Gimmicks, Glitches Mark Effort to Get Out the Vote

Pinkie Fingers, a nurse, stuck her voting stub in her pocketbook early Tuesday morning and drove five miles to exchange it for half a dozen cake doughnuts, with sprinkles, courtesy of the California Democratic Party.

“It’s a nice little gift,” she said as grease began to soak through the white Yum Yum Donuts bag. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, Pinkie Fingers had just cast her vote for Richard Riordan, a Republican.

With the character assaults delivered and the issues debated to a pulp, the campaign brain trust turned to a new mission as dawn broke on mayoral Election Day in Los Angeles: Get out the vote.

Hundreds of volunteers for Riordan and City Councilman Michael Woo took to the streets, and campaign strategists resorted to clever devices in an effort to increase a turnout expected to be shamefully low in a city poised to elect its first new mayor in 20 years.

At Sam Wu’s Chinese restaurant on Broadway, the message inside the fortune cookies said “Vote for Mike Woo.” Riordan sent 1,600 volunteers into the streets to monitor polling places and pass out door hangers urging a vote for Riordan. Woo’s campaign hired scores of unemployed people to bang on doors. Cars with speakers hanging out their windows snaked through neighborhoods plaintively blaring “Vote!”

And then there were those doughnuts. At a cost of $100,000, the state Democratic Party contracted with 58 doughnut shops and sent mailers to likely Woo voters tempting them to the polls with six of the frosted cake variety.

The mailing came after a judge blocked the party from spending $200,000 to help Woo. Republican officials complained that the giveaway violated the spirit of the ruling; nevertheless, such a throng was expected at the Yum Yum shop visited by nurse Fingers that two security guards were posted to keep voters in line.

From San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley, workers and volunteers encountered barking dogs, insults, screaming couples, threats and faceless voices afraid to open the door. One worker for Woo ventured into “the Jungle,” a low-income, high-crime area in Baldwin Hills, only to be told by a resident that he looked stupid as he hung election literature on doorknobs. Confusion and frustration seemed the order of the day.

Elan Carr, 25 and fresh out of law school, was among the early morning volunteers who showed up in Brentwood to work for Riordan. His assignment: Get out the vote in UCLA’s Dykstra Hall, a 10-story residential tower.

He searched everywhere for a parking space, found one and promptly locked his keys in his car. A relative came with a new set. “Things have gone better,” he said. On to the dorm.

He jotted down the room numbers of the registered voters he wanted to see. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go upstairs,” a dorm official said. No solicitors. Carr waited for the official to turn his back and got on the elevator for the 10th floor.

“Leave Me Alone, I’m Sleeping,” warned a sign on one door. An hour and visits to five floors later, he had spoken to exactly no one, unless you count a woman named Laura who was on the phone and didn’t want to be bothered. The dorm official reappeared and kicked him out. Carr accepted his fate philosophically. “You do what you can,” he said.

It wasn’t any better in the predominantly Latino Eastside.

“No tiempo! No tiempo! (I don’t have time!)” Eva Savedra shouted, waving her hand at Woo campaign workers on the porch of her Boyle Heights apartment.

Voter turnout is crucial in any election but never more so than in this one. The two candidates had run neck and neck since the April primary, and recent polls indicated a photo finish. Victory could hinge on the turnout, particularly for Woo. An expected swell of absentee votes for Riordan could put him over the top, and Woo desperately needed to rally supporters in minority communities, where voter response is traditionally low.

Which helps explain why the Woo campaign was rounding up unemployed people in South-Central and offering them $40 to spend the day in the hot sun, banging on doors and begging people to vote.

Flora Lane, a Woo volunteer, sat in a pink flowered hat behind a long orange table waiting for her army of workers to arrive at the Crenshaw Boulevard campaign office. There were 120 of them due at 7 a.m. By 7:55, only 65 had shown up.

Some brought their children. Some could scarcely tell you who was running in this election; they were hardly the political zealots the Riordan campaign said it had marshaled.

“I just need the $40,” said Cogena Wright, 20 and unemployed.

After a confusing litany of instructions, they were given three quarters for phone calls and a list of likely voters before a fleet of rented Super Shuttle vans dropped them off, with no maps, in neighborhoods most of them didn’t know.

“I’m just gonna walk around,” one confused young man confessed.

But Roland Scott dutifully pounded on every iron-barred front door. If they answered at all, Scott couldn’t make out the face; there was just a disembodied voice saying, “Huh?” or a hand reaching through a mail slot to accept his Woo literature.

At 20, Scott had done get-out-the-vote work for half a dozen political campaigns, including President Clinton’s. He is precisely the type of person he is paid to persuade: young, black, intelligent--and too discouraged to vote.

“I made up my mind a long time ago. I never vote,” he said, leaving his literature at another door. “Politicians always break their promises and when they do, I don’t have to feel stupid.”

By noon, the Woo workers were streaming back to campaign central tired and disillusioned. Nobody was answering the door. It was getting hot. Forty dollars suddenly seemed like a paltry sum for all this walking. A barbecue lunch and a pep talk from deputy campaign manager Curtis Earnest was intended to cheer them.

“There are a lot of people who believe black people will not get out and vote. We want to prove them wrong,” Earnest said. “You must get out there and get them to the polls. I know to some of you it is a job, but there are many of you that are dedicated.”

Back in the Jungle, Mack and his partner, Charles Hackley, persevered.

“I’ve been cursed at; I’ve been called stupid,” Mack said, deciding it was too risky to knock on the door of an apartment where a man and woman were fighting.

The task seemed no easier over in “Riordan country,” the cul-de-sacs and country clubs of the Valley where Riordan sentiments run high.

Shari Gross, 25, who had passed up an aerobics class to work for Riordan in Knollwood Country Club Estates on this morning, bounded up the sloping driveways as golfers teed off in the sun. She knocked convincingly, her list of likely voters at the ready. Before noon, the bounce was gone from her step.

“Of the three houses we managed to find where somebody was home, one was dead and the other didn’t live there anymore,” she said glumly.

Some would call this the grunt work in any campaign. Some would call it one’s civic duty. Occasionally, however, it pays off.

“Oh yeah, where is the polling place?” one would-be Riordan vote said from inside her Northridge home when a precinct walker interrupted her morning workout. “I threw my stuff away prematurely.”

Still, some of these volunteers couldn’t help but feel like Avon ladies in a ghost town.

“You almost have to beg people to do what they are commanded to do by our Constitution, that’s what this country has wound down to,” Terdema Ussery, a 61-year-old real estate agent and Woo volunteer said as he drove his church van through another Central Los Angeles neighborhood, a speaker blaring a vote-for-Woo message. “My attitude is, if you don’t vote, you can’t speak.”