Election’s Over but Not for Absentee Ballot Counters

Governor-elect Pete Wilson is appointing his transition team. Dianne Feinstein is licking her wounds. And political pundits are already looking ahead to the 1992 presidential election, in which both of California’s U.S. Senate seats will be up for grabs.

But on a sunbaked Saturday morning in the City of Commerce, more than 80 employees of the absentee voter section of the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office were still plugging away, continuing their count of absentee ballots from Tuesday’s election.

“We’ve been working since the end of September,” sighed section head Steve Logan. “We haven’t been off since then. I don’t even know anymore how many weeks that is.”

With a strong push from the Republican and Democratic parties, absentee balloting has never been so popular in California.

Statewide, an estimated one in five voters mailed in their completed ballots or dropped them off at polling places on Election Day. In Los Angeles County alone, more absentees were cast this fall--more than 250,000--than the total number of ballots cast last week in either Delaware, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming or South Dakota.

Without question, voting at home is a convenience for those who prefer not to wait in line at the polls. But the arduous task of tabulating those ballots is a logistical nightmare for Logan and his counterparts in 57 other counties throughout the state.

In Los Angeles and other large metropolitan areas, officials say the absentee count may not be completed for at least five more days. Until then, the final outcome will likely remain uncertain in the race for state attorney general, in which Democrat Arlo Smith holds a razor-thin 28,000-vote lead over Republican Dan Lungren. Statewide, as many as 300,000 to 500,000 absentees were still being tabulated. On Saturday morning, Logan and his staff, most of them temporary employees, were busy examining some of those ballots--one by one--to guard against fraud.

Valerie Barrera, dressed in a Jon Bon Jovi sweat shirt, sat at a computer optics terminal, comparing signatures on absentee envelopes to those on voter registration cards.

The state-of-the-art procedure, in which Barrera used a nine-digit code to punch up video images of the registration signatures, is far speedier than the old-fangled method of poring over microfilm records. But it remains a time-consuming process, with each worker capable of checking a maximum 1,500 signatures daily.

“The only way for the absentee ballots to be counted more quickly,” Logan emphasized, “is for people to get them in here at least a week before the election.”

At the other end of the warehouse-sized office, Sarah Leonard thumbed through absentee envelopes dropped off at polls across the county Tuesday. State election law says the ballots can be returned to any polling place, but they must be delivered by close relatives or the voters themselves, except in emergency situations.

Leonard set aside dozens of ballots in which the deliverers did not signify their relationship to the voter. They will not be counted.

On a table nearby were 13,000 absentees that have been ruled invalid. These were mail-in ballots that did not arrive at the registrar’s office until after the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day.

Some bore Los Angeles and Marina del Rey postmarks from as early as Nov. 1 or 2. Unfortunately, said Logan, the state election code says the delivery time, and not the postmark, is what counts.

“There’s nothing we can do under the law,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate situation.”

U.S. Postal Service spokesman Larry Dozier could not explain the delivery delay.

“I’m sorry that it did happen and I’ll bring it to our operations people and see if we can find out what happened,” Dozier said.

With political party observers monitoring the ballot count, the absentee staff will continue their overtime work today and on Veteran’s Day on Monday.

The Smith campaign has raised questions of possible absentee vote fraud, charging that the Republican Party may have signed up voters throughout the state for absentee ballots without their consent.

But Logan said he has received few complaints from Los Angeles voters, although he conceded that his staff no longer compares the signatures on absentee ballot applications with those on the completed absentee ballots.

“This was the first election we have not done it,” he said. “But the California election code allows us to do it this way and it’s more cost effective.”

Logan, whose staff processed 134,000 absentee ballots before Election Day, is hoping to have the remaining 130,000 to 140,000 ballots tabulated by Friday.

But due to a federal court ruling Thursday, they won’t rest easy even then.

Next month, they must begin mailing out absentee ballots for a special Board of Supervisors election in January to replace retiring Supervisor Pete Schabarum.

“Maybe someone will get 51%,” said the weary but hopeful Logan. “Then (at least) we won’t have to worry about a runoff.”