City Mailed 297,000 Incomplete Sample Ballots : Elections: Corrected versions have been sent out to wide-ranging area in advance of Tuesday’s vote.

A printing error resulted in the mailing of about 297,000 incomplete sample ballots to registered voters across Los Angeles in advance of next week’s municipal elections, city officials said.

The city clerk’s office, which already has mailed replacement sample ballots, did not discover the error until last week, after a voter called to ask why eight pages were missing from her ballot.

“After we investigated, we realized there was a rather large mailing of about 297,000 improper ballots that went out,” said Joseph Giles, assistant division chief in the city clerk’s election division.

“At the printers’ cost, we reprinted and re-mailed ballots to the entire group we think was affected, which was scattered across a large area everywhere throughout the city,” Giles said. “This was not done at the taxpayers’ expense.”

An official from the printing company, Merrill Corp., declined to comment on the cost of the error, insisting that all questions on the misprint be directed to the city.

The city finished mailing 1.8 million sample ballots--including the incomplete ballots--on March 24. The mock ballots help voters make their decisions on Tuesday’s City Council and school board contests as well as a list of proposed charter amendments.

When the clerk’s office learned that pages were missing from some ballots, the city ordered a reprint and began mailing new ballots Sunday, Giles said. “Some people have probably already received their replacements,” which include a brief written explanation of the error, Giles said.

Incomplete ballots were mailed only to voters in the area the city calls Ballot Group 229, a group of political subdivisions where no City Council or school board seats are up for election, officials said.

“That means the bad ballots could have been sent to people in any of the odd-numbered City Council districts except District 5, or any even-numbered Board of Education districts,” Giles explained. “The area is spread out across the city.”

Jill Swift, a Tarzana resident and former city parks commissioner, was among those who received an incomplete ballot.

“I got it in the mail a few weeks ago, but didn’t look at it until recently,” Swift said. “Most people probably don’t open them until just before the election.” But Swift said that as she began reading the 104-page ballot, she realized that some of the pages between 17 and 22 were missing as well as a few other pages.

Giles said the missing pages varied from neighborhood to neighborhood because different versions of the ballots are printed for each.

Although she received her complete replacement ballot in the mail Thursday, Swift said she foresaw problems if people are not aware that one of the samples is incomplete. “The city should have described the new ballots as corrected ballots, not replacements,” Swift said.