U.S. Overseer Bars Slate of Teamsters Delegates : Unions: Fraud found in balloting to select Local 63 representatives to national convention. Reformist group is certified to attend meeting to elect leadership.

A government-appointed elections officer Monday disqualified a winning slate of Southern California delegates from attending next week’s national Teamsters Union convention, charging that their victory was tainted by widespread ballot fraud by leaders of their local union.

Instead, elections officer Michael Holland ordered that a slate of reformist candidates--many have angrily battled leaders of Teamsters Local 63 for years over various issues--be sent to the convention in Orlando, Fla.

In a highly critical ruling, Holland said his staff verified numerous complaints by the reformist slate that officers and business agents of Local 63 offered to pick up ballots from some members, and in some cases marked the ballots as well as mailing them.

The election of about 2,000 delegates to the national convention--the first time in the 88-year history of the union that delegates are being elected democratically--has been marked by hundreds of allegations of misconduct to Holland’s office. However, Monday’s decision marked the only time that Holland has found abuses serious enough to warrant the disqualification of any delegate.

Holland said in his ruling that officials of Local 63 “sabotaged” the election in order to elect a 17-member slate loyal to the local’s secretary-treasurer, Robert Marciel.

Marciel is the chief officer of the 13,000-member local, whose members work in the wholesale and retail food industry. At next week’s national nominating convention, Marciel is expected to be nominated as a candidate for regional vice president of the union on a slate led by Teamsters presidential candidate Walter Shea, a union vice president from Washington.

The three major presidential candidates, who are expected to face each other in a December election, are Shea, Teamster Vice President R.V. Durham of North Carolina and Ron Carey, head of a Teamsters local in New York who is running on a radical reform platform.

Neither Marciel nor Robert Vogel, Local 63’s attorney, returned a reporter’s phone calls.

Local 63, which represents members from Barstow to Bakersfield, held its first delegate election in March. A slate pledged to Carey won 14 of 17 delegate seats. However, the slate affiliated with Marciel--who did not run as a delegate candidate--protested the results, citing inadvertent printing errors on the ballot.

A second election with a much larger turnout was held in May, and this time Marciel’s slate won all 17 seats.

However, Holland found that the second election campaign was marked by a variety of irregularities. With “arrogant disregard,” he wrote, officials of the local gave favorable treatment to the slate loyal to Marciel, withholding crucial membership information from the slate pledged to Carey and violating rules governing secret ballots by offering to mail in or mark some members’ ballots.

The offer appeared to have been made most often to Spanish-speaking Teamsters who spoke no English, Holland said. He said investigators visited 27 of the 339 work sites represented by Local 63, and were told by members at 10 of the locations that “ballots had been solicited, collected and/or marked by other members, business agents or stewards.”

The rules under which this year’s Teamsters convention and election are being held were shaped by a 1989 consent decree signed by the union’s executive board and the U.S. Justice Department. In exchange for the dismissal of civil racketeering charges filed by the Justice Department, union leaders agreed to have the union put under supervision of an independent administrator--federal Judge Frederick Lacey--who would attempt to eliminate the influence of organized crime on the union. Holland’s election office is a part of the government oversight program.

Ken Paff, national organizer of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which supports Carey’s campaign, said he was “pleased to see the reform delegates defeat the tricks of Marciel and his staff. . . . Looking ahead to December, if they could get away with it (collecting ballots), it could have been a major tactic” in the election of national officers.

Holland’s ruling can be appealed to Lacey.