Report: Tallying Ballots for the 2nd KPFK Local Station Board Election. 12/4/2004

Pacifica Radio is governed by local and national boards which are elected (directly and indirectly, respectively) by its listener-supporters. Pacifica held its second Local Station Board (LSB) elections in November, with its last votes being tallied today, December 6th. There are five Pacifica stations throughout the United States, each of which held a separate election for its LSB.

This submission is on-location video report on the process of tallying ballots and other election-related issues for Pacifica's Los Angeles radio station KPFK's second Local Station Board (LSB) elections. All KPFK ballots were tallied on 12/4/2004 in Los Angeles at a location known locally as the Peace Center, and this report was recorded at that event.

The report includes interviews with Pacifica National Election Supervisor Kenny Mostern, KPFK's Election Supervisor Mary Rosendale, and volunteers helping to count ballots on-site. It also shows and explains the process of scanning and processing ballots, including an interview with the lead contractor retained to assist Pacifica in that process.

It is recommended that you use the RM link to download the file, as the streaming links do not appear to work on this site. Playing this report requires the RealVideo player, which can be downloaded free from www.real.com if you do not already have it.

Election results were not available at the time this video was made, but have since been reported as follows:

Listener-elected LSB Members:

Kimberly King
Terry Goodman
Bill Gallegos
Lamont Yeakey
Israel Feuer
Reza Pour
Grace Aaron
Lydia Brazon
Arturo Lemus

Staff-elected LSB Members:

Maria Armoudian
Margaret Prescod
Rodrigo Argueta

Note that although the two volunteers interviewed in the video reported seeing very few write-in votes on ballots that they processed, one of the write-in candidates, Arturo Lemus, did receive sufficient votes to be elected, indicating that the ballots processed by these volunteers might not have been typical. It is also possible that if the majority of people voted for only one or two candidates (as reported by the volunteers), and these were largely the same several candidates, that some candidates could have been elected based upon very few actual votes, as many ballots for these favored candidates might have ended up as "surplus" and hence discarded after only a fraction of them was used to elect the candidates in question. We will have a better idea of this once the actual output of the STV tallying process (showing all steps in the computation of the winners) is released.