps developed by the Kern County Superintendent of Schools office, based on legal survey descriptions of the school districts in 1999, showed the line cut through the area 1/4 mile west of Calloway Drive.
Kern County Engineering, Surveying and Permit Services officials incorporated the Superintendent of Schools map into their "graphical information system" -- an online map crammed with layers of information from political boundaries and tract maps to roads and tax areas.
And Rosedale adopted the line into maps it hands out to the public.
Unfortunately the line was wrong. It was actually one-eighth mile further west.
County surveyors went back to the legal description at the request of The Californian and confirmed the mistake, said Engineering, Surveying and Permit Services Director Chuck Lackey.
Once the right line was determined, Rhea said, the county created a new voting precinct and made sure the right voters lived in the right place.
CITY MISTAKE
That's not the only rough spot in Kern County's political lines.
There is also a spot where the boundary line between two Bakersfield City Council wards knifes through the middle of a voting precinct just west of where Coffee Road and Brimhall Road intersect.
Rhea said the line mixup happened in 2006 because the county elections division was doing some precinct cleanup work in the area at the same time the city of Bakersfield was using the old precincts to redraw ward boundaries.
The result? Some Ward 5 voters voted in the Ward 4 election in 2008, Rhea said.
The slip up didn't call any elections into question because both Ward 4 Councilman David Couch and Ward 5 Councilman Harold Hanson ran unopposed in the only election held since the mistake, she said.
To fix the problem, the county has been forced to move the precinct registration of more than 423 voters from Ward 4 to 5.
MAPPING A PATH FORWARD
There are many reasons for these boundary problems, say the custodians of government's geographical data.
First, maps are drawn and databases compiled by fallible human beings. That is compounded by the fact multiple government agencies keep geographical data in different forms and Kern County's cities, school districts and special agencies are in the middle of an incomplete transition from old, paper-based mapping systems to computerized geographic systems.
Geographic information systems -- GIS for short -- store large volumes of map layers that can be used to quickly craft a custom map that shows, for instance, how school district boundaries, voting precincts and tax areas fit together.
"Some cities are very cutting edge in GIS," said city of Bakersfield Information Services Director Bob Trammell. "You have other cities in the county that don't use GIS at all."
The city creates maps of basic geographical data in the metropolitan area -- such as parcel maps and streets -- and shares that information with the county of Kern, he said. The county includes the information in its online mapping system.
But the city's maps don't extend beyond the metro area -- leaving maps of other cities to those cities or the county. And the city doesn't create or maintain political information like voting precincts or state and federal political boundaries, Trammell said.
Karin Mac Donald, director of the Statewide Database at the University of California, Berkeley, maintains the official database of California's legislative boundaries.
She said GIS is pulling the obscure world of "meets and bounds" -- the legal descriptions that describe human geography -- out of musty government map rooms and making it truly public.
"It sorts information into a form people can understand," she said.
That, county elections chief Rhea said, is a double-edged sword.
Government errors -- which can be painful for agencies when they get high-profile coverage like in the Rubio case -- are far more obvious now that anyone can pull them up on an electronic map.
But with more eyes looking at the situation, there is a greater chance of errors being found and fixed.
"Ultimately some good will come of it because it has brought some light on the fractured system," Rhea said.
Trammell and Mac Donald both said good, well-integrated technology will drastically improve the quality of information available to government.
But errors will never totally be eliminated because people make mistakes.
"I wish I could come to the conclusion that GIS could save the world," Mac Donald said.
