Alpine County Race Shows Every Vote Counts : Elections: Ballots were cast by 76.5% of the electorate--and sheriff’s contest ended in a dead heat, 276-276. Those who failed to mail in votes regret it--and want to remain anonymous.

Everyone knows of one, an offender most foul, but no one here will rat out a neighbor, tattle on a friend.

C. Ann Wade, supervisor for Alpine County’s District 3, knows five of them. Sheriff Henry (Skip) Veatch knows four, but he is too much of a gentleman to divulge an identity--even though they cost him big.

Who are these culprits? Only their county clerk knows for sure.

In remote Alpine County, where the government owns 96% of the land and the only bank closed about 15 years ago, 76.5% of those registered voted--more than double the turnout statewide and higher than any election in recent county memory.

Only 175 men and women did not bother to vote, and they are kicking themselves these days, for the sheriff’s race, a heated battle, ended in a mathematical near-impossibility, an honest-to-goodness tie: Skip Veatch 276, Villa (Lew) Roper 276.

“A lady at the library, the day after the election, had her ballot in her purse,” Wade said, recounting a tale that is repeated all over town. “She never sent it in. She said, ‘Now I know what they mean by one vote counts.’ She voted for Lew Roper.”

Don’t look for a teacher to thank for such stunning civic involvement, even here in the county seat of Markleeville. The northeast California county is so small that there is no high school; these California kids learn government in Nevada, grow up knowing more of Carson City than they do of Sacramento.

Still, when the polls closed statewide two weeks ago today, more than three-quarters of Alpine County’s 745 registered voters--1,113 people live there--had cast ballots. One reason the turnout was so spectacular was that it was not really a turnout at all. With such a low population that it is hard to muster up a polling place, Alpine County voters cast their ballots by mail, the only county in the state to do so.

“Alpine truly is a high-participating county; its results are not just a fluke of registration rolls,” says Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll. “That is the most persuasive reason I’ve heard (for the high turnout), not the demographics but the voting method.”

But local pundits have a better explanation of why Alpine County put the rest of California to shame: There were two emotional races made even more heated in part by the death of a 4-year-old Native American child in a complex abuse case that crossed the California-Nevada border.

It is a case that doubled turnout in the Native American community, Wade’s District 3, where the drama began. A case that even Veatch grudgingly admits colored the races for sheriff and district attorney. “A couple of things came up that hurt us,” Veatch says. “The Ortiz case was one.”

In 1992, Terry Ortiz and her children were visiting relatives in the Alpine County town of Woodfords, home to the Southern Band Washoe Tribe of California-Nevada. During the visit, family members reported to social service workers that Letisia Ortiz, then 2, had been abused, bitten on her nose and burned on her feet.

The child and three siblings were taken from their mother and placed by the court with other family members. On Jan. 24, an Alpine County Superior Court judge gave Letisia and her sister, Rosa, back to their mother, who was living on a ranch in nearby Genoa, Nev. Two months later, Letisia was dead, beaten with a glass baby bottle. Her mother is in jail in Nevada, awaiting trial for murder.

The Sheriff’s Department has never had a good relationship with the 310 Native Americans who live in Alpine County. “The community feels the Sheriff’s Department doesn’t respond. They live less than five minutes away, but it takes them up to two hours to come here,” Wade says. “We need someone to take control of the officers and make them do their job.”

Veatch acknowledges the strained relations, the Washoe Tribe’s concerns that its members get short shrift. But recent studies, he says, show that 40% of the department’s enforcement calls take place in Native American territory, while the community makes up only 30% of the county’s population.

“That’s disproportionate,” he says. “We respond to the calls the same without regard to race or geographic area. . . . We respond with a great deal of concern.”

A report commissioned by the Board of Supervisors is highly critical of how both the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office handled the Ortiz case.

“What is missing is a routine, regular procedure for automatic referral to the District Attorney’s Intake Section of Alpine County of all suspected criminal activities involving child physical and sexual abuse,” the report states. “A criminal investigation which may or may not have resulted in the filing of criminal charges was not conducted.”

Although Veatch declines to speak in detail about the case or the report, he insists that an investigation was carried out. And he admits that Letisia Ortiz’s death just two months before the election hurt both him and Dist. Atty. Henry Murdock, who lost his bid to remain in office.

“The Ortiz thing hurt both of us as incumbents,” he says. “We were in office when it happened. A scapegoat was sought.”

For all the factors that caused Alpine County residents to vote in record numbers--the heated races, the mail-in ballots--voting here is not automatic. The electorate of Alpine County overcomes one very high hurdle: Some barely acknowledge that they live in California.

“Physically we belong to Nevada,” said David Kirby, owner of Woodford’s Station, part general store, part local hangout. Alpine County shops, works and goes to school across the state line and at one time actually was part of Nevada. Sometimes it still feels that way.

Between 1987 and 1992, employees of this eastern California county negotiated for a paid day off on Oct. 31 so they could celebrate Nevada Day, the legal holiday commemorating Nevada’s admission to the Union. And California news--political or otherwise--is terribly hard to come by, a real hurdle for anyone attempting to actually know what they’re voting about. The television stations all beam from Nevada, and most newspapers travel west across the state line.

“The first time I saw Ronald Reagan on television was when he ran for President,” says Nancy Thornburg, executive director of the Alpine County Museum. “One thing that’s so darn frustrating is that you can’t get any California television stations here. You just don’t get the information you need.”

At least Thornburg talks about the election. Chris Branscombe doesn’t even like to do that, and was crestfallen, as a matter of fact, when the sheriff’s race tied. To others, the tie is a statistical freak show; to the Branscombes it is a guarantee of five months of discord until the November runoffs.

Branscombe works for Sheriff Veatch. Her husband is employed by Woodford’s Auto Service, whose owner has a longstanding and complicated complaint against the Sheriff’s Department, part small-town intrigue and part retribution. At Woodford’s, they vote for Lew Roper.

“I’m between a rock and a hard place in this election,” she said. “I handed my husband his ballot and I filled out mine, and we didn’t talk about who we’d voted for.”

Branscombe is not the only one who feels bad this Election Day. Yes, it may have been difficult, but at least she voted. Which is more than can be said for some people here in Markleeville.

The woman who sauntered into Alpine County Library on June 8 only to find her ballot when looking for her library card would not consent to be interviewed for this story. In fact, her friends are so kind that they would not divulge her name and instead called her for a statement on her voting lapse.

How does it feel to be one of the few, the not-so-proud, the disenfranchised here in the cradle of California democracy?

“Just lousy,” she said, through an intermediary.