Recount of Votes Goes to Sumner : Former Judge to Face Badham in Orange County

Orange County Democratic Party Chairman Bruce Sumner has won the 40th Congressional District’s Democratic primary, a ballot recount showed Friday.

The results remain unofficial. Orange County Registrar of Voters A.E. Olson said that a recheck and certification of the recount would not take place until Monday at the earliest.

But the final recount figures showed Sumner defeating LaRouche Democrat Art Hoffmann by 1,228 votes. Sumner polled 16,401 votes to Hoffmann’s 15,173.

Lawsuit Threatened

The end of the recount in the bitterly fought battle to challenge five-term incumbent Rep. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach) in the Orange County coastal district set the stage for a legal challenge, which Hoffmann said would come Monday.

Sumner called Hoffmann’s threatened action “just another LaRouche-type tactic. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve won the recount and done so by figures that are very impressive.”

Hoffmann and a Los Angeles spokesman for political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche’s National Democratic Policy Committee said that there had been “election fraud.” They said they would be suing the registrar on Monday, seeking a court order to prevent certification of the election.

Safest GOP District

“Morally, I’ve won,” Hoffmann said. “I’m still the certified candidate. I’m still in the race against Bob Badham.”

Either candidate will be an underdog in the contest against Badham, who represents what is regarded as one of the safest Republican districts in the nation.

Hoffmann said he wanted Orange County to begin “a real criminal investigation” into the election.

“Security’s pretty low key over there (at the registrar’s office),” Hoffmann said in a telephone interview from his Santa Ana home. He declined to give examples of any fraudulent votes cast during the election or of fraud during the recount, saying only that his lawyers had evidence.

County Registrar Olson declared: “We don’t have any history of fraudulent elections in Orange County.”

Sumner watched wearily Friday as the last ballots were counted by hand. He said he had already begun raising funds and laying the groundwork for the congressional race against Badham. “Now I’m in the position where I can do so with confidence and say the primary is over,” he declared. A victory celebration for Sumner is planned for Monday night at Tiny’s Restaurant in Santa Ana.

Sumner attorney Frank P. Barbaro said that he was notified Friday morning by Hoffmann attorney Robert Levy that a legal challenge would be filed Monday. Levy could not be reached for comment, but Barbaro said he believed that the registrar’s office, the County of Orange and the State of California would be named as defendants.

Barbaro also said he was told that the suit would claim violations of the federal Civil Rights Act. Asked how civil rights could be involved in the Hoffmann-Sumner race, Barbaro replied, “I can’t imagine.”

The threat of a suit has added a new twist to a congressional race that has been a roller-coaster ride most of the way. Sumner was declared the winner election night, Hoffmann was named the winner several days later and now Sumner is the recount’s unofficial winner. The recount took three weeks and ended more than a month after the June 3 primary election.

Sumner, 61, a retired judge and former state assemblyman, began his longshot write-in campaign against Hoffmann, 30, a technical writer, in late March after Democratic leaders discovered to their embarrassment that the LaRouche follower was the only Democrat to have filed against Badham.

Illinois Winners

In some years, county Democrats would not have worried about a LaRouche candidate, but last spring in Illinois, LaRouche followers caused a furor when two of their candidates won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and secretary of state.

LaRouche, a Leesburg, Va., writer and an announced 1988 presidential candidate, claims to have fielded thousands of candidates for public office around the country this year in an effort to bolster his chances at becoming President. As part of his platform--which such mainstream Democrats as Sumner claim is “bizarre”--LaRouche advocates identification and quarantine of AIDS victims, increased steel production, a laser-beam defense system and eradicating an international drug conspiracy that he says involves Britain’s Queen Elizabeth.

After discovering that Hoffmann had become the party’s standard-bearer by default, Sumner launched a $53,000 write-in effort that many local and state party leaders claimed would be a waste of money and a failure.

Armed with phone banks, mailers and 200 volunteers, Sumner set about to educate Democrats in the three-part write-in process--remembering his name, writing it in correctly on the ballot and then using a punch device to vote for him.

On election night, June 3, an unofficial machine tally of votes showed Sumner the winner by a 1,459-vote margin. Several days later, however, after a hand count from each of the 705 precincts, Hoffmann was declared the official winner by 267 votes. He polled 15,143 votes to 14,876 for Sumner.

Confessions by Workers

County elections officials initially could not explain the disparity between the machine count for Sumner and the hand count for Hoffmann. But over the next few days, two precinct workers told The Times that they had been instructed not to count any write-in votes on election night, and several voters said they had been prevented from writing in their votes.

Hoffmann’s and Sumner’s supporters have also theorized that some election workers were either confused about write-in procedures or too tired to count the write-in votes correctly. And Sumner angrily complained that some precinct workers had written “None” (no write-ins) across their reports, although subsequent machine counts showed many write-in votes.

Citing “voting irregularities,” Sumner on June 9 called for a recount. The new hand count of all Democratic congressional ballots by the registrar’s most experienced precinct workers began June 19 and has cost Sumner $500 a day. The money is to be refunded to him if the certified results show him the winner.

Throughout the recount, observers for both Hoffmann and Sumner complained of problems with write-in procedures. At some precincts, ballots were not sealed and sometimes more Democrats apparently voted than were listed on the roster sheet for that precinct, Hoffmann observer Maureen Pike said.

Sumner gained from several dozen to 100 votes over Hoffmann every day of the recount. But he complained that Registrar Olson did not allow at least 2,000 votes that were clearly meant for him. Some of those involved ballots where the name Bruce Sumner was written in the proper place, but the voter failed to punch the ballot with the proper device, either not punching it at all or poking a hole in the ballot with a pencil.

Sumner also complained that election workers were poorly trained and that they should have been shown a videotape on write-in procedures before June 3. Election officials, however, say that their precinct workers counted votes as best they could, and nothing could have prevented the disparities in voting tallies.

Asked Friday if the registrar’s office could have done anything differently, Rosalyn Lever, the registrar’s chief of election operations, said firmly, “No.”

Lever said that precinct workers received a half-hour slide presentation on procedures before the election and received verbal instructions at the precincts on election day.

The problems were unavoidable, human ones, she said, pointing out, “It’s a long day, a long time to work” on election day. Precinct workers must start at 6:30 a.m., a half-hour before the polls open, close their polls at 8 p.m. and then count write-in votes after that, she said. Some poll workers “may have been too critical” about accepting misspellings of Sumner’s name, Lever said, but added: “I think we’ve done a good job.”

Election officials Friday said that they were delighted that the recount was over and that they could again devote their attention to preparing for November’s general election. But when the last absentee ballot was counted at about 2 p.m. Friday, “there was no hoopla,” Olson said. “We just looked at each other.”

Sumner’s seven observers did not realize for a moment that the recount had finally ended, according to Audrey Redfearn, his campaign finance chairman. “Then all of a sudden we were cheering,” she said. She said Hoffmann’s observers sat quietly at their table “looking glum.”

It took another two hours to wrap up the recount by going through the “challenges,” a time-consuming process in which Sumner’s advocates, Hoffmann’s advocates, and Olson and his staff scrutinized the questioned ballots one by one, with Olson the final judge on whether those ballots should count.

At 4:15 p.m. Friday, as three Hoffmann observers left the registrar’s office, they acknowledged that the recount went against their candidate. Still, they spoke cheerfully of his prospects. There was still the lawsuit Monday, one said. “It’s not over yet.”