Clock Ticking, Election Officials Scrambling

The laminated wall calendar in Conny McCormack’s office says today is July 26. In McCormack’s head, though, this is E minus 73, and every day that goes by between now and Oct. 7 is one day less that she has to organize the special election for the recall of Gov. Gray Davis for Los Angeles County.

So while many Californians are bracing for the political pyrotechnics of a truncated gubernatorial campaign, McCormack, the Los Angeles County registrar, is getting to work.

“Our usual calendar for an election starts 130 days out,” McCormack said, brandishing a 10-page to-do countdown calendar -- with election day standing at E minus 0 -- from the March city elections.

With the recall scheduled for Oct. 7, election officials in all 58 California counties must now contend with a whirlwind preparation period.

Along with facing shortened deadlines and strained county finances, at least nine counties -- Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Riverside among them -- are in the midst of rolling out new voting systems, but they won’t be ready in time. That means officials are bringing back old paper-based systems they thought they’d never use again.

On top of that, roughly half the state’s counties have local district elections scheduled for Nov. 4, which means many registrars have two countdown calendars running in their heads.

“The average person shows up at the polls and doesn’t think about what it takes to put on an election,” McCormack said. “And I really don’t blame them.”

While all the state’s election officials are facing a challenge, McCormack has a particularly formidable set of hurdles to jump in the coming 11 weeks. Los Angeles County is the nation’s largest single electoral jurisdiction, with more ballots cast in the 2000 general election than were cast in all but nine states. McCormack is responsible for making sure that 4 million sample ballots are printed and mailed, 1,800 polling places are reserved and publicized, and 10,000 poll workers are hired and trained before Oct. 7.

“For all intents and purposes, that’s tomorrow,” McCormack said. She held up a thick, spiral-bound candidates’ handbook her staff had prepared for the November local elections. “This is the kind of thing we don’t have time to do. We’ll probably just hand candidates a single piece of paper.”

The countdown to the election started in the registrar’s Norwalk headquarters the day after the July 4 holiday weekend, when an aggressive signature-gathering effort by recall proponents made a fall election suddenly plausible. “The printers called and asked, ‘Hey, is this election really going to happen?’ ” said Kristin Heffron, the county’s deputy registrar. “And we said, ‘Yes, we think so.’ ”

But until Aug. 13, or E minus 55, when the list of candidates is officially certified by the secretary of state, all the five companies credentialed to print election materials in California can do is order stock and oil their presses.

“We’re ordering in 40,000 pounds of card stock for L.A.,” said Alfie Charles, a spokesman for Sequoia Voting Systems, which prints ballot cards for the county.

Meanwhile, McCormack and Heffron are rushing to reserve polling locations and alert veteran poll workers that the recall date has been set.

“Time is really our enemy,” Heffron said.

She usually reserves polling places six months in advance of an election, but many of the regular precinct locations -- in schools, churches and community centers -- have already been booked for other uses.

“We’re asking city clerks to move their events and give us preferential use on the space, but it’s still hard,” she said.

For the last countywide election, in November, the registrar’s office opened upwards of 5,000 polling locations, staffed with 20,000 workers. Such a full-scale election costs Los Angeles more than $20 million, McCormack said, so she intends to halve the number of polling locations and poll workers to keep the cost of the election closer to $12 million.

With fewer polling places, the county can be selective and hire only its more experienced poll workers. There is little room in the E minus countdown for training election workers in tasks such as accurately marking voters’ names off precinct lists, assisting voters who have problems and securely boxing and transporting completed ballots. Therefore, the county will rely heavily on a large pool of longtime poll workers.

Many of these workers are retirees, but over the past two years the county has trained a pool of high school and college students, who get community service credit -- and a day off from classes -- for working the polls.

“We have a group of people who are very good at running elections,” Heffron said. “And having fewer precincts means we can take the best 10,000 election workers out there -- the cream of the crop.”

One question that won’t be resolved until the filing period ends on Aug. 9 -- E minus 59 -- is what kind of ballot Los Angeles voters will be using.

In every election since 1968, most Los Angeles voters have marked their ballot choices on Votomatic punch-card units. But the Votomatic, which is similar to the units used in Florida in the 2000 presidential election fiasco, was decertified in 2001. The infamous “hanging chad” was retired with a farewell party this June after one last hurrah in local elections.

McCormack has already ordered 40,000 new Inkavote machines, which use pen markings instead of punched holes to record votes. She intends to debut them alongside 21 electronic touch-screen voting stations in a pilot program for the November local elections.

For the recall election, she hopes to use a plain card ballot, which will be printed with candidates’ names directly so that voters can simply punch out holes with a wooden dowel.

But those ballots have room for just 18 names. Only Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) has declared his candidacy so far, but several potential candidates -- from businessman Bill Simon and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger to Hollywood personality Angelyne -- have hinted they might run.

If the final list tops 18, then the Votomatic machines will come out of storage. “I hope they stay retired,” McCormack said. “But this is not an election we want to experiment on, so we’ll go back to tried and true.”

San Diego and Shasta counties, which are both in the process of buying new systems to replace their Votomatic machines, will stick with the punch cards through this election. And in Orange County, where registrar Steve Rodermund had intended to debut a new electronic voting system in the March primary, the old Datavote punch-card machines will also be coming out of the warehouse.

“We never retired them,” Rodermund said. “They’re there, and I’m glad I saved them.”

Once the list of candidates is released, the presses at Sequoia’s Porterville facility will start running 24 hours a day, churning out millions of absentee and regular ballots for Los Angeles and several other counties.

“We’ll print three shifts a day until they’re done,” Charles said. The finished ballots will be loaded onto six flatbed trucks and driven overnight to secure warehouses in Los Angeles.

At the same time, Merrill Corp.’s downtown Los Angeles printing facility will whir into action, shooting out 4 million sample ballots that will be mailed ahead of the election. Approximately 150,000 of those will be printed in the six languages, besides English, in which the county is required to distribute election materials: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

Until they are mailed or distributed for election day, the finished sample ballot pamphlets, absentee ballots and regular ballots will be stored in county-owned warehouses in Montebello. Materials coming in for the November elections -- which will be delivered to the county before the October election takes place -- will be sent to another warehouse. This is designed to prevent any mix-ups as absentee ballots get stuffed into envelopes and sample ballots are mailed starting Sept. 16, or E minus 21.

“Elections are very fragile,” McCormack said. “But with 4 million people, perfection is hard to deliver in the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances.”

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Times staff writer Tim Reiterman contributed to this report.