Low Turnout Predicted in Special Election for Open City Council Seat : Oxnard: Between 20% and 35% of the voters are expected to cast ballots. The 13 candidates are vying for a vacancy created when Manuel Lopez became mayor.

Given the few requests for absentee ballots, Ventura County election officials are predicting a low voter turnout in today’s special election to fill an open Oxnard City Council seat.

At 28 polling places throughout the city, Oxnard voters will choose from among 13 candidates competing for the council seat left vacant when Manuel Lopez was promoted from councilman to mayor last November. The polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m.

Election officials say they expect anywhere from 20% to 35% of Oxnard’s 53,227 registered voters to cast ballots today.

“Every single vote will count and will make a difference,” said Georgia Dennehey, an administrator in the county’s elections division. “With that many candidates, we could see some very close races.”

At the start of the race, election officials were confident that turnout would be closer to 35% following a strong 60% showing at the polls in November.

In that election, residents in Ventura County’s largest city installed their first elected Latino mayor, first black councilman and only the fourth Latino councilman in Oxnard’s 90-year history.

But as of last Tuesday, as the deadline passed for voters to receive absentee ballots through the mail, the elections department only had received 3,593 requests for those ballots.

Assistant Registrar of Voters Bruce Bradley said absentees generally represent about one-third of the ballots that will be cast in an election.

If that holds true, campaign workers said it could take less than 3,000 votes to win the election. And after the vote is split 13 ways, the top candidates may be separated by fewer than 100 votes.

“It’s really hard to tell how many people will come out on election day,” said Nels Henderson, a consultant managing the campaign of Roy Lockwood. “A lot of people don’t make up their minds until the last week of an election.”

On Monday, Ventura County Latinos for Better Government publicly complained that the group’s name was used without permission on a Spanish-language political flyer that criticized four council candidates, labeling each of them with a derogatory name.

Mayo de la Rocha, chairman of the group, said Latinos for Better Government did not distribute the pamphlet and has not been involved in the special election. He challenged those who published the flyer to identify themselves and condemned it as a sneak attack that gave the candidates no time to respond.

Of the 13 candidates, only six have reported that they expect their campaigns to raise more than $1,000.

Oxnard optometrist Thomas E. Holden holds the fund-raising lead, followed closely by Navy employee and former Oxnard planning commissioner Tony V. Grey.

The other candidates who report raising more than $1,000 are Lockwood, a retired fire chief and longtime council watchdog; Ralph Schumacher, an Abex Aerospace executive and planning commission chairman; Tsujio Kato, an Oxnard dentist and former mayor and councilman, and Lee Casey-Telles, a business owner and registered nurse.

The other candidates are: Deborah L. DeMoss, a homemaker and part-time receptionist; Alice Rivera Howe, co-owner of a landscaping business; John Patton Sr., a pump operator for a private water agency; John Quigley, a sewage treatment operator for the city of Oxnard; Patrick J. Sammon, a retired aviation administrator for the U. S. Navy and chairman of the Sea View Estates Neighborhood Council; Juan Soria, a retired business owner, and Lawrence Stein, a self-employed systems accountant.

In addition to those on the ballot, Oxnard sculptor Michael Racine has qualified as a write-in candidate.

FYI

For election information or directions to your polling place, call the Ventura County elections office at 654-2781 between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m.