For Workers Still Counting Ballots, Election Is Far From Over

Al Checchi, Jane Harman and Darrell Issa can take their time thinking over their tactics, their speeches and what else they could have done with all that cash--for them, the primary election is over.

For a few dozen county workers, it is not.

They must count 100,000 more ballots, including those that could determine the outcome of the race for a San Fernando Valley state Senate seat between Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon and former Assemblyman Richard Katz.

Thursday marked the start of the county’s post-election canvass, the marathon of collating, copying and paper-pushing that will ultimately yield the official results of the primary.

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For the employees of the county registrar-recorder’s office in Norwalk it meant the mind-numbing task of tallying the ballots not counted in Tuesday’s primary, and a complete accounting of the 3,731,710 ballot slips issued to polling stations from Lancaster to Long Beach.

County workers also must tally ballots from 1% of the 4,856 precincts by hand and measure the results against the computer to ensure the accuracy of the electronic counting system.

For up to 28 days, they will wrestle with envelopes and sort ballot cards for 10 hours a day, seven days a week. They must separate the wheat from the chaff, discarding ballots that came in unsigned or after the Tuesday night deadline.

“We’re very tired and we don’t get to slow down,” said Conny B. McCormack, Los Angeles County’s registrar-recorder/county clerk.

The last-minute ballots, to some, are the flotsam washed ashore by a wave of electoral procrastination and carelessness: There are the absentee ballots delivered the day of the primary, the provisional ballots issued to voters with unverified registrations, and the damaged ballots--torn, crumpled or rendered inscrutable to the county’s electronic card reading machines.

To Steve Logan, head document receiver, the absentee ballots represent something else, something sacred--a thoughtful electorate.

“I feel it’s people that want to take their time,” Logan said. “They really want to look at the ballot. I really feel they put more thought into it.”

But whether the ballots were considered carefully or not, pressure is mounting for Logan and his staff to get them counted. Quickly.

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That was underscored promptly at 8:05 a.m. Thursday, when an “observer” for former legislator Katz--who according to Tuesday’s results is losing his race against Alarcon--walked into the third-floor office where workers were examining last-minute ballots.

Both Katz and Alarcon predicted that the results would be close but neither expected the winner to be decided by absentee ballots. Katz’s campaign, however, did devote some resources to appealing to absentee voters, reminding them to vote just before the election.

Looking over Logan’s shoulder, Katz campaign manager Dennis Petrie saw a ballot delivered to the polls by a relative of the voter.

“Will this one be counted?” Petrie asked.

Logan told him it would.

“OK. OK, fine,” Petrie said.

He turned out to be the first of a dozen consultants, lawyers and other political aides to visit the registrar-recorder Thursday in the name of one of the county’s four still-competing candidates. Assemblywoman Grace Napolitano and former political aide James Casso are in a close race in the 34th Congressional District.

Alarcon attorney Frederic Woocher said he wants “to be comfortable with the process. There’s not much, frankly, we can do at this stage. It’s the people’s responsibility to vote, and they’ve done that already.”