Voter Registrar to Quit After 17 Years of Terrible Tuesdays

For 17 years, Al Olson’s bad days have been Tuesdays. Not every Tuesday, just special Tuesdays, usually one in June and another in November: Election days.

Olson is Orange County’s registrar of voters, the man who draws up the voting lists, receives financial contribution statements from candidates and, above all, runs the elections.

A white-haired, craggy-faced man with a calm voice and a ready smile, Olson joined the registrar’s office in 1970 and became registrar in 1976. He will turn 70 on Tuesday and plans to leave office Aug. 28.

“I will say we’re going to miss him and it’s going to be tough to fill his shoes,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Roger R. Stanton said of Olson. In Sacramento, Deborah Seiler agreed.

Seiler, head of the elections division in the secretary of state’s office, called Olson “one of the most competent and cooperative registrars in the state. He will be very much missed by his colleagues and this office.”

Both Stanton and Seiler were involved in the election Olson remembers as his worst, in June of 1980.

The previous year the supervisors had spent $1.5 million on a new voting system, replacing the old paper ballots with a new machine and cardboard ballots that were marked with pens, plus assorted computer hardware and software.

Olson had recommended that the system not be purchased. So had other county staff members.

“We were concerned prior to election night that things were not going well,” Olson remembered in an interview last week. “On election night it became apparent we were having troubles.”

Glitches in the system delayed the vote count for an incredible four days, a state record for slowness.

“We finally got the semiofficial vote count on Saturday, after a Tuesday election day,” Olson said. “Yes, that was my worst election day.”

Stanton ran for supervisor for the first time that year. When the votes were counted he came out on top and went on to win the November runoff, beating incumbent Philip Anthony.

“The problems, I don’t think--in vote counting--were ever his,” Stanton said of Olson. “The old system, when I was elected to this job, was one that Al Olson had voted against. . . . To his credit, he was right then.

“Despite the fact he didn’t like the equipment, he was able to work with it. This new board of the ‘80s has respected his advice and guidance.”

Both the county and Seiler’s office investigated the slow count. Officials with the secretary of state’s office threatened the equipment’s manufacturer with decertification of its machines, which would have barred the machines in California elections. But Olson said the manufacturer “made a number of changes,” and the system “did considerably better” in November.

Another Change

Still, in 1985 the county switched to yet another new system.

Despite the millions of dollars spent on new equipment, Orange County still traditionally winds up near the bottom when counties are ranked on quickness of reporting election results, Seiler said.

Her records show that in the June, 1986, primary Orange County was the 57th of the state’s 58 counties to report results from all precincts. That election was complicated by the presence of a write-in candidate for a congressional seat in the Democratic primary.

Bruce Sumner, former county Democratic Party chairman, aimed his write-in candidacy to keep Democrat Art Hoffmann, a supporter of extremist Lyndon R. LaRouche, off the November ballot. Sumner’s success was so close that it sparked a recount lasting weeks and ultimately wound up in court.

But in November, with no recount and no special problems, the county still ranked 56th of 58 counties in reporting its results.

Some state officials said the county’s problems with slowness are not going to be solved until the voting equipment is changed.

“Arguably, the last two systems that Orange County has had have not been of the type that would enable rapid ballot counting,” Seiler said. Other large counties use just one voting card in an election, regardless of how many candidates or propositions are on the ballot. Orange County uses several.

“For a county the size of Orange, that may be a good system in a lot of respects,” Seiler said. “But when you have a multiple card system, given the number of registered voters they have, it can be very slow.”

Olson said Orange County is “the only large county that uses a multicard system. When you have five or six cards per voter, it just takes longer to get the (counting) job done.”

He said installation of more card-reading machines would quicken the count but would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time when the county is already strapped for cash.

Olson is paid $60,000 a year for supervising a staff of nearly 60 with a budget of more than $4 million. He is known for working 60 hours a week or more and having assistants who work equally long hours.

Born in Corvallis, Ore., Olson earned an electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University before going to work for RCA in Camden, N.J.

Unable to join the military in World War II because a broken hip as a teen-ager had left him with a pronounced limp, he joined the merchant marine and became a radio operator on tankers in the Atlantic and Pacific.

After the war, he joined Douglas Aircraft Co., where he met his wife, Helen. He then worked for a computer company when that industry was in its infancy. He joined National Cash Register Co. when it bought the computer firm. In 1960, he joined the Norden division of United Aircraft Corp., which sent him to Orange County to help develop a vote-scanning system that eventually was bought by the county.

Olson moved to McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach in 1965. Next, he wound up on the registrar of voters staff in Orange County in 1970, helping to organize and prepare for elections. Six years later he became registrar.

Olson is an avid ham radio operator. Each Sunday he arises at 1:30 a.m. and drives to Anaheim, where he operates a radio station in a Rockwell International recreation center. He raises U.S. military personnel in South Korea, Japan and the Philippines on a radio link to Anaheim and patches them onto a telephone link to their families across the United States.

He has been doing that since 1970 and said he has no plans to change his pattern when he retires.

Olson said that over the years he has gotten along with the county’s supervisors “reasonably well.”

“You level with people,” he said. “You level with people all the time, and it eventually works out all right.”