Vote Chief to Be Quizzed

With Florida serving as a lively backdrop, county leaders in Orange County are taking second glances at the recent election and the person who oversaw the local vote count, county Registrar of Voters Rosalyn Lever.

And this is what county supervisors see: 40,000 sample ballots shipped late, a Libertarian misidentified as a Republican on the ballot, a precinct without any ballots and allegations of voter-day wrongs in Santa Ana.

On a different day and in a different county, these things might have been brushed aside. But Lever was just scolded in March for her office’s primary-election meltdown with delayed results and Web site problems.

Next month, supervisors will be calling Lever onto the carpet again.

Supervisor Todd Spitzer, disappointed with the registrar’s office after the March primary, said he will ask Lever to appear before the board at its Dec. 12 meeting to talk about “recurring problems.”

“As we all know,” Spitzer said, “Orange County voters were plagued with problems ranging from our failure to provide accurate sample ballots or our failure to provide any sample ballot at all, to our inability to provide requested absentee ballots.”

If the board wants better and quicker results, Lever has a message of her own: Get ready to dig deep. A pricey new vote-counting system, like the high-tech network used in neighboring Riverside County, could cost the county $30 million to $50 million.

“I can’t arbitrarily go out and spend that kind of money [without board approval],” Lever said.

Riverside became the state’s first county to conduct an election without paper ballots, and though there were apprehensions about the new technology, it worked, said Riverside registrar officials.

Lever, who was appointed by the board in 1995, is a well-respected administrator who was in charge of the office during a tumultuous period when former U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan alleged voting irregularities in 1996 had cost him a race against Loretta Sanchez. Sanchez won by 984 votes.

In a previous encounter with the board, Lever told supervisors the county’s 16-year-old system is accurate, but “old and slow.” She favors a state-of-the-art electronic system but has reservations because it lacks an “audit” trail feature that would allow her staff to double back and investigate how problems developed.

Supervisor Cynthia P. Coad recalled that after the primary election, Lever was asked whether more staff and new equipment was needed. “She said, ‘No,”’ recalled Coad. “She thought she could handle it.”

Coad believes the county is ready for an electronic paperless system, one that can be financed over a number of years.

Supervisor Jim Silva, whose son is in the military and stationed overseas, has his questions ready.

“How many people requested an absentee ballot when they knew they were going to be out of the area and didn’t get one? I ask because my son, stationed in Korea, who requested one on time, didn’t get one,” Silva said. “I’d like to know why.”

Silva said he understands that a lot of the registrar’s equipment is old but believes a replacement system could be purchased for less than $50 million.

“I think we could probably find [a new system] and update our system for much less than that,” he said.

Lever said people need to realize that in presidential elections--as Florida is vividly showing the nation--”things do happen and things do go wrong.”

For example, the company that printed Orange County’s sample ballots could not complete the job and notified Lever of the problem “very late” in the election schedule.

“We right away went to another company but consequently we were late sending some out,” she said.

A proofreading error at the registrar’s misidentified Libertarian Michael Chacon as a Republican on about 121,000 of the 450,000 sample ballots. Just the same, Chacon lost badly to Assemblyman Dick Ackerman, the GOP nominee. A new mailing of corrected ballots was sent out at a cost of $70,000.

Officials from both parties expressed consternation that some voters might not have voted or at least came away confused on how to vote because of the delays in mailing about 40,000 sample ballots to Spanish- and Vietnamese-speaking voters. County Democratic Party Chairwoman Jeanne Costales said party workers fielded “a ton” of calls from first-time voters in the Vietnamese community.

In a more serious charge, a coalition of Latino leaders has formed a legal team to investigate allegations that voters were harassed, intimidated and--in some cases--turned away from a Santa Ana voting booth by poll workers.

Lever said a precinct officer simply “decided not to work” on election day and failed to notify the registrar’s office or the polling place. The precinct officer, who had the ballots, never showed up and neither did the ballots, Lever said

Lever immediately sent people to the volunteer’s home address but it turned out to be a church. The worker was not there. Faced with a polling place that had no ballots, the registrar’s staff scurried to nearby polling sites and gathered extra ballots.

Voters who showed up to vote at the original site were given a choice: They could return later in the day when more ballots arrived or could vote at nearby precincts.

Though a candidate for a local school board claimed that five Spanish-speaking people were unable to vote, Lever said that despite the precinct’s problems, “No voters were turned away.”

Lever’s office also had to contend with 60,000 more requests for absentee ballots than ever before, 290,000 in all--about one-fifth of the 1,342,746 voters registered in Orange County. The previous high was 224,000 absentee ballots in 1998.