Absentee Ballots Create Chaos in Claremont Vote

The first initiative election in Claremont’s history was thrown into chaos Tuesday as city officials were forced to check signatures on more than 2,000 absentee ballots to verify their authenticity.

By midaftenoon, six absentee ballots had been rejected because the signatures on them did not match those on voter registration records supplied by the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters, according to City Clerk Barbara Hallamore Royalty.

In addition, Royalty said that she had collected 46 affidavits from voters alleging that their signatures had been forged on applications for absentee ballots.

Some of those affidavits were delivered Tuesday by confused voters who were told at polling places that, according to election records, they had requested absentee ballots when in fact they had not, Royalty said. After signing the affidavits, the 46 were allowed to vote.

Final results of the election, which will determine whether a vacant 20-acre lot should be rezoned to permit construction of a 340-unit apartment complex, were not expected until this morning.

The proposed zoning change, which was rejected last fall by both the Claremont Planning Commission and the City Council, was placed on the ballot after the developer earlier this year collected more than 6,000 signatures, far more than the 15% of the city’s approximately 19,000 registered voters required to get it on the ballot.

Since then, Claremont, a college town of 35,000, had been embroiled in a clamorous campaign over Measure A, intensified by an aggressive absentee ballot drive by the developer, Claremont Park Limited Partnership, and charges that the firm was trying to “buy the election” by outspending opponents $123,187 to $1,975.

In letters to local newspapers, several residents complained that paid door-to-door canvassers for the developer misrepresented the issue during visits to their homes. However, Terry Fitzgerald, a consultant for the developer, said before the election that any misrepresentations were unintentional and that several of the canvassers had been fired.

None of the partners in the project could be reached for comment Tuesday.

By last week, Royalty had mailed out about 4,700 absentee ballots, 3,951 of them requested on applications hand-delivered to her by the developer, she said. An average of 400 absentee ballots are requested for most elections, Royalty said.

About the same time, city officials began hearing reports that some residents who had not requested absentee ballots were receiving them.

Robert Jorgensen, assistant head of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s special investigation division, confirmed Tuesday that the office was investigating the matter, but refused to comment on the nature of the allegations or whether the results of the investigation could affect the outcome of the election.

Like other voters who tried to vote on Tuesday, Robert and Emily Hurst said that they had received absentee ballots in the mail last week, but thought they had been mailed by mistake.

“I don’t like my name signed on anything I didn’t do,” said Robert Hurst after signing an affidavit that he had not requested an absentee ballot. “This is really a violation.”