Recorder Rejects Petitions on Term Limits for County Supervisors

An initiative to impose term limits on members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors died abruptly Tuesday, falling 1,120 signatures short of the roughly 197,000 needed to qualify it for the November ballot.

If passed by voters, the measure would have limited supervisors to two four-year terms and stripped them of the power to draw their own districts.

Critics charge that the supervisors’ seats are now essentially lifetime jobs--no elected incumbent supervisor has been defeated at the polls in 20 years, and all three who are up for reelection this year are running unopposed.

Petition organizer Christopher Skinnell said he was floored by the announcement at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

“We needed 197,000 signatures, roughly, and we turned in almost 300,000, so we felt pretty confident that we were easily going to meet that number,” said Skinnell, chairman of Voters Organized for Trustworthy Elections, which began gathering signatures in December. “So it was quite a shock.”

Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said more than a third of the signatures submitted were deemed invalid. Most people simply could not be found--either they were not registered or their signatures were illegible. Others were registered at the wrong address, and more than 17,000 signatures were found to be duplicates.

Verifying all the signatures on the term-limits petition--the largest ever submitted in Los Angeles County--required a “Herculean effort” by the county clerk’s office, McCormack said. Most petitions can be declared valid or invalid on the basis of a 3% statistical sample. But the term-limits petition was too close to call, requiring that all 298,164 signatures be checked in 19 days.

“It meant bringing on temps, it meant putting off a lot of the other election work and pulling some of the recorder staff,” said McCormack. “We had night shifts, we did everything. We loaded the signature software onto machines that we’ve never loaded it onto before. We had people all over the building working on this thing.”

In addition to hiring about 50 temporary workers, McCormack had as many as 189 staffers working 8- to 10-hour weekend shifts to meet their deadline, costing the registrar-recorder’s office as much as $250,000 in overtime pay and other associated costs.

Skinnell said he would contest the ruling. Today, his group will begin going over the invalidated signatures in hopes of overturning enough of them to reverse the decision.

“It’s a typical thing that when you collect signatures, you’re going to get people that aren’t registered in the county,” he said. “But for one out of every three to be invalid, that is, from what I understand, amazingly high.”

On Nov. 7, voters will still be able to decide on one county measure, a proposal to expand the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members.

As it now stands, the board is the county’s most powerful elected body. Each supervisor represents nearly 2 million people--more than many U.S. senators--and the board oversees the county’s $15-billion budget.

Critics say that the reason incumbent supervisors are rarely challenged is that mounting an election campaign in such massive districts is so expensive.

“The burden of a challenger to run against an incumbent is so great that it’s not really a competitive election process,” Skinnell said. “The only time the supervisors leave office is if they retire or die.”