Los Angeles County’s new voting system encountered a bug that didn’t allow a handful of homeless residents, who could not provide precise addresses, to vote in their local races. It’s not known how widespread the problem is.

A homeless resident in Chatsworth on Monday, March 2, was unable to vote on local candidates in the Los Angeles City Council race, after he used an intersection to indicate where he lives. Advocates say at least three other people faced the same issue.

The Los Angeles County’s voting system is in the midst of a $300 million transformation. Touch-screen voting stations have replaced the old manual, paper-marking devices. And instead of being assigned to neighborhood polling locations, voters can now go to any center in the county, where they can then get their ballots generated based on their home address.

Aaron Brice, 42, who lives along an industrial road and does not have a home address, said he first experienced the problem when he tried to vote on Sunday, at a polling center in a classroom of the Mason Park Recreation Center.

He and advocates who accompanied and transported him said he could not vote in the local 12th district race, in which Councilman John Lee is being challenged by astrophysicist Loraine Lundquist, and a write-in candidate and engineer Asaad Alnajjar.

On Monday, Brice tried again to vote, this time at the Germain Charter Academy voting center. A ballot was again generated using just the cross streets of the intersection near where Brice lives, and again the local council race was missing from the ballot, despite other races showing up.

A reporter from this news group reached out to the county registrar-recorder’s office Monday morning. A spokesman did not respond with an explanation of the situation until nearly 4 p.m., more than an hour after Brice’s second failed attempt to vote in the local race — and most of a day tied up in the process.

The spokesman, Mike Sanchez, said that in such a situation in which a cross street is given, a poll worker should call the registrar recorder’s office to get a precinct number that would produce the correct ballot with the local race

“That is how they check in, and that is how their ballots are identified,” Sanchez said.

It was unclear Monday whether poll workers knew of the remedy at the Germain Charter Academy site. Advocates, who had contacted the registrar-recorder’s office, asked the workers if they knew of a phone number to call if such a scenario occurred, and two workers said they did not.

A little after 4 p.m., one poll worker said he received an email blast from headquarters informing them of a remedy for the glitch. The email included the same phone number he had already been calling.

That poll worker was on the phone from about 2:30 p.m. until 5 p.m., when polls finally closed, attempting to get a resolution on the matter. He was able to get a new precinct number that was meant to produce the correct ballot for Brice, but he still needed to get instructions on how to enter that number. By the end of the day, they were unable to generate the correct ballot for Brice.

Brice and another voter who is homeless stayed in the voter center, as the poll worker spent most of the afternoon talking to registrar recorders officials. Thomas Finnegan also could not cast his ballot and bemoaned having lost a day he could have spent at his work, making and repairing bikes.

Kim Olsen, an advocate for the homeless, summed it up from her point of view: “It’s called disenfranchisement.”

Brice responded that he did not know what might have been happening, but that “disenfranchisement” sounded like “a big fancy word” to him.