Martinez's folly

Opinion    Los Angeles Daily News   18 March 2005

City, state must thoroughly investigate mayoral election breakdown

At the very least, Frank Martinez has a lot of explaining to do.

Martinez, the Los Angeles city clerk, has come under intense scrutiny for his handling of last week's mayoral primary. And he's got no one to blame but himself.

A month before the election, Martinez says, he found that coding on the newly printed ballots was too dark. But he didn't send them back to the printer to be done right. Instead, he decided to rewrite the rule book for counting ballots.

He called up the private expert who knew all about InkaVote ballot counting machines and had him rewrite the code so the machines would keep on counting, despite the confusion caused by the printing problem.

In doing so, he appears to have violated state law, which requires that all changes to voting equipment be certified by the Secretary of State's Office. For reasons that only he knows, Martinez never bothered to check in with Sacramento.

Then, to make matters worse, Martinez chose to have city workers and election volunteers hand-sort every ballot on election night and re-ink with blue highlighter all those that might be faint. This was inexplicable since county officials in November ran three million votes through machines and only had a few hundred that didn't count properly.

And for reasons that only he knows, Martinez never bothered to invite independent observers to monitor the process, let alone representatives of the mayoral campaigns.

Clearly, in the world of appearances alone, there's a problem that calls the integrity of the election process into question. Martinez was hand-picked just last September by Mayor James Hahn for this plum job that pays nearly $200,000 a year.

By the time Martinez was rewriting the rules for the election, it was clear his patron was fighting for his political life against former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg. It also was clear that the city employees who were going to do the hand sorting and re-inking largely came from unions that backed Hahn because he gave away the city treasury to them.

Now, this doesn't prove there was vote fraud. It just looks bad, real bad, especially to people suspicious that the local and federal criminal investigations of the Hahn administration suggest there's a corruption problem.

The City Council, upset that Martinez's rules stalled the vote count until nearly 4 a.m., has opened an investigation. The Secretary of State's Office, troubled that it wasn't consulted about the software change, has launched an investigation of its own.

On these narrow points, Martinez has a lot of explaining to do.

But these probes can't stop at the narrow issues. The credibility of Los Angeles' election procedures are on the line as surely as Florida's were in 2000 in the Bush-Gore contest.

Los Angeles voters already are deeply apathetic or worse because of the long-term failures of City Hall. If the election process can't be trusted, then the public's faith in democracy itself will have been shattered.

The mayor and other officials ought to lead the charge in calling for a thorough and independent investigation of what went wrong.