At Santa Clarita Polls, Confusion Is Commonplace

The breakdown of voting equipment, consolidation of precincts and several last-minute mailings by opponents of cityhood created widespread confusion Tuesday among voters in the Santa Clarita Valley.

At the City of Santa Clarita Formation Committee headquarters in Saugus, volunteers answered telephone queries throughout the day from people who did not know where to cast their votes.

“Some people didn’t receive sample ballots telling them where to vote,” said formation committee member Jill Klajic. “Others had their polling place changed.”

Loose Pages

Of 40 polling places in the area, about half reported problems with pages coming loose from election ballots, causing voters to wait in line for long periods. Elderly voters at the Friendly Valley senior citizens’ complex in Newhall waited as long as an hour before they were able to mark their ballots.

The problem with the ballots caused many voters to believe they had cast their votes for the wrong candidate among the 25 running for seats on the five-member City Council. It also led some candidates to discuss legal challenges to the election.

But, in late afternoon, Alfred Duron, a trouble-shooter for the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office, demonstrated for cityhood proponents that it was impossible to punch into the wrong places.

“There’s no way this ballot could get out of alignment,” he said. A metal strip that held the ballots in place loosened, causing pages to fall out of the ballot, Duron said.

“We’ve been repairing them as fast as we can,” he said. “Actually, all it takes is a strip of tape to hold it in.”

After Duron’s demonstration at a Sand Canyon polling place, Connie Worden, city formation committee spokeswoman, said she is satisfied that there was no illegal tampering with the ballots.

“It was either a case of human error or mechanical error,” she said.

Duron said the county has had similar problems in the past, but never so widespread as in the Santa Clarita Valley.

At Rio Vista School in Canyon Country, precinct worker Helen Taylor said she had to shut five of seven voting booths because of the ballot snafu.

“At 7:15 a.m., these machines started breaking down,” she said. “The pages started coming out of them. I called the registrar’s office. They finally got someone here to fix them at noon.”

No Pages Missing

Taylor said she caught one voter trying to confiscate one of the pages. “But I stopped her,” she said. “None of our pages are missing.”

Adding to voters’ confusion were several last-minute mailings from cityhood opponents that listed the wrong polling places.

Organizations backed by developers spent thousands of dollars to fight the creation of the city of Santa Clarita from the booming communities of Canyon Country, Newhall, Valencia and Saugus. Voters have been deluged with anti-cityhood mailings almost daily during the last two weeks.

“I think I got five of them in one day,” said one resident.

Worden was specially bothered by one hand-delivered, unsigned flyer that listed names of 24 City Council candidates and implied that among them were a convicted child molester and someone who had been arrested for driving under the influence of narcotics.

“Are you sure that all of these people are honest and have the best interest of the community in mind?” the flyer asked. It did not directly connect the wrongdoing to individual candidates, and it omitted the names of two candidates and listed one who dropped out of the race in August.

‘Dirty Politics’

“I just think that’s dirty politics,” Worden said. “It’s probably libelous. At the very least, it’s in bad taste. They know very well we don’t have time to respond to these ridiculous charges.”

Candidate Kenneth Dean said he is going to contact his attorney about filing a lawsuit after the election. “I take it personally,” he said.

Adding to the day’s confusion, the registrar’s office, anticipating a low voter turnout, consolidated several precincts into one polling place, Klajic said.

“A lot of people had to vote at unfamiliar voting places,” she said. “There was a lot of confusion, especially among the seniors.”