Torres, Molina Push to the Last Minute : Turnout: Volunteers work hard to get out the vote. Some prospective backers are called several times before polls close.

At the campaign headquarters of state Sen. Art Torres, there was no time to mince words. In less than nine hours, the polls would close.

“Use guilt. You can beg,” organizer Cathy Keig urged a rapt group of two dozen volunteers. “Do whatever you have to, to let people know how important it is to get out and vote.”

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina’s forces were charged with an equally urgent task Tuesday, as the campaign for the 1st District seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors got down to the serious business of getting voters to the polls.

Success or failure in the historic election hung in the balance, both sides agreed.

“Until they can tell us that they have voted, we will not let them go,” said Alma Martinez, Molina’s campaign manager. “That’s the difference between winning and losing--getting out the vote.”

Supporters papered the district with door hangers, while sound trucks shooed voters out of their doors in key neighborhoods. Both campaigns offered rides to the polls.

Hundreds of volunteers took pains to make sure that their supporters knew where to vote. Many voters were confused in the Jan. 22 primary because the county registrar of voters had consolidated 736 voting places into 371, a common practice in low turnout special elections.

“It was a royal nightmare on (primary) Election Day,” Martinez recalled, because some people went to their customary polling place, unaware that it had been moved. “This time we go out of our way to let them know where their polling place is.”

With a low turnout expected, volunteers concentrated on those already committed to their candidate. For many households, that meant three or four telephone calls or home visits by the time the polls closed at 8 p.m.

As forces were mobilized in the final hours of the campaign, the Torres camp boasted a bigger army of volunteers, with 1,200 to Molina’s 400. Nearly half of Torres’ workers came from the Service Employees International Union and other unions.

Torres used his numerical advantage to send at least one poll monitor to virtually all of the district’s voting places--from East Los Angeles to outlying communities such as City of Industry, Irwindale and Santa Fe Springs. Using lists of known supporters in each precinct, volunteers checked to see who had voted, then walked to the homes of others to urge them to the polls.

Plenty of workers were left to operate the 200 telephones at six phone banks around the district, said Torres campaign consultant David Townsend.

With smaller numbers, Molina focused poll monitors at just 70 of her highest-priority precincts in urban communities such as Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights and Pico Rivera, which provided much of her base when she won the primary with 35% of the vote.

About 200 more volunteers were held in reserve to be directed at the end of the day to neighborhoods where the vote lagged, Martinez said.

“This is not done willy-nilly,” Martinez said. “Wherever they go, it’s very targeted.”

The Election Day efforts were most intense in suburban communities such as El Monte, Montebello and Monterey Park. Those areas went heavily in the primary for state Sen. Charles M. Calderon and Sarah Flores, former aide to Supervisor Pete Schabarum.

Both Molina and Torres said the votes would be crucial in the runoff. Molina hoped merely to fight Torres to a standoff in those communities, winning with her already proven base of support closer to downtown Los Angeles. Torres wanted to make up the difference in the suburbs, where he hoped endorsements from Calderon, Flores and law enforcement groups would carry considerable weight, Townsend said.

“Clearly, those are the areas that will be the most contested,” Townsend said.

Precinct No. 4450010 typified the hotly contested suburbs.

The community of neat single-family homes near Schurr High School in Montebello tilted slightly to Molina in January, by 77 votes to 60 for Torres. Another 143 votes went to Calderon and Flores.

Three Torres supporters arrived at the polling place at noon to find that only six of their known supporters had voted, not counting absentee ballots. They began cruising the neighborhood and stopping at homes highlighted in yellow on their precinct sheet.

“Until they are crossed off the list, we won’t stop harassing them,” said John Echeveste, one of the trio of volunteers. “We are not supposed to leave here for the rest of the day.”

Molina backers Clara Solis and Jeff Hernandez, a husband and wife team, worked the same turf. Solis found that nine Molina voters had cast their ballots by 10:30 a.m.

“About the worst response I’ve gotten was one person who said, ‘I’ve been called a lot and bothered by a lot of people,’ ” Solis said. “I just try to tell them how important it is to vote.”