Rivals in Long Beach Council Race Swap Impropriety Charges : Election: Five days before voters go to the polls, dispute erupts over absentee ballot distribution and alleged telephone intimidation tactics.

Five days before the election, a placid campaign for a City Council seat in Long Beach suddenly got down and dirty Thursday with angry charges of improprieties on both sides.

Supporters of Mike Donelon accused Tonia Reyes Uranga’s campaign of “criminal misconduct” for allegedly distributing dozens of absentee ballots to voters who had not requested them.

In turn, Uranga supporters charged that Donelon campaigners had sought to intimidate voters by interrogating them about their absentee ballot applications. Telephone callers, saying they were “police representatives,” called many would-be Uranga absentee voters Wednesday night and said their votes would be invalidated because of improprieties, Uranga said.

Donelon, a general contractor, and Uranga, an employment and training consultant, finished in a virtual dead heat in a June runoff election. Donelon, who eventually squeezed a two-vote victory out of almost 6,000 votes cast, held the 7th Council District seat for 79 days before a Superior Court judge voided the election in September.

The city clerk’s office has received 2,289 applications for absentee ballots for next Tuesday’s special election--about 1,300 of them forwarded by the Uranga campaign, according to that campaign’s staff. Campaign consultants believe that absentee ballots have a higher probability of being cast than those of voters who plan to go to the polls because poll voters are more likely to be hampered by bad weather or personal emergencies.

Donelon campaign manager Jeff Adler said that professional telephone surveyors, paid for by the campaign, had called 400 of the apparent Uranga supporters and found 87 who said they either had not requested absentee ballots or were not sure if they had.

Adler charged that Uranga volunteers, zealously seeking to nail down support for their candidate in the district, had claimed that they were verifying voter information to solicit signatures on absentee ballot applications. “That’s obtaining a signature under false pretenses,” he said.

In response to complaints by Uranga supporters, Adler acknowledged that surveyors hired by the Donelon campaign had made calls in the name of the Long Beach Police Officers Assn., which has endorsed Donelon, and that the surveyors had sought to sway voters to Donelon.

Marc Coleman, an attorney working for the Uranga campaign, said those calls were intimidating. “That’s like Georgia in the 1960s, with the local sheriff harassing voters,” Coleman said. “Many of these people are first-time voters who are Latinos or Filipinos.”

One Uranga supporter said Thursday that a caller from the “police officers commission” had questioned her about her absentee ballot application. Another said that a police officers association representative had told him that “there was an investigation going on regarding voter fraud and intimidation.”

Uranga denied that any improprieties occurred in distributing absentee ballots and said that ballots were distributed by her staff only to voters who had requested them. “We’ve been performing a service by bringing ballots to the doors of our voters,” she said.

The city clerk’s office has received only a few complaints from either Donelon or Uranga supporters, the spokeswoman said. “Our office has no real authority to deal with campaign tactics,” said Deborah Wright, chief deputy city clerk.

Adler said Donelon campaign officials have asked for an investigation by Long Beach city prosecutor John Vander Lans and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Uranga said several groups supporting her will file complaints with the state Fair Political Practices Commission.