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Voters in Los Angeles and Orange counties are trying out something new: Vote Centers.

Instead of traditional neighborhood polling places, these centers let voters cast a ballot in-person at any location in the county -- as many as 11 days prior. Early returns show that more than 200,000 people in L.A. County have already used the new centers to cast a ballot, Mike Sanchez of the LA County Registrar-Recorder’s told me.

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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.”

Kim Alexander is president of the California Voter Foundation (CVF), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization she re-founded in 1994 and dedicated to improving the voting process to better serve voters, online at www.calvoter.org. CVF is a longtime leader in advancing the responsible use of technology in the democratic process, by pioneering online voter education, online campaign finance disclosure, and voter-verified paper ballot records and auditing requirements for computerized voting systems.

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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.

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The sudden retreat of Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Tom Steyer ahead of Super Tuesday has left many Californians who voted early grappling with loss – and regret.

“I was heartbroken,” said Andrea McNew, 44, who had been volunteering for the Buttigieg campaign in San Diego, California. “But I know it’s a tough road to the presidency,” she added. “So we’re working through it”.

McNew was one among an estimated 4 million Californians who mailed in their ballots before the South Carolina results were reported. Based on voting data and polling, about 800,000 Californians likely voted for Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Steyer, according to Paul Mitchell, whose campaign research firm, Political Data Inc, tracks ballots as they are returned. Although many Super Tuesday states allow early voting, California, which has the most delegates to award, has most enthusiastically encouraged it.