Mercer Lead a Surprise in Braude’s Old District

In a surprise finish to the hotly contested 11th City Council District race Tuesday, community activist Georgia Mercer finished ahead of longtime council aide Cindy Miscikowski, ensuring a runoff election in June.

While there was little suspense in the other council races, which saw all incumbents returned to office, Councilman Mike Hernandez won reelection despite a surprisingly tough challenge by Rose Marie Lopez, a former aide to ex-Councilman Art Snyder.

Meanwhile, alarmed at an unusually high number of polling place problems that kept some voters from casting ballots, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday directed the city’s top elections official to expedite his probe of what went wrong and make recommendations for improvements.

No contest turned out to be tighter Tuesday night than the one to replace retiring Councilman Marvin Braude, whose 11th District includes parts of the Westside and the San Fernando Valley. From the onset, political experts predicted the race was Miscikowski’s to lose.

Miscikowski served as Braude’s top aide for years, and had money and endorsements from numerous Los Angeles council members and homeowners groups.

But as the race wore on she faced an increasingly tough challenger in Mercer, a 55-year-old community activist who once worked for Mayor Richard Riordan and who shares many of the same political traits as Miscikowski.

In the end, Mercer, of Tarzana, managed to garner 41% of the votes, or 759 more than Miscikowski, a Brentwood resident.

At a news conference Wednesday at her Encino headquarters, Mercer quickly began drawing distinctions between herself and her opponent.

“Yesterday’s results, I believe, were a statement by the voters that they see two quality candidates for this office, but the majority would prefer someone who can bring fresh thinking and fresh ideas to the City Council,” Mercer said. “I view City Hall through the eyes of the community, while my opponent sees the community through the eyes of City Hall.”

Supported by her connections to the Jewish community and backed by the Democratic Central Committee and numerous union organizations, Mercer ran a controversial campaign, featuring mailers that painted Miscikowski as having an “open door” to lobbyists and developers.

“I think we had to expect the negative campaign was going to [include] a hit. . . . I was pleased it wasn’t any more than that,” Miscikowski said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s a horse race now.”

In hopes of winning the seat, Miscikowski, 48, said she would work harder to remind voters of the reforms she has helped push through, including the passage of ballot measures banning oil drilling off the coast and limiting development.

A key question is whether either candidate will win the backing of Mayor Richard Riordan, who received a whopping 72% of the ballots cast Tuesday in the 11th District.

City Hall sources say the mayor had been lobbied hard by both campaigns to make an endorsement before the primary. But with the pressure for his own reelection now off, the potential benefits to the mayor have dwindled, and most observers said Riordan is likely to stay mum.

Perhaps most important is the potential embarrassment factor: Despite his sweeping reelection, Tuesday’s results sent a mixed message to the mayor because his choice for city attorney lost and the charter commission candidates he backed were largely unsuccessful.

Riordan staffers were silent Wednesday, saying only that they would probably discuss the political landscape in the 11th District over the next few days.

In other races, Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr. defeated three candidates in the harbor-area district, while Councilwoman Laura Chick defeated Mort Diamond in the West Valley. Voters also reelected Richard Alarcon, Mike Feuer and Jackie Goldberg, all of whom ran unopposed.

While no upsets materialized Tuesday, a novice candidate racked up an impressive chunk of the vote in the predominantly Latino 1st District near downtown Los Angeles.

With a budget of about $45,000 (half from city matching funds), Lopez took more than 41% of the vote, while Councilman Hernandez won his third successful bid for the office with 56%.

Although Lopez was making her first run for elected office, she got some powerful help from her former boss, county Supervisor Gloria Molina. Molina endorsed Lopez, an aide for six years while Molina was on the City Council, and helped with fund-raising. She also appeared prominently in at least one of the several campaign mailers Lopez sent likely voters in the historically low-turnout district.

Lopez also was a City Hall aide to former 14th District Councilman Art Snyder for 12 years before he resigned to become a lobbyist.

But the Hernandez camp said it was the negative tone of Lopez’s campaign--and the councilman’s own determination not to fight back in kind--that cut into his victory margin.

“It’s a lot easier to wreck things than to build,” Hernandez said in an interview Wednesday. “When you’re running against an incumbent with as favorable a reputation as mine, you’ve got to knock them down.”

Back at City Hall on Wednesday, City Clerk J. Michael Carey was summoned to the council chamber for a rundown on problems, ranging from late polling place openings to missing or switched ballot sections.

The lawmakers voted unanimously to seek a detailed report, giving Carey two weeks to complete the task and come up with proposals to stem future problems.

“I really want by the June [municipal general] election to be able to assure people that they will be able to vote,” said Councilwoman Rita Walters, whose 9th District suffered the most--and the most serious--glitches Tuesday.

Late Wednesday afternoon, the mayor’s office released a letter from Riordan to Carey in which the mayor said he “fully supports” the council’s call for a probe and outlined several areas of concern.

Those included reports that voters may have been improperly turned away for not producing identification and the mayor’s concern over how votes were to be handled that were cast for charter reform commission candidate Helen Bernstein, a Riordan endorsee who was killed in a traffic accident last week.

Carey said he did not believe the incidents were widespread enough to affect outcomes in any of the races. But he said there were indications that at least one precinct worker had been fraudulently called and told not to report for duty, and in several cases pages were missing from ballot materials.

Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.