Trial Drones On, One Signature Moment at a Time

This is the boiler room of the legal process, its unglamorous side, the trenches.

Several hundred votes cast in Compton’s June mayoral election are being challenged as illegal, so now a judge, city officials and several attorneys are reviewing them.

One at a time.

Last June, Eric Perrodin ran against incumbent Omar Bradley in the Compton mayoral race. Perrodin won by 261 votes. Bradley filed a lawsuit challenging the election.

The early days of the trial, which started in November, were classic courtroom theater. Accusations of conspiracy and voter fraud flew, and news cameras bobbed after attorneys exiting the courtroom. A star witness, expected to support Bradley’s case, stunned the courtroom by offering damaging testimony against him instead.

Two months later, the star witnesses and the cameras are gone. Absent as well are the impassioned speech, the shouted objection, the pounded gavel.

Bradley’s attorney, Bradley Hertz, is still trying to overturn the election, not in one fell swoop, but ballot by painstakingly examined ballot.

He says signatures on at least 560 voter registration documents don’t match those on absentee ballots and precinct rosters, and that Compton City Clerk Charles Davis abused his discretion by allowing those votes to be counted.

For the past week, Superior Court Judge Judith C. Chirlin has tried to determine if those votes, cast in June, contested in August and hauled to court in boxes in November, should count.

Each day is nearly the same. In the morning, Davis takes the stand. The signatures from the voter registration cards and other documents are paired for comparison and placed on an overhead projector.

Like bugs under a microscope, they transform into impossibly complicated creatures, bristling with legs and spines.

On Tuesday, Hertz had questions. As he does every time a pair of signatures flashes on the screen, he argued the signatures didn’t match.

“Mr. Davis,” he said, “do you notice any differences in the ‘G’ in these two signatures?”

Davis, Compton’s city clerk since 1973, had examined the day’s batch of signatures beforehand and made notes.

“Yes, it appears to be more spread out on the ballot envelope,” he said. Still, he said, they were a match.

Letter by letter, the comparison continues. First name, middle initial, last name.

The attorneys and judge compare the quirks of penmanship, in all their variety. Letters tilted at odd angles, bunched together in clumps, veering off in corkscrew flourishes.

Silent under the scrutiny, the paired groupings of loops and whorls are poked and prodded for clues. Were they both created by the hand of the legally registered voter they are supposed to represent?

After Davis gives his opinion, Judge Chirlin agrees, disagrees or postpones her judgment, placing the votes in piles designated “legal,” “illegal” and “questionable.”

The line separating the three is in the eye of the beholder. “Mr. Davis,” Hertz asked again, “does the upper signature appear stronger or more vibrant than the lower one?”

“I guess it’s all subjective,” Davis replied, “but I would have accepted this one.”

There is no cross-examination, but Bruce Gridley, the attorney for Compton, weighs in occasionally.

“Is the court commenting,” he asked on Tuesday, “as to whether it agrees there is a similarity in the ‘Gs’ and the ‘Ls’ in these signatures?”

The lack of theater had one courtroom observer’s head lolling as he nodded in and out of consciousness that morning, barely an hour into the proceedings.

But for the vigilant, unexpected details, some of them fascinating, emerge.

The signature of one Jose Ledesma rose at a sharp angle on one document and was level on another.

Davis pointed out a notation on the ballot indicating that Ledesma was blind, and guessed that he had been assisted with the signature that was level.

One of Simon Goss’ signatures appeared much smoother than the other. Davis noted that the clean signature was made in 1978, when Goss was 36.

“His signature has changed quite a bit, but that happens as you get older,” Davis said.

Last week, absentee ballots were examined. This week, the scrutiny has turned to signatures on voting precinct rosters that were flagged as questionable by the county registrar’s office. The courtroom process, orderly if not speedy, remains the same.

And so it goes on the fifth floor of downtown’s Superior Court, a battle for the mayoralty of a city of 93,000, fought letter by letter.

“It may seem boring from an observer’s point of view,” said Gridley. “But with something as essential as the right to vote, you have to do it right.”

In five days of testimony, 80 votes have been declared illegal, 126 legal and 26 questionable.

Only a few hundred more to go.