Registrar Gave Firm Job Before It Was Bid

Two weeks before a $117,000 project went out to competitive bid, San Diego County Registrar of Voters Ray J. Ortiz told an Escondido firm to begin the job, The Times has learned.

After the bidding, the contract went to Election Data Corp. of Escondido, which was already doing the work.

The contract, formally awarded on June 18, called for the verification of more than 176,000 local signatures on a statewide initiative petition, at a price of 67 cents per name.

But Richard J. Stephens, president of Election Data, said in an interview Thursday that his firm actually began work on the job about June 3.

Stephens said his company already had been doing signature verification work for the registrar’s office on four initiative petitions. On June 2, the secretary of state ordered San Diego County to verify 100% of the signatures on petitions seeking to qualify a medical malpractice initiative for the November ballot. In most cases the registrar verifies only a sample, usually 5% of registered voters.

Stephens said Ortiz asked his firm to verify the signatures on the malpractice initiative while the job was being put out to bid. If the contract had gone to another firm, Stephens said, he was prepared to quit the work in progress and hand it over to the winning bidder.

Stephens said he could not recall how much of the work had been done before his company was officially awarded the contract.

According to county records, Ortiz sent a letter June 16 to the county Purchasing Department, asking that the department seek bids from Election Data and one other firm, then award the job to whichever company bid lower and could do the job in time to meet the June 30 state deadline.

By that time Ortiz described the need to quickly find a contractor to do the project as an “emergency.” The letter didn’t mention that Stephens’ firm already had been doing the job.

Within two days the Purchasing Department had solicited bids from three vendors and received responses from Stephens and handwriting expert Howard C. Doulder of Huntington Beach. Doulder bid 95 cents per signature, 28 cents more than Stephens’ offer.

The third vendor, Election Management Co. run by Lance Gough of La Jolla, declined to bid. At the time Gough already was running the signature verification operation for Stephens.

Stephens’ firm formally won the job and completed it on time.

Ortiz, registrar of voters since 1979, is under criminal investigation by the district attorney’s office for suspected “irregularities” in his handling of contracts with private firms. It is not known whether the contract with Election Data is one of those under investigation.

Ortiz, on leave of absence from his job until the completion of the investigation, did not return calls to his home Thursday. He has declined to discuss the operations of his department in any detail.

In his June 16 letter to the Purchasing Department, Ortiz said he did not have the resources within his department to meet the state’s June 30 deadline.

“Therefore, I request that you contact these possible sources, determine their ability to meet this need, and arrange an award to the contractor who can most cost-effectively meet this emergency in the best interests of the department and San Diego County,” the letter said.

County officials in the registrar’s office and in the purchasing department said they did not know why Ortiz waited until June 16 to send the letter describing the “emergency”--two weeks after the secretary of state ordered the registrar’s office to verify 100% of the malpractice initiative signatures and nearly two weeks after Ortiz had asked Stephens to begin the work.

County policy requires that contracts of more than $25,000 be bid competitively, although it is common practice to seeks bids on contracts as small as $5,000, said William Napier, assistant director of Purchasing and Contracting for the county. Ortiz contends the state election code grants the registrar’s office independent authority to award contracts--that contention is disputed by the purchasing department--but the registrar has in the past gone through the purchasing department on all items costing more than $10,000.

Stephens conceded Thursday that his company’s arrangement with the registrar’s office appeared “peculiar.” But he said it was in the county’s best interest. He said Ortiz would have lost valuable time if he had not allowed Stephens to work on the signatures before the contract went out to bid.

“We had all these people in place and they were working and they knew what they were doing,” Stephens said. “We had weeded out the unsatisfactory ones and we were starting to hum with a pretty good operation.

“This thing (the medical malpractice initiative) broke and you’ve got 30 days to complete it. What do you do? Do you say, ‘We’re going to stop this, we’ve got to go out to bid,’ which is going to take two or three days, and then start the thing up again?

“People can make what they want of it . . . “ he said. “He (Ortiz) is in charge of the shop. He’s got to (decide) does he want to keep going with a whole crew of people in there and not stop this . . . You can look at it any way you want, but that’s what it was.”

Stephens has received more than $300,000 from the county since 1984, when his company, then based in St. Charles, Ill., began doing work for San Diego. Much of Stephens’ work here has involved the assembly of automatic vote recorders, the handling of cardboard voting booths, and other tasks associated with the logistics of putting on elections.

About a year ago, Ortiz contracted with Stephens to verify signatures on petitions for the city of San Diego’s growth management initiative, Proposition A on the November ballot. It was the first time the registrar had contracted with a private firm to verify signatures. Satisfied that the pilot project showed a savings for the county, Ortiz then brought Stephens’ firm back in early June to verify local signatures on four statewide initiatives.

It was while that work was being done that the larger job became available and, eventually, was awarded to Stephens.

Stephens’ wife, Lora, owns Electronic Marketing Co., a firm that has leased computer equipment to the registrar’s office for about $8,000 this year.