Primary results may sink McNerney's bid for Congress

By Matt Carter, STAFF WRITER

PLEASANTON Gerald McNerney's plans to run for Congress against Richard Pombo have been derailed or at least sidetracked.

The Pleasanton environmental engineer staged a late write-in campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in the March 2 primary so that Pombo, R-Tracy, wouldn't run unopposed in the fall.

To secure his party's nomination and have his name appear on the November ballot, McNerney needed 1,740 votes.

Certified election results released last week by the four counties in the 11th Congressional District show McNerney came up 73 votes short. The first-time candidate and his supporters have until today to decide whether to contest the results.

The decision is complicated by differing interpretations of the elections code in the three counties where McNerney received the greatest number of votes: San Joaquin, Alameda and Contra Costa.

McNerney, 52, believes he received more votes than were officially tallied. Some voters using paper ballots, he says, may have written his name down without filling in an oval "bubble" similar to those on multiple-choice tests indicating they wished to vote for a write-in candidate.

If the oval is not filled in, optical-scanning devices that read paper ballots don't sort them so that write-in votes can be recorded by election workers.

Voters using touch-screen electronic voting machines wouldn't have made such a mistake, because they must touch a box indicating they want to write in a candidate's name in order to access another screen. But Contra Costa County voters still use paper ballots and thousands of voters in all four counties use paper ballots to vote absentee.

If McNerney is willing to foot the bill, elections officials are prepared to re-examine all the paper ballots for instances in which voters wrote in his name, but failed to fill in the oval bubble. However, elections officials in Alameda and Contra Costa counties say the votes still won't count.

"The question is, in San Joaquin County, we may pick up 15 or 20 votes, but I don't think we'll pick up the 73," McNerney said. "We'll have to go into the other counties" and ask a judge to rule on the validity of any contested write-in votes.

"That's going to cost money, so we're considering whether that's a viable option," Mc-Nerney said.

The Secretary of State also could rule that he's eligible to win the party's nomination with less than 1,740 votes, McNerney said. The minimum number of votes needed to win the nomination is determined by multiplying the number of party voters who voted in the district's last election by 1 percent.

The release of certified election results was an unexpected reversal in McNerney's campaign.

A week earlier, elections officials were reporting that Mc-Nerney had received more than 2,000 write-in votes. McNerney issued a news release formally launching his campaign to unseat Pombo and his chief of staff congratulated him for participating in the political process.

But, when the certified results were released, Alameda County officials said McNerney had received 562 votes 339 less than the tally provided by a county elections worker to ANG Newspapers on March 25.

According to the certified results, McNerney received 593 votes in San Joaquin County, 461 in Contra Costa County and 51 in Santa Clara County a total of 1,667 votes.

Brad Clark, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, said the numbers provided to ANG Newspapers and McNerney represented all write-in votes not just those cast for McNerney.

"Those are just the number of people who cast some kind of a write-in vote they could have been for Mickey Mouse, or Bugs Bunny, or any number of people or characters" Clark said.

This year, write-in votes were cast for nearly every character in the popular "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, he said.

Alameda County's top election official maintains that the law doesn't allow write-in votes cast on paper ballots to be counted unless the oval "voting position" is filled in. But he said elections officials "were fairly liberal in terms of the spelling of (McNerney's) name" on ballots it considered valid.

"He came in today, and we let him look at a printout," of different ways voters had spelled his name, Clark said. "He could tell by the votes from the (touch screen) machines that we took a lot where his name was not spelled right. He seemed happy about that."

Although McNerney's name may not appear on the ballot next to Pombo's in November, a Dublin resident also is planning to run for the 11th Congressional District seat.

Thomas A. "Tom" Benigno, who ran against Pombo as a Republican in the 2002 primary, says he plans to run as an independent. Running as an independent allows Benigno to skip the primary, where he received 12.9 percent of the vote in 2002.

Benigno also ran as a write-in for governor in last fall's recall election, receiving seven votes five in San Joaquin County and two in Alameda County.

To qualify for the November election, he must submit a filing fee of $1,547 or collect 3,000 signatures by Aug. 6.