San Diego, CA — A lawsuit was filed Friday against the county of San Diego alleging that the Registrar of Voters Office didn't follow state law in counting votes for last week's primary election.

Political activist Ray Lutz contends that the 285,000 mail-in and provisional ballots that hadn't been counted by the end of Election Night on June 7 weren't included in a state-mandated manual tally of 1 percent of the ballots. The manual tally is conducted to check for discrepancies in the computer count made that night.

There are two ways to conduct the 1 percent count, and the county of San Diego uses both ballots from polling places and batches of mail-in ballots, according to Lutz. He said the law didn't allow a selection of the leftover 285,000 mail-in ballots and provisionals to be omitted. Lutz told CBS8 that the remaining votes after election night could "swing" the Democrat presidential nomination from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders — even though Clinton had 2,467,824 votes statewide to Sanders' 2,005,113.

"This election could swing from Hillary (Clinton) over to Bernie Sanders — it's about to flip," Lutz said. "We want to make sure that all those provisional votes are counted to make sure that if it is going to flip from Hillary to Bernie, then we want to make sure it's not subverted somehow." Over the past week, county election workers have been counting the provisional and leftover mail-in ballots, and by the end of Thursday, 83,000 remained uncounted. In San Diego County, Clinton had 195,815 votes (53.7 percent) to Sanders' 166,483 votes (45.6 percent).

REAL-TIME RESULTS: San Diego County's 2016 Primary Election

County spokesman Michael Workman told City News Service that he couldn't comment on the particulars of the lawsuit, but added, "We do look forward to being heard in court."



City News Service