Ballot Mix-Ups Leave Valley Voters Fuming

Several hundred San Fernando Valley voters who tried to cast ballots in school board races Tuesday discovered their candidates’ name was either missing or replaced by someone else’s, possibly providing losing candidates with grounds to contest the outcome.

At least six polling sites in the Valley were supplied with erroneous ballots, or ballots meant for other sites, according to reports from the city clerk’s office and voters. Apparently, ballots for the 4th District school board race were sent to some polling sites in the 6th District and vice versa.

“We had ballots from another group and another group had ours,” said a volunteer at the polling site at Vistas Retirement Facility in Van Nuys.

“People were very angry. They came to vote for their people and they couldn’t.”

The mix-ups weren’t restricted to the school board races nor to the Valley. At Park LaBrea, near the Fairfax District, election materials were missing. The wrong ballots were delivered to at least six locations in South Los Angeles.

Doors to a polling place in East Los Angeles were locked, forcing election volunteers to devise other options. In Councilman Nate Holden’s 10th District, at least one polling place did not open until after noon.

City Councilman Richard Alarcon said his father, Anthony Alarcon, couldn’t find his son’s name on the ballot in his North Hollywood neighborhood. Alarcon, who ran unopposed, said if there were one place where he would want to make sure he was on the ballot, “I guess it’s the one where your father votes.”

The councilman said many of his friends in that neighborhood knew which number to punch on the computerized ballot, and volunteers at the polls told voters Alarcon’s number if they asked about it.

Some of the other voting precincts in the Valley where voters reported problems were: El Camino Real High School and Calabash Street Elementary in Woodland Hills; Sherman Oaks United Methodist Church; a house site on Goodland Avenue in Studio City, and Riverside Drive Elementary in Sherman Oaks.

As luck would have it, it was the first day on the job for newly appointed City Clerk J. Michael Carey. Campaign workers for state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), who was challenging Mayor Richard Riordan, faxed a letter to the city listing problems at 15 balloting locations--including three at which some of the mayor’s campaign literature was found inside the voting booths.

“Whatever’s going on seems to be systematic, or systemwide. We’ve been getting calls from all over the city,” said Hayden campaign aide Rocky Rushing.

The foul-ups may open the door for losing candidates to contest the results, requesting a new election or another solution to the problem.

“There should be another run in June, all four of us,” said 4th District candidate Diana Dixon-Davis. “Because how many people were denied the right to vote for us?

“It’s a basic fundamental right that your name is supposed to appear on every ballot and they’ve taken that right away from us,” she said, complaining that the mix-up raises “too many questions about where, when and why things happened.”

While some voters wrote in their preferred candidate on the envelope provided with their ballots, others simply hurled insults at volunteers who sat helpless and without many solutions.

City employees delivered correct ballots in the morning and early afternoon to sites that reported problems. But voting sites like the Vistas retirement home did not get new ballots until 3 p.m. after more than 50 people had cast their ballots.

“We really had a tough job,” the volunteer at the retirement center said. People “were angry. They came for nothing.”

School board incumbent Julie Korenstein, one of four candidates running for the 6th District school board seat, said she received numerous calls from angry and confused voters.

“I had a parent call this morning at 7:45 just frantic because she had gone to vote early and discovered the problem,” she said.

City elections chief Kristin F. Heffron acknowledged there were more foul-ups than usual and attributed them to the complications from having on the ballot Proposition 8, a city charter overhaul measure that also featured 52 candidates for 15 seats on a commission to rewrite the hefty document that forms a constitution of sorts for the city. Different candidates ran for commission seats in each of the 15 council districts.

“We had different ballot materials for each district, not only for council races but also for commission races,” Heffron said.

That prompted a lot of last-minute work that limited the number of times volunteers could check the ballots, Heffron explained. There were also a large number of cancellations by volunteer election workers, which touched off a weeklong scramble to find new polling places.

But even with the confusion, Heffron said voters could have written the names of the candidates on the envelope. “People write in candidates all the time,” she said.

If voters didn’t write in their candidate’s name their vote was lost, Heffron explained. Heffron would not comment on the prospect of a special election because of the mistakes.

Times correspondent Dade Hayes and Times staff writer Jose Cardenas contributed to this story.

Election Coverage

* BOND: Burbank voted on two school board seats and a school repair bond measure. A18

* POLL: Electorate dominated by older whites but had historic percentage of Latinos. A17