Polling Place Mixup Angers Valley Voters

As if voter turnout is not bad enough in Los Angeles municipal elections, the city clerk has assigned 242 Tarzana residents to a polling place in West L.A.--one mountain range and two freeways away from their neighborhood.

The city said the mistake occurred when an inexperienced election worker inadvertently merged two precincts.

“I apologize,” Kristin Heffron, chief of the city clerk’s election division, said Monday.

But apologizing is not the same as righting the wrong. And the city insists that voters must make the 16-mile trip (one way), or vote absentee.

“I guess I’m just not going to vote,” said Sylvia Wachtel, a real estate broker who lives in the hilly Tarzana neighborhood west of Reseda Boulevard, near the El Caballero and Braemar country clubs.

“I don’t even know where this is,” said Shirley Dubin, another Tarzana voter who had no idea how to find her Westside polling place, the Stoner Recreation Center at 1835 Stoner Ave. “For years, we’ve voted just a few blocks from our house. The poll’s always been there.”

The voters were warned of the foul-up in an April 5 letter from the clerk’s office. The deadline for applying for absentee ballots is today.

The city sent the same letter to a handful of voters who live on the south side of Mulholland Drive. Those voters have been assigned polling places in faraway Mandeville Canyon or the Pacific Palisades.

In that case, the city did not make a mistake. The long-distance voting assignments happened because the city adopted Los Angeles County precinct lines. To assign more convenient polling places to the Mulholland Drive voters would require “work that we are not capable of doing easily,” Heffron said.

Mayoral candidate and state Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) held a news conference Monday to reveal details of the faraway polling place assignments. He blasted the city’s response to the problem and threatened to file a lawsuit unless it does better.

“It’s another example of City Hall failing to take care of the interests of its citizens,” said Katz, who has frequently attacked the “downtown crowd” during his long-shot bid for mayor.

The city should set up an emergency polling place in Tarzana, he said. Failing that, he said, city officials should go out to personally notify voters of the situation and extend the deadline for requesting absentee ballots.

Jorge Medovoi, a property manager from Tarzana, is determined to get to the polls, even if it means a 32-mile round-trip drive to West Los Angeles.

“I think there’s really something dirty going on with this--like they don’t want some of us to vote,” Medovoi said. “But I’m not going to let this stop me. I’ll just get in the car and drive there.”

Path to the Polls Jorge Medovoi, a property manager, lives in Tarzana. But because of a mistake by the L.A. city clerk’s office, he and about 240 others in his neighborhood are being sent across town to vote in the April 20 election. However, Medovoi, plans to go the distance. From his home, he must: A. Drive almost two miles to the Ventura Freeway. B. Go east nearly 3.5 miles to the San Diego Freeway. C. Take the 405 south about nine miles to Santa Monica Boulevard. D. Travel west to Stoner Avenue. E. Go left 3 blocks to the Stoner Recreation Center where he can finally vote.