ELECTION NOTEBOOK : Sunshine, Basketball Cut Into the Turnout

Barbara Anderson has a keen sense of the significance of politics in the life of the average Californian.

“Voting is the one thing you can do in Los Angeles without having to wait in line,” the Hollywood resident quipped Tuesday.

The disappointing turnout was the lowest for a primary with the governor’s office at stake since the state began keeping count in 1916.

This despite the first chance to vote on an insurance commissioner with the power to set auto insurance rates, nominate the next attorney general and decide whether to raise the gasoline tax.

But then, the election had to compete with beach weather at both ends of the state and the televised first game of the NBA finals in the evening.

“We expect the majority of voters by 7 p.m. because of the basketball playoffs at 6,” said Barbara Pulskamp, precinct officer at a polling place in South Pasadena, where a little more than 100 people out of 661 had voted by 10:30 a.m.

At a poll in Redondo Beach where the turnout is usually high, only 34% of the 465 voters had appeared by the end of the basketball game’s first quarter.

“I think the propositions overwhelmed people,” said precinct supervisor Gertrude Kaessinger. “From what I heard from my friends, people didn’t understand them.”

Orange County Registrar of Voters Donald Tanney said the increasing practice of voting by absentee ballot would raise the turnout some. But he lowered his prediction of a 50% turnout to 40% as the day came to a close.

“I don’t know what this is about,” Tanney said. “I don’t know why people aren’t interested in voting.”

In all, about 12.9 million Californians were registered to vote and barely more than 40% did.

But actually it’s worse than that.

About 19.1 million Californians were eligible to register and vote--that is, they were at least 18 and U.S. citizens, not incarcerated in mental institutions and had not lost their civil rights for being felons.

So only about a third of the state’s eligible population bothered to exercise the right to vote.

Few people endured a longer Election Day than Karen Davis.

She phoned in before 6 a.m. to get her assignment as a polling place coordinator for the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder. First, they kept her on hold for 20 minutes. Then they told her to drop everything and race to Lawndale, where all five volunteers at one poll failed to show.

After dropping her daughter at a day-care center, Davis hustled to Inglewood to pick up poll materials, then steered through South Bay traffic. She managed to open the poll at Leuzinger High School by 8 a.m., an hour later than the law requires.

Davis handled the poll alone all day, sitting inside a small conference room. “I was lucky my sister lives two blocks away from here, because she brought me something to eat,” Davis said Tuesday evening.

By law, the poll couldn’t close without one official witness--in this case, county employee John Dailey, who arrived from San Pedro about 7:30 p.m.

The day wasn’t smooth, either, at the polling place at 907 Knob Hill Ave. in Redondo Beach.

Road crews had the street blocked off to lay asphalt from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. Prospective voters were forced to park around the block and walk past the disruption.

“One of the voters was so ticked off he drove right through the barricade and we could hear him all the way in here . . ., “ said Robert Ruesch, the poll inspector.

The Waltons have been off prime-time television here for years. But Ralph Waite, the family’s rock-solid father, is ever popular in England.

At least, that’s what Jay Rayner says. A reporter for the London Observer, Rayner on Tuesday night wrapped up two weeks of interviews with the actor-turned-politician, who was seeking the Democratic nomination in the 37th Congressional District in Riverside County.

“There seems to be an element in the Ralph Waite race that represents for English audiences something intrinsic about American politics,” Rayner said at a Palm Desert party for Waite. “You know, movie star becomes political star.

“It wasn’t that way with Ronald Reagan because, although he was an actor, no one remembered his films.”

Perhaps they were bidding for a place on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Or maybe just trying to record an increasingly obscure event--Americans voting.

In any case, Richard Reilly was surprised to find a video camera, fixed atop a tripod, taping his coming and going at a poll in the Palms section of Los Angeles.

Reilly said he thought of the security guards that Republicans stationed outside an Orange County poll in 1988, a tactic some said was to discourage Latino voters.

“It may not be malicious, but it sure jangled my nerves,” Reilly said.