City Clerk Will Investigate Ballot Mix-Ups, Other Election Irregularities

Amid higher-than-usual incidents of polling place foul-ups--and even some hint of possible sabotage in at least one precinct--Los Angeles City Clerk J. Michael Carey on Tuesday night said he will investigate irregularities in the municipal primary.

Carey said he does not believe the problems that kept some voters from casting ballots Tuesday were widespread enough to have affected the outcome of any of the contests, even in the expected close races for seats on a proposed charter-rewriting commission.

“Normally we have problems in 20 to 35 precincts. This time it was between 40 and 45,” said Carey, noting that that is a small fraction of the 2,302 precincts in the primary.

Typically, logistic problems cause some polls to open late and there are also some mix-ups in election materials that put the wrong ballots in a handful of polling places, Carey said. But this year it took longer than usual to get the problems straightened out, increasing the chances that some voters could not get back to the polls in time to cast ballots, he added.

Additionally, at least one volunteer precinct worker reported getting a telephone call, from someone purporting to be from the city, telling him his services were not required, Carey said.

Asked if he suspected sabotage, Carey said, “I hope not. I hope it was our mistakes in putting [ballot materials] together, but we will definitely investigate.”

The biggest problems appear to have occurred in the 9th Council District, running from downtown through South-Central Los Angeles. Some of the ballots had pages missing or had the wrong pages, depriving some who voted early of their chance to choose among Councilwoman Rita Walters and challengers Peter Torres and Addie Miller.

There were also reports of voter harassment in some 9th District polling places and police were called to some locations, Carey said. He did not have details Tuesday night.

Candidate Torres, however, said he and his campaign workers observed numerous irregularities. In a number of locations, ballot boxes were unlocked and one was sliced open, he said.

Latino voters, he said, were being intimidated and not allowed to vote if they did not have identification, which is a violation of election regulations, he said.

At Trinity Recreational Park, which has the highest percentage of Latino voters of all 92 precincts in the 9th District, and at other locations, voters complained to him that they were being turned away because they did not have identification, he said.

At other locations, voters said they were turned away from the polls because precinct workers claimed that they had run out of ballots, Torres said.

Coincidentally, Tuesday was also the day the City Council unanimously followed Mayor Richard Riordan’s recommendation to give Carey the city clerk’s job, a position he has held unofficially since Elias Martinez stepped down last year.

Scores of problems and complaints awaited him--not unexpected in an election with 2,302 precincts (1,932 in the city plus those for the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles Community College District, which the city oversees).

But city elections chief Kristin F. Heffron said: “We do have a little more [trouble] than usual.” She attributed the problems to the complications of having Proposition 8 on the ballot. The measure featured 52 candidates for 15 seats on a commission to rewrite the City Charter. Different candidates ran for commission seats in each of the 15 City Council districts.

“We had different ballot materials for each district, not only for council races but also for commission races,” Heffron said. Adding to the difficulty was an unusually high number of cancellations by volunteer election workers, which in some cases touched off a week-long scramble to find new polling places.

“The calls started coming in a week ago, almost faster than we could write them down,” Heffron said, adding that she could not explain what caused the last-minute cancellations.

Among some of the problems:

* Missing election materials for at least one Park La Brea polling place, in Ferraro’s 4th District, and isolated incidents of council members’ names turning up on ballots in other lawmakers’ districts (most of which could be remedied well before the polls closed).

* Late openings at two polling places in Councilman Nate Holden’s 10th District. Holden complained that it was 12:30 p.m. before materials arrived at one location and 10:15 a.m. before another polling place was unlocked.

* No Spanish-speaking volunteers at a Pico-Union polling place in Councilman Mike Hernandez’s 1st District.

* The omission of 7th District Councilman Richard Alarcon’s name from the ballot in the North Hollywood precinct where his father voted.

Times staff writers Miles Corwin, Lucille Renwick and Jose Cardenas contributed to this story.