Motor Voters?

Al Schwartz knew something was wrong the minute he glanced at his sample ballot--the address listed as his polling place for next month’s election wasn’t even in Los Angeles, much less his Chatsworth neighborhood.

Instead of his usual voting spot, the school 100 yards from his house, Schwartz was instructed to travel to the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation in Montebello--a full 45-minute freeway trek away.

“At first I believed it, and I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I am not going to drive 45 minutes to vote,’ ” Schwartz, 70, said Monday. “Then I thought about it more and realized, ‘No, even they could not think that someone would do that.’ ”

Schwartz was right. He is one of numerous northwest Valley residents who received comically erroneous sample ballots last week from the Los Angeles city clerk’s office. Some volunteer poll workers from Chatsworth were also notified in writing that they would have to go to Montebello.

City officials determined Monday that voters in two adjacent precincts in Chatsworth had received the mistaken information.

The Montebello address is a polling place, all right: It’s a location for residents in that city to vote in the Los Angeles Community College District election, which is part of the consolidated June city ballot. The college district serves areas both within and outside Los Angeles. Other issues going before Los Angeles voters next month include the proposed overhaul of the city charter, and several City Council races.

“We do use that location as a valid precinct, but as to how that happened, I do not know yet,” Joe Giles, the assistant chief of the city clerk’s elections division, said Monday. “Now our work begins. We will do a thorough review to make sure that nothing else went wrong.”

A similar snafu occurred earlier this year before the April primary, when city elections officials mailed wrong poll information to two precincts in the Torrance area.

But Giles cautioned that the mistakes should be seen in the larger context of the Gargantuan task before city officials. When mailing information to 1.9 million registered voters in more than 2,000 precincts, a few slip-ups are bound to happen, he said.

The important part, Giles said, is to correct them before the election. That is what city officials hope to do in Chatsworth by mailing postcards to 1,500 voters later this week listing their correct polling places. City officials usually mail such cards to voters as a courtesy when their voting locations change.

However, the notices may be overlooked by voters who, like Schwartz, wait until receiving a sample ballot to begin considering the issues in the election, often relying on the information it contains and taking it to the polls.

“I read these sample ballots to see about the people and their various axes to grind, and that’s when I begin to discuss things,” said Schwartz, who considers himself a frequent voter. “This kind of thing should never happen.”

Carol Hiestand, who also received one of the erroneous ballots in her Chatsworth mailbox, agreed. She hopes affected voters will learn before it is too late that they need not travel to Montebello to play their role in democracy.

“If we can go where we usually go, everything should be fine,” she said. “But this could be confusing to new voters. It’s not exactly going to get more people to the polls.”