Ballot Recount Ordered in 10th District Council Race

A recount of votes in Los Angeles’ hotly contested 10th City Council District was ordered Thursday after candidate Geneva Cox claimed that ballots were incorrectly tallied, costing her a place in the June 2 runoff.

Cox, who finished third behind former state Sen. Nate Holden and Homer Broome Jr., challenged the semiofficial count, which had her finishing 439 votes behind the second-place Broome in Tuesday’s election.

Because no candidate received a majority in the race, the two top finishers go into the runoff. A recount giving second place to Cox would put her instead of Broome into the June race against Holden.

“The ballots were counted inaccurately,” said Cox, a former field deputy to Councilman David Cunningham, whose resignation last fall left the 10th District seat vacant.

No Illegalities Charged

In petitioning City Clerk Elias Martinez for a recount, Cox did not charge any illegalities during the counting of ballots for the Southwest area seat but asserted that “votes cast . . . for Geneva Cox in certain precincts were not credited to Geneva Cox in the tabulation of ballots.”

In the city’s semiofficial results, which will not be certified until 14 days after the election, Cox was shown to have 2,647 votes of the more than 19,400 ballots cast. Broome tallied 3,086 votes for second place while Holden led the field of 13 candidates with 4,085.

In her petition, Cox said a “reliable source . . . had observed an employee of the city clerk’s office at the computer tabulation center remove a box of sealed ballots from the restricted computer tabulation area” before the ballots were counted Tuesday evening.

She told reporters Thursday that the box was returned but suggested that ballots could have been removed. When she was pressed on whether she thought ballots had been stolen, her husband and campaign manager, Jim Cox, interjected and said: “No, what we think is that there was a tricky count.”

Bernard Barrett, head of the city clerk’s election division, and another election official from the city clerk’s office, Joe Giles, said they were present on election night and were unaware of any such incident involving a ballot box.