Schools Seek Investigation Into Lost Election Mailing : Lancaster: Flyers for a bond issue, taken to the post office at least a week before the election, were returned to surprised school officials with no explanation.

Angry Lancaster School District officials are seeking a federal investigation of why voters failed to receive at least 7,000 campaign mailers supporting the district’s $47-million school bond measure, which was defeated by a small margin in the April 10 election.

Last week, Lancaster postal officials returned the mailers to surprised school officials with no explanation. The mailers were taken to the post office at least a week before the election, school officials said.

“I’m to the point where, considering all I’ve heard, I think they could have made the difference,” said Ed Goodwin, the district’s interim superintendent. The district’s Board of Trustees voted Tuesday night to seek a federal investigation of the mix-up.

School district officials and campaign leaders also said they believe that thousands of other pieces of their campaign mail were either delivered late or not at all.

“This is no coincidence, in my opinion. It’s an act of sabotage,” said Rowland King, the district’s assistant superintendent.

While postal officials dismissed the charge, they said they were trying to determine what went wrong. A postal service spokesman said the situation may have resulted from improper labeling of the bags by the measure’s supporters.

The ballot measure, known as Measure A, would have raised property taxes within the school district to pay for new schools. It fell 570 votes short of the two-thirds margin needed for passage. A total of 8,339 votes were cast on the issue, 59.8% for and 40.2% against.

Kent Price, the political consultant who ran the bond measure campaign for the district, said he had been considering a legal challenge of the election because of problems with the mail. But by Wednesday, Price said he did not expect to pursue that.

“There’s nothing we can do at this point,” Price said. “We really don’t have any legal recourse.” Similarly, election officials in the secretary of state’s office said mail problems, which do occur sometimes in campaigns, are not a legal cause for contesting election outcomes.

John Conte, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service headquarters in Van Nuys, said postal officials believe that the campaign mail got waylaid because it was not given a red tag designating it as political mail for priority delivery. Conte said that is the sender’s responsibility.

But Conte said postal officials in Lancaster apparently have no records of having accepted the undelivered campaign mail, consisting of two different flyers. He said workers at the Lancaster post office first found the wayward bundles the day after the election.

Price said the bags containing the mailers, which came from a private mass-mailing firm in Kentucky, had been properly marked with the red tags.

“We’re pretty much convinced had the mail program worked properly, we would have been successful on Election Day,” Price told the school board.

Even if it won’t change the outcome of the election, school officials said, they still want an investigation to determine what happened and to prevent it from happening again. The request for an investigation will be sent to the area’s congressman, Rep. William M. Thomas (R-Bakersfield). Thomas was unavailable for comment.