There but for the Grace of Election Gods ...

You think you can imagine how county election officials in South Florida are feeling?

Forget it, you don’t have a clue.

Rosalyn Lever, however, does.

She’s Orange County’s registrar of voters and, it just so happens, is in good spirits Thursday morning as we talk in her Grand Avenue office in Santa Ana.

And why not? No minicams, no TV microphones, no national and international press dogging her every move in the wake of the local ballot count.

In Lever’s world, that means she’s dodged another bullet.

Don’t think for a minute, though, that she hasn’t thanked her lucky stars as she ponders the plight of her Florida brethren.

“It could hit any one of us,” she says.

As the county’s top election official for the last 5 1/2 years, Lever has swum in the fishbowl. Four years ago, local, state and national Republicans challenged Loretta Sanchez’s victory over incumbent Rep. Bob Dornan. Allegations of widespread voter fraud, never proved, made Lever an overnight newsmaker.

Her report from having been there and done that: It ain’t fun.

“You can’t imagine the pressure they’re under,” she says of the Florida county election officials. “I’ve been in the spotlight before, but nothing on that kind of level. I mean, this is the president of the United States you’re talking about. . . . “

She then finishes that sentence with what is probably the unspoken mantra for county election officials: “ . . . and there is no perfect voting system out there.”

I ask if what they’re going through haunts every registrar.

“Yeah, it’s everyone’s nightmare,” she says. “And the first thing I would do [if it happened] is to contact the county counsel and have them advise me every step of the way.”

Registrar Has Been There

At 48, Lever has spent her adult life working on elections, a career she says she loves. She began as “extra help” in the office 28 years ago and rose to the top. She oversees an operation that will count more than 950,000 ballots--more than twice as many as in Palm Beach County, Fla.

Much like baseball umpires, no one pays attention to election officials--unless they goof up. Or, someone thinks they’ve goofed up.

“I will tell you that for every election, something happens,” Lever says. She gives the impression that the glass is always half empty during election season, because of the variety of things that can go wrong--many out of her range of control. In years past, she didn’t sleep much right before election night, “just because of all the tension leading up to it.”

She’s amazed at how quickly Florida has tried to wrap up its vote count. California counties have 28 days to certify their ballot counts.

Lever’s worst professional moments, without doubt, came in the aftermath of the 1996 Dornan-Sanchez race. Describing the pressure as “horrendous,” she says the personal vitriol from some quarters only added to the time-consuming allegations she had to try and track down.

That specter has led at least one of her two grown children to suggest that Lever no longer needs the aggravation. Her game plan is to put in no more than five more years--partly because she always wanted to retire young and partly because she has an uneasy feeling that, in her business, disasters always lurk and she has no desire to be featured nightly on MSNBC as a curious and restless nation looks on.

“The pressure seems to get more and more on us every single year,” she says of county election officials. “Elections in California are getting more and more complicated. The Legislature passes more and more bills that make it harder to administer an election. At some point, it [an election-night calamity] is going to happen in California, and it’s going to happen in a big county. And my hope is it doesn’t happen here.”

Maybe that’s why Lever seems to enjoy recounting this story:

After the Florida news broke, a Times reporter telephoned her to check on some of the more arcane ballot-box terminology.

Lever says, “I told her the terminology is, ‘Thank God it ain’t me.’ ”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.