Re-inked jimmy-rigged ballots

Jimmy-rigged


Anybody with a third grade education ought to know you don’t mess with someone’s ballot. It’s up there with cutting school and forging an absence slip.

It is hard to believe that these Mayor James Hahn appointed officials do the things they do. I guess the question is, why not? Other than being appalled, we don’t do anything about it anyway. Regularly, under Mayor James Hahn, officials take the benefit of the doubt before we have a chance to give it to them. In practice, it has become cliché: Officials commit the ethical violation. Play dumb. Make light of the violation – No big deal. Make up a completely lame excuse. The newspapers report it. We don’t do anything about it. And they continue to reap the benefits. They don’t seem the least embarrassed, ashamed, or frustrated.

If you were pulled over for speeding, do you think the cop would stop writing because you said your foot slipped and you didn’t think it was a big deal. Do you think the officer would entertain a blue ribbon committee of your appointed associates? Do you think the officer would like to listen to your attorney? Absolutely not! So why aren’t we doing anything about this? It seems we are purposefully not policing this stuff. It seems no one cares.

Should we take a lesson and accept this is the way it going to be in Los Angeles? The message we are clearly sending is get the goods while the getting is good. The citizens really made a mistake in allowing the mayor to reform the Los Angeles City Charter. It is obvious the Charter has given the Mayor too much power. It gives new meaning to the saying, "Power corrupts and, absolute power corrupts absolutely." It seems Charter reform has fostered a new white collar gang in town that we should really be more concerned about.

It appalls me to read articles like “L.A. re-inked votes City clerk ordered election workers to fill in faintly marked ballots” by Troy Anderson and Rick Orlov in Saturday’s, March 12, 2005, Daily News.

“Without informing mayoral challengers or anybody else, Los Angeles City Clerk Frank Martinez ordered election workers Tuesday [election] night to use blue highlighter pens to re-ink thousands of voters' ballots that had "bubbles" partially or faintly filled in,” the Daily News reported.

Frank Martinez is another in a long list of questionable Hahn appointees that seem to all come up severely short in the integrity department. Mayor James Hahn appointed Martinez last September. Martinez defended what he did, saying he was following secretary of state-approved procedures to mark over incompletely filled out bubbles to make sure the InkaVote machines counted them. Malarkey! Any moron with an ounce of concern for public opinion would have let the machine kick them out, set them aside and identify them for the public before tampering with the evidence.

I am sure Martinez saw the Florida recount fiasco and knows that recounting requires a number of officials from both sides of the aisle. So the effort to quickly “fix” the ballots is reason enough to demand a complete recount. Not to mention, I see no noticeable ideology difference between Hahn and Villaraigosa so the marking and the focus had to be directed against Hertzberg. By eliminating Hertzberg, the unions in this town are assuring themselves of a “no lose” election.

How many experts do we need to scratch and sniff? The Daily News quoted expert Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, "I've never heard of anything like this before. It's unprecedented. You don't tamper with the ballots. You want to have the ballots in the same condition when they were deposited into the ballot box and you never want to touch ballots in terms of putting a mark on them. It's shocking."

Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, Conny McCormack, can't understand why Martinez decided to delay the count for hours and direct more than 200 election [City] workers to examine each ballot individually to make sure the ink mark was highly visible. McCormack said, "We have counted more than 5 million ballots on the InkaVote system since 2003-04 and we have shared our experience with them and everything has been fine. The machines read even the smallest amount of ink. So we are puzzled and frankly surprised at their decision to hand-count every ballot. It's certainly not our procedure and there was no need to do it. We had no pre-knowledge that they were going to do this."

County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich criticized Martinez's actions, suggesting that "questionable activities such as this undermine the integrity of the process and voter confidence."

