It’s Official: Vista Prop. K Fails on Tie Vote

VISTA —  After a two-day election recount, the county registrar of voters on Tuesday declared a tie vote and said the effort to launch a redevelopment agency is dead. But supporters of the downtown revitalization program said they planned to challenge the outcome in court.

“It isn’t over until it’s over, and it’s not over yet,” said Mayor Mike Flick, who campaigned heavily for Proposition K, the redevelopment measure, before the Nov. 5 election and paid $280 for the recount. “We plan to contest this thing and I’m confident we’ll win.”

According to results of the recount released and certified Tuesday, the balloting on Proposition K was a tie--3,726 “yes” votes and 3,726 “no” votes. That means the measure lost, because under California election law, recall votes and ballot initiatives need a majority to pass, said Assistant Registrar Keith Boyer.

But Flick and other Proposition K supporters said they intend to challenge the election results based on eight ballots invalidated by the registrar as improperly punched. Some ballots were punched outside of the “yes” column while others were not punched all the way through, Flick said.

“They may not be punched just right in the registrar’s view, but it’s clear that those are all ‘yes’ votes and we think they should qualify,” Flick said. “If a judge rules that one, only one, is valid, then we win. Those are pretty good odds.”

The mayor said his attorney, William Wittke of San Diego, would file the election challenge in San Diego Superior Court within five days. Wittke declined to discuss the case in detail, saying only that “the registrar believes that under their ballot punching system, these votes are not valid. It is our opinion that they are.”

Tuesday’s events marked the latest chapter in the bizarre saga of Proposition K, a measure endorsed by a heavily funded coalition of civic leaders and developers but opposed by a loose-knit group of slow-growth advocates.

Initial election returns showed that the proposition had failed at the polls by just one vote. The following day, however, pro-K forces had new hope when they learned that 40 absentee ballots had yet to be counted. The verdict that time--Proposition K was still short, but by three votes.

Buoyed by the narrow margin--Vistans rejected redevelopment by a 3-to-1 margin 10 years ago--Proposition K’s supporters asked for the recount. The nail-biting dragged on for two days while four members of the registrar’s staff counted the ballots by hand. When they learned that the recount left redevelopment only one vote shy of victory, the pro-K troops could scarcely believe it.

“What a potboiler,” said Milo Shadle, chairman of the pro-redevelopment committee. “We’re all beginning to wonder if it will ever end.”

Flick, who called the vote on redevelopment the most important issue facing Vistans since the city’s incorporation, took a more philosophical view.

“First and foremost, I think the sanctity and the importance of every individual’s vote is illustrated here,” the mayor said. “I would imagine people on both sides of this issue are kicking themselves, and they should, for not taking a few minutes out of their day to vote, particularly when men and women have died to preserve that right.”

The topsy-turvy character of the election may be unusual, but Proposition K’s narrow finish is not unprecedented in Vista. In 1981, a ballot measure asking voters whether the mayor’s office should be an elective post failed by just one vote. (It passed decisively three years later.)

“That was a close one, but this one is really unbelievable,” City Clerk Jean Brooks said.