Girding for a Botched Vote : Balloting: Memories are vivid of the goof-ups and mismanagement of June’s primary in Amador County. Many are bracing for blunders at the polls Tuesday.

Voters in tiny Amador County, 40 crooked miles southeast of Sacramento, have their fingers crossed, hoping the flurry of mistakes that spoiled last June’s primary election won’t be repeated Tuesday.

Although this Gold Rush county, with only 30,000 residents and about 17,000 registered voters, is one of the smallest in the state, it is often one of the last to report election returns, according to the secretary of state’s office.

In June, the first Amador report was phoned into the secretary of state at 4:59 a.m.--nine hours after the polls closed. But many people think the election was mishandled so badly that it might have been better if no returns had been reported.

Among the blunders were these:

* County Clerk-Recorder Sheldon D. Johnson personally assembled ballot holders incorrectly in four of the county’s 28 precincts, invalidating more than 650 ballots and throwing the race for sheriff into the courts.

* Sample ballots were not mailed until one week before the June 5 election, which meant that most absentee voters never saw sample ballots.

* The count was late because pre-punched cards used in Amador County’s Votamatic system were punched incorrectly and had to be redone before counting could begin, technician Don Baumer said.

* Johnson and his staff counted absentee ballots that arrived after the polls closed, a clear violation of the state election code.

* In a special fire district election, people who were not supposed to vote did so and vice versa, partly because poorly trained precinct workers did not know who was eligible to vote.

* Several people said security was lax in the vote-counting area on election night and that “known campaign workers” mingled with the official vote tabulators.

“Nineteen years in the newspaper business and I haven’t come across anything like this,” said Tom Mauldin, managing editor of the thrice-weekly Amador Ledger Dispatch.

Longtime residents said things haven’t been as exciting in this historic Mother Lode area since Jackson’s notorious house of prostitution was shut down in the 1950s.

“People were livid,” said Virginia LaVielle, who managed the campaign of Ken Blake, the “losing” candidate for sheriff.

After the election, angry residents formed Concerned Citizens for an Accurate Election to try to pressure Johnson, the County Board of Supervisors and the secretary of state into making sure that June’s errors are not repeated in Tuesday’s General Election.

But the early signs do not look good.

Absentee ballots and sample ballots were mailed late again, although not as late as last spring. Some voters have complained that the sample ballots do not adequately explain the complicated statewide measures to be voted on.

There have been reports that the names of candidates appear on the ballot in one supervisorial district where there is no contest but do not appear in a second district where there is a race.

And, most daunting of all to many voters, Johnson has announced that he will dispense with the services of an outside technician and handle the computerized vote-counting equipment himself on election night.

“I’ve done it before, I’m sure it will be all right,” he said. “The only reason I didn’t do it in June was that I was a candidate myself.”

Much of the criticism for the June snafu’s has been directed at the 50-year-old Johnson, who has been County Clerk-Recorder since 1979.

“He is an honest and credible man, but he is incompetent,” LaVielle said. That opinion was expressed in many other interviews.

Johnson blinked a time or two when these criticisms were recited during an interview but didn’t appear to be greatly disturbed.

The county clerk concedes that he made mistakes in June, especially in assembling ballot holders so that votes were recorded for the wrong candidates. He also takes general responsibility for the foul-ups.

“It ends with me,” Johnson said. “I’m in charge of elections, I’m responsible.”

But he placed some of the blame on Western Elections, a Stockton printing company that delivered sample ballots so late that they could not be mailed out before May 29, one week before the election.

Caren Daniels-Meade, chief of elections in the secretary of state’s office, said Western Elections was late in delivering materials to seven counties but that serious voting problems have come to light only in Amador County.

Jake Harvey, president of Western Elections, said: “My election manager resigned at a critical time” on May 21, but that Johnson had assured him in a telephone conversation that the delay would not cause problems.

“His problem is himself, if you ask me,” Harvey said.

Johnson conceded that some absentee ballots were counted even though they arrived after the polls closed, in violation of the state election code.

“I think there were a few,” he said. “Everything was so late--we were trying to give everybody a chance to vote. I know you’re not supposed to do that but we thought it was being fair.”

Frank Halvorson who runs Jackson’s only automobile agency, worries that all the problems will give voters a reason to stay away from the polls.

“We’ve always had a pretty high turnout in this county, but this kind of thing just builds voter apathy,” he said. “When people think their vote doesn’t count, then where are we at? That’s what bothers me.”

So Amador County voters will approach the polls Tuesday with some trepidation, wondering whether the general election will go smoothly or if they will have an opportunity once again to display bumper stickers that read, “Amador County--Famous for Wine, Gold and Recounts.”