Perot Write-Ins Could Slow Vote Tallying, Registrar Says : Election: A representative of the independent presidential candidate discourages use of protest balloting in Tuesday’s primary.

Tens of thousands of absentee ballots and presidential write-in votes for Texas billionaire Ross Perot could produce an extraordinarily long “election night” for local candidates, possibly delaying final counts in some contests for days, San Diego County Registrar of Voters Conny McCormack said Tuesday.

“It could be a long, long count,” McCormack said. “I’m sure it’s going to be a little unnerving for some candidates.”

While the nearly 170,000 absentee ballots issued to date all but guarantee a multiple-day delay in learning the outcome of some close elections, the Perot campaign itself has taken steps intended to make the vote-counting process less lengthy and burdensome than McCormack and her staff fear.

On Tuesday, the leaders of Perot’s San Diego campaign, who are circulating signature petitions to qualify him for the November ballot, issued a statement urging supporters not to write in his name in the June 2 primary.

“Write-in votes for H. Ross Perot will do more harm than good,” said Jack Flowers, chairman of the San Diego Perot petition drive. “It’s just not an effective way to protest.”

Perot’s supporters have little to lose in discouraging write-in votes for his independent presidential candidacy, because, with Perot not having qualified to run as a write-in in the primary, those votes would not even be tabulated. Consequently, there was no prospect of using the primary for a strong, albeit symbolic, show of support.

However, even though any write-in votes cast for Perot next week will be invalid, they will delay the counting of the other votes cast in other elections listed on such ballots, McCormack stressed.

Under the registrar’s vote-counting procedures, if any name--even an invalid one--is written in at the top of ballot cards in the space provided, the entire ballot must be manually reviewed before votes cast for candidates and ballots on the lower portion can be machine-tabulated.

Preliminary reviews of those ballots will begin June 3, but actual counting is not expected to begin until June 4 and might not be completed until the weekend or as late as the Monday after the election, McCormack said.

The registrar’s office has already warned candidates, from the lowest-level posts to the highest, to expect potentially inconclusive results on Election Night.

“We wanted to prepare them so they wouldn’t think this was the Philippines or that something funny was going on,” one election official said.

Among other tasks, the registrar’s staff must number both portions of write-in ballots, determine whether the voter “over-voted” by writing in a name in a race in which he also voted for another candidate listed on the ballot, and verify whether the write-in vote was cast for a qualified candidate.

Prior to the Perot campaign’s Tuesday announcement, McCormack, citing the write-in votes Perot recently received in the Oregon and Washington primaries, estimated that up to 50,000 write-in ballots could be cast for him here next week.

Although McCormack anticipates that Perot supporter Flowers’ admonishment will reduce that number, the registrar is still braced for a potentially large number of write-in votes.

“There still are going to be a lot of people who want to register their protest and support in that way,” McCormack said.

The tabulation of absentee ballots will be equally time-consuming, illustrating how their increasing popularity--both for reasons of voters’ convenience and candidates’ strategy--has perhaps forever altered the conventional notion of an election night.

Because of the extensive procedures involved in verifying the accuracy of absentee ballots--notably, in checking the validity of the voter’s signature--vote counting no longer merely stretches into the late night or early morning of the day after the election, but has been expanded into a sometimes days-long process.

“If you thought about that, it could drive you crazy, so I try not to,” 76th Assembly District candidate Ronnie Delaney joked. “It would be absolute agony to have to wait that long.”

The approximately 170,000 absentee ballots requested is a record for a local primary election and, based on past practice, a sizable percentage of them will not be mailed back until Election Day, while many others will be dropped off at polling places. As with the write-in votes, none of those last-minute absentee ballots will be counted on Election Night.

To date, only about a quarter of the absentee ballots requested have been returned to the registrar’s office. Historically, about 80% of the registered voters who request absentee ballots use them, a figure that leads McCormack to estimate that as many as 50,000 absentees will remain uncounted on Election Night.

“And if the absentee ballots have write-in votes, that slows things down even more,” McCormack said, chuckling wryly.

One further delay in the vote count deals with so-called “provisional” ballots, cast by individuals whose registration is in question or who had asked to vote absentee but then seek to vote at the polls without turning in a blank absentee ballot. About 6,000 provisional votes are likely to remain uncounted on Election Night, McCormack said.

“We want the vote to be quick but, more importantly, we want it to be accurate,” McCormack said. “I think everyone can agree on that, so I hope that keeps the frustration level down.”