Voters Find Selves Riveted or Revolted by Florida Recounts

Remember voter inertia?

The mantra that the presidential campaigns were as scripted as reruns? The idea that the two major parties were so indistinguishable it didn’t matter which won?

Many Southern Californians don’t feel that way now. Here in the Hollywood-driven world where some were turned off by the hyper-eroticized impeachment hearings, voters are electrified by chads, butterfly ballots and Palm Beach senior citizens.

Some people are even comparing the postelection fervor to O.J.

Others, though, are tired of it all. “I’ve stopped watching the election,” said Lisa Tomko, 34, of Irvine. “The longer people are in ambiguity, the worse it gets. There has got to be a better process.”

“When people are left to draw their own conclusions or speculate, then chaos happens,” said Tomko, who tuned out the coverage on TV five days ago.

At a Costa Mesa cafe, Jeff Williams, 32, of Newport Beach declared that he was “totally over it. I’m not following it minute by minute. Let’s just get on with it.

“Considering that we are the most technologically advanced country in the world, you would think we would have this [election process] a little more streamlined.”

Gore supporter David Kramer, 52, of Newport Beach acknowledged that he wasn’t well-versed on the electoral college before the election.

“I took civics back in high school, but I didn’t actually have a grasp on it,” Kramer said. “By reading the paper I’ve learned something.”

“At this point, I don’t care who wins,” said Kramer, who gave up on watching TV reports closely after the first week of coverage. “Both candidates have political parties behind them that don’t know how to bow out gracefully.”

Still, from chat rooms to coffeehouses, some people who finally figured out how the electoral college works are debating its legitimacy with the conviction of constitutional scholars. For many, the postelection limbo suspending Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore has been a dizzyingly brutal lesson in the truth behind a once-lifeless cliche:

Every vote counts.

Nonvoter Vows to Change His Habits

Costa Mesa cafe manager Gary Rodriguez, 25, didn’t cast a ballot on election day but vows to change his ways.

“Now that people know that their vote could make a difference, I think they will become more interested the next time,” Rodriguez said. “Not only have I learned a lesson, but I think a lot of people have.”

Rodriguez said he will pay more attention to local issues as well.

“In Fullerton, where I live, I saw signs that said ‘yes’ and signs that said ‘no’. I had no clue about what the issues were,” he said. “I know that I’ve got to take the time to educate myself on this.”

At a West Los Angeles cafe, interest was still high. “It went from the most incredibly boring campaign to the most incredibly exciting election,” said Jerry Rosen, 50, a training consultant.

That marks a sea change from the outright indifference with which many Southern Californians greeted the proceedings to impeach President Clinton just before Christmas two years ago.

Then, many went out of their way to avoid the spectacle of a U.S. Capitol obsessed with sex, lies and Linda Tripp’s tapes. Even the bizarre emergence of porn king Larry Flynt as a Clinton ally aroused just a flicker of morbid interest.

Now, with sex out of the equation and Thanksgiving on the table, politics are sizzling.

“Tell me another time all the stations carried a legal proceeding that was this widely watched since O.J.,” said Donna Bojarsky, a political consultant in Westside Los Angeles, a rarefied bastion of high-stakes Democratic fund-raising where O.J. allusions have heft.

Spawning of Urban Political Legends

“I think the nation is riveted,” she said. “It’s about something. . . . The previously hackneyed phrase ‘every vote counts’ will never mean the same thing again.”

Arnie Steinberg, a Calabasas-based Republican political strategist with a polling firm, said the “voyeuristic curiosity” about the recount is spawning a whole new class of political urban legends.

“I’m stunned when I talk to people . . . They repeat to me the wildest rumors about what’s happening in Florida,” Steinberg said. “These are educated, otherwise informed people who will say things to me like ‘the election in Florida was fixed.’ People pick up on these rumors and they become fact and it just increases the suspicion.”

For Lataunya Rouse, an Inglewood security guard, it’s all elections, all the time. Rouse watches the latest vote-count judicial decisions in Florida on television, listens to them on the radio and reads about them in the newspaper. When she’s patrolling out on the street, she gets cell phone updates from her friends.

In the process, she’s gotten so lathered up she was planning to call CNN and volunteer as a populist pundit.

“It’s crazy. It’s really crazy,” she said. “I’m 35, and I’ve never seen an election like this. There’s some kind of hogwash going on.

“It’s much deeper than O.J. It’s about people’s perceptions. If Bush gets in there on fraud, he’ll be there wrongly. If Gore gets in it’ll be because he whined and got his votes recounted. And it’s all unfair to us, the people.”

In Wilmington and San Pedro, strong pro-Democratic union enclaves that are home to the largest locals of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, longshoremen said they were paying close attention to the episodic recount battle in Florida. Some said the postelection difficulties exposed flaws in the process that must be addressed.

“What’s all the hurry? We got time for recounts,” said Joe Radisich, chairman of the ILWU’s political action committee. “There’s a lot of hypocrisy out there. The Republicans are complaining about the time it’s been taking. But they wasted the nation’s time for a year with Clinton’s impeachment.

Maybe. But some election fatigue may be starting to creep in.

Atiba Sylvia Thomas, 53, said this election is a particularly sensitive topic for her because of America’s history of preventing African Americans from getting an equal opportunity to vote.

“My people died to vote,” she said. “But I thought the system was working. I can’t believe I’d be so naive.”

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Times staff writers Dan Weikel, Joe Mozingo and Gina Piccalo contributed to this report.