Court Reverses Supervisors Election Results : Politics: Judges rule that Santa Barbara County official did not win by 2 votes but lost by 12 in 1992 race. The incumbent plans to appeal the decision.

Bill Clinton is looking toward the halfway mark of his first term. Dianne Feinstein is already campaigning for reelection.

But 17 months after that same November election night, a state Court of Appeal has ruled that a Santa Barbara County supervisor was not elected after all, that he didn’t win by 2 votes--he lost by 12.

The sitting supervisor, oilman and rancher Willy Chamberlin, and the veteran supervisor he thought he had defeated, veterinarian and environmentalist Bill Wallace, have been battling over the results in the 3rd District virtually since the polls closed in November.

“We’ve been doing this for so long I don’t hold my breath,” Wallace said Thursday of the decision by the 2nd District Court of Appeal. “But I’m hoping to be back on the board within 100 days.”

Chamberlin plans to appeal to the state Supreme Court, sources said. Chamberlin could not be reached for comment.

Don’t think this monumental post-election struggle--which had its origins in the June, 1992, recount of the primary vote that sent the two men into a runoff--is merely a battle of egos and local politics.

The fact that more than $1 million was spent on a county supervisor’s race, the fact that Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt gave a benefit for the appeal, is a pretty good gauge of what was on the table: This election did nothing less than change two decades of slow-growth voting power in the luscious coastal county at a time when big development decisions faced the county board.

“Huge stakes--the biggest,” said Ed Maschke, Wallace’s campaign manager and the former planning director. “All about oil, all about real estate, all about development . . . areas all the way up the coast that are still undeveloped. That’s what we fought (over) for 20 years.”

“The swing vote on the board,” Timothy J. Staffel, the 4th District supervisor, said of the significance of the Chamberlin vote. “A more business-friendly, taxpayer-friendly board from the direction the county had been going (which was) very much pro-environmental, very much anti-business.”

Linda Krop, acting chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, said “it’s pretty clear” that controversial votes on some environmental matters would have gone the other direction by a 3-2 vote had Wallace been elected.

The most controversial is a dispute over the future of 20 miles of pristine coastal mesa from Goleta to Gaviota, where development was approved by the supervisors but denied by the Coastal Commission.

Big disagreements over small numbers began in the June, 1992, primary, when Chamberlin came in first--yet still 28 votes short of avoiding a runoff with Wallace, the 16-year incumbent who was running in a redrawn district. Chamberlin asked for a recount, but the results did not change.

Nearly a month after the November election, Chamberlin was certified as the winner by seven votes. Then Wallace paid for a ballot-by-ballot recount. Investigation into who voted, where, who had registered, student votes and absentee votes narrowed Chamberlin’s margin to five votes.

Wallace appealed. A Superior Court judge ruled a year ago that Chamberlin had won by two votes, 17,203 to 17,201. But the Court of Appeal decision, while upholding the Superior Court judge’s reasoning, allowed 10 more Wallace votes and ruled out four Chamberlin absentee ballots, declaring Wallace the winner.

Wallace’s appeal was based on the question of voting rights and “provisional ballots”--what votes can count when election officials get the polling place or the voter’s name or address wrong, or when voters go to the wrong polling place, among other problems.

“After a certain point, this wasn’t about getting Bill’s seat but counting every vote that was there,” Maschke said. Yet the same court decision that gave the election to Wallace rejected his voting-rights argument 2 to 1. “It’s tremendously ironic,” Maschke said. “We potentially lost the battle but won the war.”

The 62-page decision contained its own droll note: “The vote for ‘Wilt Chamberlin . . . appears to be facetious.”