Then true to form, the Hahn appointee flawlessly executes the hokey lame excuse which has brought fame and fortune to the Hahn administration and disgust to the rest of us…

Martinez defended his decision, claiming it was legal [It really irks me when they use the word “legal” like it is a high standard. Any less, it would be criminal, wouldn’t it?] and he wanted to ensure every ballot was counted. "It might have been out of an overabundance of caution on our part since it was our first time using the InkaVote system," Martinez said. "Just like with pulling chads, we have guidelines for what we do to overmark ballots. "It was done in a public process and the ballots are available for review. We are confident that process was accurate and ensured every proper vote was counted."

Add a little plausible deniability and some condescending innocence… Hahn indicated he was unaware of Martinez's action but noted he took extra precautions on his own ballot. "I held it up and it didn't look like it had marked the spots well enough, so I put the ballot back in the machine and really pushed it in to make the marks." Hahn added that the county used InkaVote in November and "there didn't seem to be a problem."

Then there is the emphatically couched rhetoric which in effect begrudgingly condones the unacceptable behavior.
We didn’t know…
We are definitely concerned…
They shouldn’t have done that…
Everything is okay… We’ll accept the “jimmy-rigged” results…
Next time we’ll add some assurances so we slip public scrutiny.”

Parke Skelton, Villaraigosa's campaign consultant, said he was not aware of the use of the blue highlighters and would have insisted that all the campaigns have observers present if he had known.

"If I was Bob Hertzberg, I'd want to go in and look at those ballots," Skelton said. "A decision like this should be made in broad daylight. It seems unusual to me they would make a unilateral decision to re-ink ballots before a problem has been demonstrated.

"I think it's rather unusual that they would go in and do that without there being any indication that there is a problem and without it being done in an extremely public way."

Then the problem is sent to the City Attorney’s Office for laundering…
Send it to the City Attorney’s Office for a review. Are you kidding? Rocky Delgadillo spends over a million to run unapposed. Why? Because he is part of the oligarchy running this town and he is feather bedding for bigger things.

It should be clear from Laura Chick's firing of Dan Carver, a former Federal investigator who got too close to a hot trail leading to the City Attorney’s Office. Let’s get something straight, lawyers can’t distinguish right from wrong, they get big bucks just to defend their position. The City’s position is Hahn’s position. Honor among thieves, so to speak.

The Secretary of State's Office said inquiries should be directed to the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office because laws governing Los Angeles city elections are enforced at the local level. This is one of the big problems with a City Charter is that we exempt ourselves from much needed State regulatory scrutiny. Our governing boards are jimmy-rigged and locally greased. It is a shame that we have to go outside the City to get a feeling of legitimacy.

City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's office had yet to receive a complaint but is prepared to look at any improprieties, a spokesman said. [Like the City Attorney’s Office is going to do any good. Recall the City Attorney’s Office represents the City’s scoundrels.]

"Our understanding is that election supervisors oversaw all aspects of it to make sure that the voters' intent was carried out," Frank Mateljan said. "We have not received any formal complaints and would act immediately [to sanction the results] if there is a problem."

Apparently citizens do have a choice. They can fight this corruption or leave. It seems they are taking flight. Josh Grossberg of the Daily Breeze reports that a third of the residents in Los Angeles surveyed by the Public Policy Institute of California say they want to move out of Los Angeles, up more than 20 percent from 2003. The survey reveals the county's 10 million residents are "stunningly unhappy with some key indicators of quality of life and paints a picture of growing concern for any chance of long-term recovery."

The number of residents who plan to leave the county almost doubled in two years. A similar survey in 2003 found that 17 percent of residents did not see themselves staying in the county. The number is now 33 percent.

In fact, more people in the city of Los Angeles say they plan to leave than the 26 percent who voted in the recent mayoral election, said Mark Baldassare, the survey's director.

"It seems they plan to vote with their feet," he said.

And until we clean up the mess we have watched Hahn and his bureaucrats create, we can watch increasing numbers of our better-healed employers leave Los Angeles. And with them, they take our jobs and futures.