That polling address on Tuesday's ballot? It's wrong for 1,180 voters in Pomona

June 3, 2016 10:34 AM PT

It is a basic ingredient to being able to vote: a polling place to cast your ballot.

Los Angeles County sent nearly 1,200 ballots with a polling location in La Puente. That would have been perfect — had the voters lived in La Puente and not Pomona.

The mistake, attributed to an elections worker, sent county employees scrambling to alert voters about the correct polling place in time for Tuesday’s election.

“This shouldn’t have happened. Things like this lend themselves to have some sense of mistrust and concern about the results of this election,” said Councilwoman Cristina Carrizosa, who represents voters who received the wrong ballot address.

Carrizosa said she first learned of the problem when she heard of a constituent worried that “he wasn’t going to be able to go vote that far away.” She alerted officials about the problem when she discovered that many people in the neighborhood had an incorrect polling location.

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A spokesman for the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk, Aaron Nevarez, said the agency was sorry for the printing error, which affected the sample ballot for one out of the county’s 5,000 polling locations.

Nevarez said this type of data entry error is rare. No one in the registrar’s office can recall the last time such a mistake was made, he said.

The mistake directed voters in the precinct to vote at Sunset Elementary School at 800 Tonopah Ave., but did not list a city. It refers to a poll site that is a 20-minute to 40-minute drive away, depending on traffic on the 10 and 60 freeways. The polling place is a 15-mile drive west, in the suburb of La Puente.

The error comes as Pomona on Tuesday will vote on a contentious measure that would lift a ban on new billboards that voters approved in 1993, and allow the installation of 10 new electronic or printed billboards along several freeways. In return, the city would receive up to $10 million in revenues over the next 40 years, according to the city attorney’s analysis.

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Nevarez, said the county learned of the problem from the Pomona city clerk on May 25, and, two days later, mailed out postcards alerting the 1,180 voters in the district that: “You have a change of polling place!” The postcard was followed up by 469 robocalls to household landlines, 297 live telephone calls to cellphones, and 206 e-mails to voters who wrote down a telephone number or e-mail address when they registered to vote.

The poll workers in La Puente have also been told to notify Pomona voters at the affected precinct, No. 5250069A, the real location of their polling site, which is at Philadelphia Elementary School at 600 E. Philadelphia St. in Pomona.

Pomona voter Mike Suarez, 60, was not in the affected precinct, but said the county should have done more to contact the voters who received the wrong information. He said the county should have knocked on the doors of each voter to hand them a corrected sample ballot with the correct poll address. He said voters might ignore a postcard and just focus on the sample ballot, and may not want to go to a polling place that is so far away after returning home from work.

The mistake “stifles the vote of a minority community,” said Suarez, who opposes the billboard ballot proposition, Measure Y. “In a close election, every single vote counts…. It’s a sad situation when this happens in a crucial election and in a vulnerable and minority community like Pomona.”

Opponents of Measure Y, which include the councilwoman, said in printed arguments that electronic billboards are dangerous because they can distract drivers, and favors the interests of the billboard company set to benefit from the measure over those of voters. The opponents noted how Los Angeles has banned new electronic billboards amid complaints that they’re a form of visual blight.

“I really don’t want digital billboards around my city,” Carrizosa said. “We won’t have any control over what is advertised.... I think we are getting very, very shortchanged. And since there are no escalation fees, there are no cost-of-living increases – 40 years from now, those $250,000 [annual payments to the city] will amount to very little.”

The county registrar spokesman, Nevarez, said his agency will not go to each affected voter’s home to hand a corrected ballot. The erroneous ballot was sent to 2% of Pomona’s 59,420 reigstered voters.

“We simply don’t have the sources to go door-to-door,” Nevarez said. “I think the amount of outreach we did in this particular case was substantial.”

Pomona resident Jim Popovich, 72, who co-authored the Yes on Measure Y argument, called the printing error “damned unfortunate.”

“It’s going to cause confusion. How many people are going to read the postcard?” he asked.

Popovich said, however, that he was satisfied with the county’s efforts to reach voters.

“They’re trying to put an election together. How are they going to deliver them?” he asked. “It sounds to me like the registrar of voters is doing everything they can to correct it.”

Popovich said Measure Y’s new revenues are sorely needed by Pomona to help deal with serious financial problems that have forced city layoffs and cuts in library hours.

“This thing puts money in the city general fund,” Popovich said. “That isn’t going to solve all of the city’s problems. But it will definitely help solve some of them.”

To verify your polling location in Los Angeles County, call (800) 815-2666 or go to www.lavote.net.

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