Absentee Voting May Delay Some Outcomes

Los Angeles County election officials have some advice for candidates and their supporters in tight races today: Don’t wait up for final results.

The outcome of hard-fought campaigns such as the district attorney race and some legislative and congressional contests could remain in doubt until next week when an avalanche of absentee ballots are verified and counted.

County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said Monday that “an explosion in popularity” of absentee voting poses an enormous challenge for election officials.

Nearly one out of every eight of the 3.9 million registered voters in Los Angeles County requested absentee ballots for this presidential election. It does not appear that a record number of absentee ballots will be cast.

About 196,000 of the 481,000 absentee ballots that were mailed out had been returned by Monday.

McCormack predicted that up to 200,000 more absentee ballots, most of them turned in at polling places today, will not be counted tonight. “These uncounted ballots leave some close races hanging in the balance,” McCormack said.

Under similar conditions in November 1994, the outcome of a hotly contested South Bay congressional race between Democrat Jane Harman and Republican Susan Brooks was not known for weeks. Harman was eventually declared the winner. They are in a rematch today.

Absentee ballots must be received at a precinct or through the mail at the registrar-recorder’s Norwalk office by the time the polls close at 8 p.m.

None of the absentee ballots will be counted until after polls close. The signature on the ballot envelope must first be verified against the signature on the original voter registration form. “We check every single one,” McCormack said. “That’s a tedious process. It can’t be done any faster than we are doing it.”

In a memo sent to the Board of Supervisors on Monday, McCormack said “the speed of this signature verification process is significantly hampered by our outdated signature verification equipment.”

McCormack, who is overseeing her first general election in Los Angeles County, said she and her predecessors have tried to obtain funding for new equipment costing about $500,000 but were turned down because of the county’s financial problems.

McCormack noted Monday that the office’s phone equipment is not adequate to meet demands.

A heavy volume of calls to the county’s election headquarters in Norwalk overloaded the phone system Monday, she said.

GTE spokesman Larry Cox said the phone company’s Norwalk central office normally handles 10,000 calls an hour, but was receiving five times that volume Monday. “The whole central office was in a state of close to overload,” he said.

“We do not have the capacity . . . to accommodate the number of voters attempting to reach our department,” McCormack wrote the supervisors.

If voters cannot reach her office, McCormack said, they can call the city clerk in their communities to find the location of polling places. Democratic and Republican party headquarters also have precinct lists.

Dealing with absentee ballots isn’t the only challenge that McCormack’s office will face today. The process of getting millions of punch-card ballots from the 5,632 polling places in the nation’s most populous county is a monumental undertaking.

Ballots are driven from the precincts to one of 77 collection centers in the county. The Sheriff’s Department delivers ballots via patrol car from collection centers within 10 miles of the registrar-recorder’s headquarters. The remainder of the ballots are flown to Norwalk by helicopter from one of six heliports across the county.

Once there, county employees, assisted this year for the first time by hundreds of volunteers, will open ballot boxes and prepare the ballots for the computers, which actually tabulate the votes.

McCormack said voters will be given an “I voted” lapel sticker to demonstrate “pride in the voting process.”