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Initiative proponents have until the end of April to collect the signatures they need to put their ideas on the ballot — and with millions of Californians staying home, some campaigns won't have time to collect enough signatures. 

California voters may experience a small silver lining amid the coronavirus pandemic: a shorter November ballot, featuring fewer of the statewide propositions that often put voters in the middle of confusing industry fights. 

Initiative proponents have until the end of April to collect the signatures they need to put their ideas on the ballot — and with millions of Californians staying home, and practicing social distancing when they go out, it may be impossible for some campaigns to collect enough signatures in time. 

Many voters in Los Angeles County had to stand in line for hours to vote on Super Tuesday. There were reports of glitchy equipment and confused staff, even though L.A. County was using new touch screen machines that were supposed to make voting faster and more convenient.

Guest: Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation (audio)

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Combined with more than half a million votes that the registrar has received through the mail, that would already represent a 13% turnout for L.A. County, if all the votes cast so far are counted.

The new system has its advantages, says Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation, a voter outreach and research nonprofit. She said there have been bumps as the new system has been rolled out, but called the vote centers “a good fail safe for a place like Los Angeles where we have millions of voters.”

There are nearly a thousand voting centers to choose from, but many longtime polling places won’t be open this year.

I caught up with Alexander while she was driving between vote centers in Watts and Culver City to see how the new system was working.

She said she saw lines growing this morning, which could signal long waits tomorrow.

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Los Angeles County spent nine years working on a government-designed and -owned voting system with the goal of setting a new standard for security, reliability and transparency.

Instead, millions of county voters on Super Tuesday will cast ballots on a system in which numerous security flaws were found. This has prompted some election integrity experts to call for barring the system from elections until they’re fully resolved. The issues include multiple digital and physical vulnerabilities, some of them identified in a recent assessment by California’s secretary of state and others identified by outside computer security experts

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Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit that works to improve the voting process, said the county should be commended for building a publicly owned system, but the delay in disclosing the source code is perplexing.