CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : ATTORNEY GENERAL : It Might Be Next Week Before Race Is Decided

With more than 200,000 absentee ballots still to be counted and Democrat Arlo Smith leading Republican Dan Lungren by fewer than 29,000 votes, the race for state attorney general remained too close to call Wednesday.

Final results in the bitterly fought campaign might not be available until next week, campaign and election officials predicted.

Apparently fearing Lungren could still wind up on top, the Smith camp immediately raised questions of possible absentee-voter fraud, thus raising the specter that the election of the state’s chief legal official could be decided in court.

“They could personally argue their own cases,” joked Smith’s weary campaign manager, Marc Dann.

With all 26,060 precincts across the state reporting, 11-year San Francisco Dist. Atty. Smith clung to a 46.7% to 46.3% margin--Smith winning 3,144,565 votes to Lungren’s 3,115,729. But former five-term congressman Lungren appeared cautiously optimistic of overtaking Smith as the absentee ballots, which traditionally tilt toward Republican candidates, are slowly counted.

Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties alone have at least 200,000 absentee ballots to count. State election officials said the statewide total of uncounted ballots could be as high as 500,000.

In Los Angeles County, more than 100,000 absentees will be checked “one by one” during the county’s election canvass, according to spokeswoman Henrietta Willis. The canvass, she said, begins today and could take three weeks to complete.

As the extreme closeness of the race became apparent, Smith’s campaign lawyer, Neil Eisenberg, issued a statement Wednesday calling on state officials to investigate possible vote fraud.

“In their zealous efforts to register voters,” Eisenberg said, “Republicans crossed the line and may have broken the law. Republicans apparently signed up citizens to vote by absentee ballot without those citizens’ knowledge or consent. This is a flagrant and serious violation of the law.”

To back up the claim, Eisenberg and Dann cited scattered reports that voters in Southern California counties received absentee ballots they never requested. Eisenberg said the Smith camp would monitor the absentee count in Southern California counties to help ensure that the signatures on absentee ballots were the same as those on absentee ballot applications. The Smith campaign also opened a toll-free hot line for other voters to register similar complaints.

But Conny McCormack, registrar of voters in San Diego, where the Smith camp cited problems, said Wednesday: “We didn’t see any abnormalities at all.”

And California Republican Party spokesman Dan Schnur asserted that the state GOP--which mailed out an unprecedented 6.5-million absentee ballot applications to party members--was careful to instruct absentee voters to sign their own ballot applications.

“Smith’s charges are absolutely ludicrous,” Schnur said. “Theoretically, we could hire a platoon of handwriting analysts and soothsayers to look into this further. But I’m not sure to what end.

“If this is the best Arlo Smith can come up with, then you can stick a fork in him because he’s done.”

Lungren campaign officials, citing the “extraordinarily large number of absentee ballots,” urged the offices of the secretary of state and governor to take “special care . . . to ensure the integrity of the election process.”

The contentious nature of the post-election jockeying was in keeping with the negative campaigning that marked the race to succeed outgoing prosecutor John K. Van de Kamp.

Smith, who frequently criticized Lungren’s lack of prosecutorial experience, also proved a master of hyperbole, concluding his final Los Angeles speech last Sunday with the statement: “My opponent has the worst record in Congress. He’s against everybody and everything.”

Lungren, who repeatedly lambasted Smith’s prosecutorial record, also went so far during the campaign as to dredge up a widely reported 1982 incident in which Smith and an aide spent a weekday afternoon drinking at a succession of North Beach bars.

The candidates both spouted tough anti-crime rhetoric, but were like night and day on other issues. Lungren, 44, is a staunch abortion opponent and favors offshore oil drilling on a case-by-case basis. Smith strongly favors abortion rights and was endorsed by all of the state’s leading environmental organizations.

A Los Angeles Times exit poll showed that Smith captured the female vote, 49% to 44%, while Lungren won male voters by the same margin. Smith also took the Jewish, blue-collar, liberal and high school dropout vote, while Lungren was the winner among Protestants, business managers and conservative voters.

Candidates from the Libertarian and Peace and Freedom parties earned 466,000 votes combined.