Coining a Strategy: Heads I Win, Tails We Recount

A post-election update: Two candidates for Otay Water District Board in San Diego County each got 2,597 votes. Ruben Rodriguez and Jose A. Lopez agreed to decide the winner by a coin toss. Rodriguez lost, but wants a recount, which will cost him $3,000--about one 50-cent piece per vote.

San Diego City Councilman Jim Madaffer took office at noon on Dec. 4. In the middle of his swearing-in celebration, his aide was faxing news releases about all the things Madaffer was hard at work on for his constituents.

And former Oakland Assemblywoman Audie Bock was two days from leaving office when she took a trip. Bock, the first Green Party state legislator, ran as an independent and lost last month. This month, at the invitation of Mexico’s new president but at California taxpayer expense, she attended Vicente Fox’s inauguration.

There are some Californians who think that the way they raise and spend money, every party is the green party.

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College try: Two Claremont McKenna College seniors, conquering their disdain for Al Gore, this week launched a Web site encouraging people to send instant e-mail to Republican electors, urging them to break ranks and vote for Gore.

David Enrich is registered independent; his friend Matt Grossman is with the Natural Law Party. “Neither of us voted for Gore, neither of us likes Gore, neither of us particularly wants to see Gore as the next president--except for the fact he did win more votes than any other candidate.”

The government majors were sophomores when they built their original Web site, https://www.truedemocracy.org, discussing campaign finance reform, voter turnout and registration--and the electoral college.

“The electoral college always struck us as, first, unfair and undemocratic, and second, as something that’s really interfering with people connecting to politics,” says Enrich.

When preelection buzz had Gore winning the electoral vote and Bush winning the popular vote, “we started to compile a list of Gore electors and contact info to post it on our Web site to ask them to put patriotism above partisanship and vote for Bush.”

Then the opposite happened. “We scrambled around and tracked down as many states’ [Republican] electors as we could,” ultimately listing 172 from 18 states. The new Web site, https://www.votewithamerica.com, lets people send instant e-mail to 54 online electors.

They’ve talked with many electors recently, and “every single interaction has been positive,” says Enrich--but none has pledged to switching that vote.

Bad enough that this drama is playing out during finals week. Even worse: no extra credit.

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Tell it to the Marines--and the judge: The Army sergeant and the young potential Marine recruit bumped shoulders in the hallway of a military recruiting office in Merced.

When it was over, the sergeant was under arrest on suspicion of three felonies and three misdemeanors involving a handgun and an aluminum baseball bat.

Merced County Deputy Dist. Atty. Bruce Gilbert says the jostling on Nov. 14 left Sgt. Gregory Earl Anderson feeling that he deserved an apology, and he made some remark to a Marine about “what kind of low-class people you’re recruiting here.”

That’s all it was--until Anderson drove off in an Army car and came back with the bat and gun. He waved the gun, said Gilbert, then began playing batter up. A fellow soldier tried to calm him down, but Gilbert says he kept swinging for the two Marines there. One man was slightly injured, some door molding was badly splintered, said Gilbert, and Anderson may be looking at some time in the county’s stockade.

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One-offs: San Francisco’s mushroom fair, with samples, recipes and an exhibit of a poisonous death cap mushroom, drew hundreds of fungus fans. . . . Less than a month after a Sacramento Bee political writer was fired for making up quotes and sources, the San Jose Mercury News said that a former summer intern wrote articles describing more than a dozen people whose existence cannot be verified. . . . Merchants in a Placer County shopping center are outraged that an adult video and lingerie store plans to move into a space between a children’s clothing shop and a toy store.

EXIT LINE

“Palm Springs is the best example.”

--Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s white-shoe attorney Ted Olson gets his white-shoe resorts mixed up in his Supreme Court remarks Monday about the election in Palm Beach.

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California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

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The Pumpkin State

Satisfying the nation’s appetite for pumpkin pies, California produced 56,752 tons of pumpkins last year, or about 25% of the country’s crop. The value, which varies according t o the purpose for which pumpkins are grown, totaled more than $9.8 million. Top counties in 1999:

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County Tons Value to Growers 1 San Joaquin 40,800 $5.8 million 2 Sacramento 4,396 $440,000 3 Stanislaus 4,100 $491,000 4 San Mateo 2,677 $410,000 5 Santa Clara 2,387 $1.1 million 6 Riverside 1,200 $142,800 7 Ventura 1,192 $225,000

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Source: California Agricultural Statistics Service

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times