County Registrar-Recorder Staff Works Its Way Out of Hot Seat

It all boiled down to a simple, two-page fax Wednesday afternoon. That was the result of weeks spent painstakingly reviewing hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles area petitions to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

At 1:15 p.m., Conny McCormack, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder, sent the short affidavit to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley’s office in Sacramento. In it, McCormack confirmed that 275,544 of the 331,513 petition signatures received by the county had been deemed valid. The Los Angeles total was more than a quarter of the 986,858 needed statewide to qualify the recall for the ballot.

“We’re done,” McCormack said in her seventh-floor office in her department’s Norwalk headquarters.

And as crowds gathered in Sacramento to hear Shelley certify the historic recall election, election officials in Los Angeles County could enjoy their first quiet afternoon in a while.

For the last two weeks, McCormack’s team of 250 election workers had been plowing through the recall work, many of them hand-counting the petition signatures in a single locked room.

Then they had to compare a random sample of 9,945 petition signatures against voter registration records, looking for fraudulent or incomplete documents. By the time they finished late Tuesday night, the election staffers had found 1,679 were invalid, a statistic that projected 83.1% of all the petitions the county received were valid. On Wednesday, the petition pages were neatly stacked, ready to be packed into boxes and trucked to a nearby warehouse in Montebello, where they will be kept for at least six months.

McCormack and her deputy, Kristen Heffron, spent the morning checking through the final numbers and making sure they had met the secretary of state’s reporting guidelines before sending the fax.

In the building’s lobby, county residents waited in unruly lines to apply for birth and marriage licenses, mostly unaware that a part of the recall’s fate was being decided, one check mark at a time, seven floors above them.

“Even though I’m thinking, ‘Wow, isn’t it great to be part of this historic moment,’ I’ve had to just concentrate on getting all of it done,” said Victoria Jacobs, one of McCormack’s assistants.

With the recall count finished, McCormack and Heffron turned to preparing for a long planned semiannual conference of the 88 Los Angeles County city clerks, which will take place today.

The conference was one of several items that had received little attention since just after the July 4 holiday weekend, when recall proponents announced that they had collected several hundred thousand signatures in the county.

“Everyone had a moment of pure panic,” Heffron said. “But then we just got down to business.”

The two women also examined a pair of punch-card voting machines, which may be used in a recall election.

“The counting was difficult,” McCormack said, looking over one of the units. “But it was nothing compared to what the election will be like.”