McNerney calls for a vote recount

By Matt Carter, STAFF WRITER

PLEASANTON Gerald McNerney's future as a congressional candidate may depend on what's written on thousands of ballots that have been shrink-wrapped and stacked on pallets in a warehouse in Martinez.

Days before the March 2 primary, McNerney launched a write-in campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in the 11th Congressional District.

The first-time candidate, who said he didn't want incumbent Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, to run unopposed, needed 1,740 votes to win the nomination. He came up 73 votes short, according to election results certified last week.

On Monday, McNerney filed requests for recounts in the four counties the district takes in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Santa Clara.

But if the recount doesn't change the results of the election, McNerney could be presented with a bill in the tens of thousands of dollars.

So for now, McNerney is limiting the recount to a one-day examination of ballots in Contra Costa County, where he thinks he's got the best chance of finding additional votes.

The 52-year-old Pleasanton resident thinks some voters using paper ballots may have tried to vote for him, but that their votes weren't counted.

If a voter wrote his name down, he says, but forgot to darken an oval bubble that indicates a vote for a write-in candidate, machines that read the paper ballots wouldn't have sorted them so that write-in votes could be hand-counted by elections workers.

Alameda, San Joaquin and Santa Clara counties have made the switch to electronic voting machines, which won't let voters make that mistake. The touch-screen machines require voters to first check a box indicating they want to cast a write-in vote before they can access another screen and type in a candidate's name.

Absentee voters using paper ballots in those counties might have made the mistake McNerney is worried about forgetting to darken the oval. But every vote in Contra Costa County was cast on paper ballots, so McNerney wants to begin the recount process there.

The one-day recount scheduled to take place Monday will cost an estimated $5,400, according to Candy Lopez, the assistant Registrar of Voters in Contra Costa County.

All of the ballots cast in the

primary have been sealed and put into storage. The first step will be to pull the ballots off of their pallets and sort out precincts within the 11th Congressional District, Lopez said. Then recount boards will begin the process of examining individual ballots one-by-one.

It would take days to re-examine all the ballots, but McNerney can stop the process if it appears that write-in voters were marking the oval after all.

"He has the right to call it off at any time if he doesn't think it's going to do him any good," Lopez said.

If enough uncounted ballots with McNerney's name on them are discovered, the candidate and his supporters may still have to go to court to have the election results changed. Contra Costa and Alameda County elections officials maintain that by law, they are not allowed to count write-in votes unless the oval "voting target" is filled in.

For now, "we're not trying to overturn the election results, just to see how many ballots had my name on them" but weren't counted, McNerney said.