Flawed Voter Guides Dismay Candidates

More than 1,000 voter-information pamphlets mailed to Huntington Beach residents mistakenly contain candidate statements for the Anaheim City Council race.

County election officials said Monday that corrected pamphlets will be mailed out by Friday, but some council candidates say they fear that serious damage has already been done to their campaigns.

“This is going to be a pretty ineffective solution,” said Pam Julien, one of 12 candidates--including three incumbents--who are seeking election to three Huntington Beach City Council seats in November.

“If I got a second sample ballot in the mail, I’d probably just throw it away. This gives a definite advantage to the incumbents,” Julien said.

Seven candidates in the race spent $1,550 each to include a statement in the voter pamphlet. The misprinted pamphlets list the correct candidate names. But in another section are Anaheim candidates’ names and statements, said Don Taylor, assistant county registrar of voters.

Taylor said 10,000 voter pamphlets were misprinted, but only a portion of those were mailed before the mistake was discovered.

“I don’t think it’s a very big portion of it,” Taylor said.

The county will mail the corrected pamphlet to all 10,000 residents, he said.

Candidate Lou Baker said even a small number of lost votes could affect the outcome of the race, though.

“If the election is close, there may be grounds to hold a special election,” Baker said.

Candidate Thom Doney said some residents may send in absentee ballots before they receive the corrected voter pamphlet.

“They’ll just stick with the incumbents because they have no other information to rely on,” Doney said. “All candidates are fighting the power of incumbency to start with. When you have things like this happen, all it does is make it more difficult.”