Count Slowed as Monitors for 2 Candidates Contest Ballots

Nearly a dozen monitors for Assembly candidates Tony Strickland and Roz McGrath crowded behind clerks at the Ventura County registrar of voters office Thursday, challenging the validity of 20 absentee ballots and slowing the review of 20,000 ballots expected to decide the closest local race in years.

Republican Strickland leads Democrat McGrath by 346 votes out of 89,536 counted so far in the 37th Assembly District. The race is not expected to be decided until Monday, when late-arriving absentee ballots are finally tabulated.

The 20 challenged ballots represent such a tiny fraction of the 5,000 reviewed Thursday that county elections chief Bruce Bradley said the candidates’ monitoring is a waste of everyone’s time.

“I don’t think the challenges will make any difference,” he said. “There’s usually no good basis for the challenge. I’m sure we’re going to rule that most of those 20 are valid.”

So far, Strickland’s representatives say they have challenged 18 votes and McGrath has challenged two. The basis of the challenges is that the signatures on the absentee ballots do not match those on the voters’ registration cards.

On its own, Bradley’s office has disqualified 358 absentee ballots because signatures did not match, there were no signatures or the voter had moved.

Partisan challenges of absentee ballots are not unusual in close races statewide, and four or five are occurring in close Assembly races this week.

But Bradley said this could be the first in Ventura County, although a 1984 congressional race and a 1990 county supervisor’s race were just as close.

Thursday’s monitoring was marked by claims by McGrath’s campaign consultant, Phil Giarrizzo, that the Strickland camp was focusing its challenges on Oxnard Latinos, who are heavily Democratic. McGrath won Oxnard by more than 6,000 votes.

“It’s a very specific program to impact Latino Democrats,” Giarrizzo said. “We weren’t there to challenge, we were there just to observe. But then they started their challenges.”

By afternoon, an attorney representing the Democrats was at the registrar’s office to oversee the process.

Strickland’s campaign consultant, Joe Giardiello, said voters’ ethnicity and their cities of residence had nothing to do with which ballots his group challenged.

“We haven’t targeted any particular area or group,” he said. “If the signature’s bad, the signature’s bad. It’s pretty obvious. Who knows the reason? Maybe the husband drops off the wife’s ballot and she forgot to sign it, so he does.”

Mike Madrid, political director of the Ronald Reagan California Republican Center, said he was at the Ventura election center to make sure that the process works as it should.

“We’re not trying to disqualify ballots,” he said. “All we’re doing is watching the democratic process unfold.”

Over the next few days, the registrar’s office will review 38,000 absentee ballots for validity. An additional 3,500 questionable ballots with improper voter addresses or polling places will be reviewed, and about half will qualify to be counted, Bradley said. Another 500 damaged ballots will also be tallied.

In all, more than 40,000 votes will be counted, about half in the 37th Assembly District.

At one point Thursday, 11 monitors from the two campaigns were looking over the election workers’ shoulders, Bradley said.

“Right now, it’s not a big deal except it hinders us in doing our job, slowing us down,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘Don’t pass on that signature. I want to check it.’ ”

Bradley said 17,000 of the 38,000 absentee ballots were processed Wednesday. But just 5,000 were reviewed Thursday, partly because of the monitoring. Still, he expects final votes to be counted by 4 p.m. Monday since his staff will work Saturday.

“You know, we haven’t had this before, and it’s not conducive to a happy working environment,” he said. “But it’s part of the process.”