Recounts Change Water Board Results : Elections: The revised tallies reverse winners and losers in both Santa Margarita and Los Alisos districts. Registrar says ‘landowner’ apportionment led to foul-ups.

The results of last week’s Santa Margarita and Los Alisos water district elections have changed after a recount of the votes, the county registrar of voters said Wednesday.

The recounts were ordered and completed Tuesday after errors were discovered in both Nov. 2 elections, Registrar Donald Tanney said.

“It’s never fun to admit errors, but the errors did occur,” Tanney said. “But it was better to discover them now than to have the wrong person seated in the position and have us find out later. It also would have been awful for us to not have found out about them at all.”

Both districts are so-called “landowner” districts where votes are apportioned on the basis of a property’s assessed value, instead of the typical “one-person, one vote” system.

In the Santa Margarita election, challenger Betty Olson, who finished second in the initial count with more than 429 million votes, dropped to fourth place and will not be filling one of the three vacant seats.

In her place will be Sean Barrett, an incumbent appointed to the board in July. Barrett initially finished in fourth place but moved into third with more than 327 million votes after the recount.

Barrett said Wednesday night that the election has been a roller-coaster ride from the start.

“I woke up the day after the election and was shown on television as one of the winners,” Barrett said. “Then, after I got to work, I found out I finished fourth. I had adjusted to that and now this happened. I have mixed feelings. I feel sorry for Betty but I’m happy I’ll have the chance to continue the work that I started four months ago.”

The remaining seats will be filled by Jim Mizell, who was the first-place finisher before and after the recount, and Bob Lay, who initially finished third but has now moved up to second with more than 352 million votes.

Tanney said returns in the Santa Margarita election, which attracted seven challengers and three incumbents, were off by 122 million votes. The mistake was made when someone miscounted 122,000 votes appearing on one ballot as 122,122,000 votes.

Tanney said the Los Alisos election had appeared to be error-free. But after discovering the Santa Margarita errors, he ordered a recount in both elections.

“Since landowner elections are often fraught with problems, I wanted to go back and check it out,” he said.

In the Los Alisos election, challenger Rod Jewell, who had been the top vote-getter before the recount, dropped to third place and did not win one of two open seats after all.

Incumbent Harry C. Johnson, who appeared to have lost his seat on the board, moved up to second place and will remain in office.

Challenger Tom Bishop, who was in second place, wound up as the top vote-getter with more than 163 million votes, Tanney said.

Tanney said 60 million votes were not counted in the Los Alisos election because of a computer program error.

“We entered the ballots into the computer but something in the computer program didn’t take and they weren’t counted,” Tanney said. “It was a system error, not a human error of mis-entering the numbers.”

Tanney said landowner district elections are particularly difficult and cumbersome because of the millions of votes involved.

It is much to his relief, he said, that under a new law approved this year, both water districts will be converted to “one-person, one vote” districts in 1994.

“It will be nice to not have to do these in the future,” Tanney said. “With these types of elections, you are dealing with a lot of ballots and a lot of numbers.”

Tanney said both water districts were informed of the change in election results on Wednesday.