Absentees and Split Vote Boosted Baugh

Assemblyman Scott Baugh and his opponents for the 67th District GOP nomination essentially competed in two elections Tuesday--the one before Baugh’s indictment and the one after.

And while Baugh won both, election results show that criminal charges filed against him last week dragged down the Huntington Beach Republican to such an extent that he might have lost had two challengers not split the vote.

With just the absentee ballots counted--those mailed to the registrar of voters office before word of the indictment hit the media Friday night and Saturday--Baugh was a big winner, capturing nearly 69% of the vote. His opponents together garnered only 31%.

But the race tightened considerably when walk-up voters cast their ballots Tuesday. Baugh captured about 44% of Tuesday’s vote, and his two competitors combined for nearly 56%.

Overall, Baugh took about 49.4% of the vote while his opponents, Cypress Councilwoman Cecilia L. Age and Barbara Coe, an activist for the passage of Proposition 187, took about 50.5%.

“The headlines in the paper didn’t do Scott Baugh any favors,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a Republican political consultant. “He was saved by the absentees, who voted well before the problems with the district attorney came down. In a two-person race, he might have lost.”

Baugh and his supporters, however, cast his victory Tuesday as a “repudiation” of felony charges that he filed false campaign reports and persuaded his former treasurer to commit perjury. Baugh and his supporters have contended that Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi timed the charges to help oust him from office, an accusation Capizzi has denied.

“To win by 15 points on election day with all that negative press is pretty darn good,” said Dave Gilliard, Baugh’s campaign consultant.

Baugh campaign workers readily acknowledge they followed an absentee-vote strategy, hoping to lock up ballots early in an election they knew would have a low voter turnout. Regardless of the timing of the indictment, Baugh’s vote total shows the value of such a strategy in small, low-turnout elections.

Baugh has been implicated in a Republican scheme to draft a decoy Democrat in the hope of siphoning votes from a more established Democratic opponent in last year’s Nov. 28 special election, which Baugh won. Three GOP campaign workers have pleaded guilty to fraudulently circulating nominating petitions for the decoy candidate, Laurie Campbell, who was thrown off the ballot before the election, and a fourth has been indicted on charges of participating in the scheme.

Baugh has denied wrongdoing.

Although it’s impossible to know just what voters had in mind Tuesday, political analysts speculated that at least some who cast ballots believed Baugh’s indictment was politically motivated, that others saw the charges as relatively minor campaign paperwork errors and that some probably hadn’t fully digested the severity of Baugh’s problems.

Still others turned away from Baugh completely but split over who might make a more suitable candidate, analysts said. Age said she telephoned about 11,000 voters in the three days following the indictment in an attempt to persuade them to vote for her. About half said they would at least consider it, Age said; the other half made no commitment.

Ultimately, “I think people who were undecided didn’t know what to do,” Age said. “We did a last-minute push and thought that was going to work, but I guess we just didn’t have enough time to take advantage of [the indictment].”

Gilliard said the Baugh campaign spent $15,000 on a mailer targeting absentee voters, and more money to have campaign workers go door to door and make phone calls in the absentee-vote campaign.

“We invested some campaign dollars into the absentees and treated this like a recall election, knowing there would be a low turnout,” Gilliard said. “I wouldn’t say it saved the election for us, but I’d say it gave us a pretty good cushion.”

Age’s campaign consultant, John Kern, said Baugh’s win was not surprising, considering the absentee ballots.

“This has been the classic strategy of the conservative Orange County machine, if you will, that you run a very strong absentee program,” Kern said. “That’s where they spent a lot of their money. We knew we would have limited resources and we chose to hoard those resources till the end.”

Barbara A. Coe, chairwoman of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, an Orange County-based umbrella group instrumental in putting Proposition 187 on the ballot, said the high number of absentee votes on Baugh’s behalf makes a “clear-cut case that people had voted well in advance of having all the facts.”

Even so, Coe wasn’t very surprised by the absentee results. But the walk-up totals stunned her, given Baugh’s indictment.

“I found that pretty incredible and deeply frightening,” Coe said of Baugh’s success on Tuesday. “Sadly enough, a lot of people don’t take their responsibility as voters seriously.”

The stain of a criminal indictment or investigation hasn’t always been fatal in California. Former state Sen. Frank C. Hill (R-Whittier) won a special election in 1990 despite being targeted by an FBI corruption investigation. He was convicted in 1994 of using his office to extort $2,500 from an undercover FBI agent who was part of a Capitol sting operation.

Former state Sen. Paul Carpenter (D-Cypress) won reelection to the State Board of Equalization in 1990 despite his conviction after the same FBI probe on four counts of racketeering, extortion and conspiracy for using his state Senate position to extract campaign contributions from interest groups.

And Assemblyman Pat Nolan (R-Glendale) won reelection three times despite being under investigation in the FBI corruption probe. He eventually pleaded guilty to using his office as a racketeering enterprise to solicit bribes from those seeking his backing on legislation.

“Voters tend to react to these things differently,” political consultant Hoffenblum said. “In Baugh’s case, I think a lot of people looked at this as campaign election violations and find that far different from someone getting caught with brown bags filled with thousand-dollar bills.”