NEWSMAKERS

Ballot-Stuffing: Cincinnati financier Carl H. Lindner Jr. skewed results of a USA Today call-in poll to favor real estate mogul Donald Trump, the newspaper said Thursday. The June poll showed that 5,640 of 7,802 calls came from two phone numbers at a subsidiary of Lindner’s American Financial Corp. A spokeswoman for Lindner said Lindner admires Trump’s “entrepreneurial spirit.”

House Report: Lindy Boggs reportedly will not seek reelection to her New Orleans congressional seat. She has been under increasing strain because of the cancer of her elder daughter, Barbara Sigmund, friends of the family say. The daughter is mayor of Princeton, N.J. Boggs, 74, was expected to announce her decision today. Boggs won a special election in March, 1973, to succeed her husband, Hale Boggs, the powerful House majority leader whose plane disappeared over Alaska six months earlier.

Whaddya Bid?: Personal possessions of former billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt--including a ranch, porcelain art figures and a popcorn popper--will be auctioned Saturday. Hunt and brother William Herbert Hunt, who sought bankruptcy protection when their silver fortune collapsed a decade ago, were ordered to sell the goods to pay creditors. Trustee Carter Pate in Westlake, Tex., called the auction “distasteful for all parties involved.”

Fun at Last: Gymnastics is not the same these days for Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton, 22. “Now I perform, I don’t compete, and that makes a real difference,” said Retton, who will be married in December. In Los Angeles, she won a gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics in the all-around competition, the first ever for an American woman gymnast. Now she performs six to eight times a year and travels as a motivational speaker. “When we were practicing for the Olympics, we spent eight hours a day in the gym,” she said in New Orleans. “We were too tired to do anything else.”