Final Tally Is What Counts for Voting Chief

At this time, he’s the bureaucrat in the eye of the storm, the official at the center of a beehive of activity.

One minute, county elections boss Bruce Bradley is stung by a voter who didn’t get a sample ballot. The next voter complains about an absentee ballot delayed in the mail. Then a precinct volunteer calls to bow out of the Tuesday election.

“The phone rings 1,000 times a day,” moans Bradley, a stocky 58-year-old with a curmudgeonly humor, “and it’s always something wrong. There are 385,000 registered voters out there, and they don’t call up to say they don’t have a problem.”

Bradley, director of elections for Ventura County since 1991, takes those calls. Or he returns them. He patrols his 10-worker office nervously. He doesn’t hide inside his glass office, on which there is no door, instead making sure he can see what’s going on outside and that workers can walk on in.

Which is to say that he takes his job seriously and is accessible: a good thing for a bureaucrat.

“He really cares about the voting process. He wants people to vote,” said Olivia Lopez, who has worked with Bradley for 20 years. “He’s very involved in everything. And he’s approachable. He’s available to people who come to the counter. And we don’t have to screen his calls. He takes them all.”

Bradley is also a worrywart.

As election day approaches, he’s worried about staffing 432 precinct polling stations with 1,700 workers.

He’s worried about hiring 50 laborers to tote ballots in 432 boxes off trucks to computers for counting. He’s worried the computers may fail, or the trucks may break down. It has all happened before.

“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” he said, “but it’s also the most stressful. There are so many things you just can’t put off. It’s an important job, so you can’t goof off.”

Bradley thinks back to November 1992, when everything seemed to be going well. Then the job sneaked up and bit him on the bottom.

Bradley crossed the yes and no wires, reversing Ventura County’s votes reported to the secretary of state’s office on 13 state ballot propositions.

“I don’t know of any other county that screwed up, but I did,” Bradley said with typical candor. “I linked their yes line to my no, and vice versa. This was the first time we’d plugged into the state computer. And I made a mistake.”

So he worries.

That doesn’t make him a bad boss, colleagues say, just a conscientious one.

He takes his job so seriously that he’s no longer a member of any political party.

“I’m a decline-to-state.”

He was once a Republican, like his father. But he changed that because people were always asking him to speak at Republican functions.

“I don’t want people to think I represent any party, or point of view,” he said. “I want them to see me as the ultimate bureaucrat.”

But unlike the anonymous bureaucrat, Bradley doesn’t run from controversy.

When he learned that Community Memorial Hospital had spent more than $2 million on Measure O in a bid to wrest $260 million in tobacco settlement money from county government, he was typically pointed.

“Unless you are a Silicon Valley dot-com king, how can you afford to compete with that?” he said. “What would they have done with that $2 million? Treat patients?”

He’s fearless as a prognosticator. Not that he’s always right on the mark.

In the March primary, he said only 43% of voters would turn out. “The man’s optimistic,” he said of Secretary of State Bill Jones’ 52% projection. Then Proposition 22, the anti-gay marriage initiative, helped prove Jones correct.

“I have no ability to gauge what’s going on in the churches,” Bradley said. “I’m a numbers cruncher. I turn on CNN for [analysis].”

So what will the local turnout be this time? About 80%, he says.

Who will win the presidency this time?

“It’s Kennedy-Nixon all over again,” he said. “I’m glad Mayor Daley isn’t still in charge of Chicago. It’s a horse race. And people are interested.”

What will happen with Measure O?

It’s a tossup too, he said. But Bradley challenges the conventional wisdom that conservative, affluent east county voters, with their two private hospitals, might vote for the initiative because they have less need for the county hospital safety net.

“People said the same thing about the Weldon Canyon landfill,” Bradley said, referring to the unsuccessful 1996 initiative to build a dump near Ojai. “They said that Simi Valley wouldn’t care, but Simi Valley overwhelmingly defeated it.”

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Profile of Bruce Bradley

Age: 58

Residence: Ventura

Occupation: Ventura County elections chief

Education: Bachelor’s degree in history, University of Connecticut, 1964

Background: Captain, Air Force, 1964-70; manager, Montgomery Ward, 1970-80; supervisor of elections, Ventura County, 1980-91; assistant registrar of voters, 1991-present.

Hobbies: Hiking and fishing. Boating at Lake Casitas. Reading newspapers and magazines. Most recent book was “Pillars of Wisdom” by T. E. Lawrence.

Personal: Married to Misty Bradley, a clinical social worker, for 31 years. Daughter Ginger Paschal, 36, is a biology teacher at Buena High School. Son Bruce Bradley, 29, is public relations director for the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Ventura County.