Fired Union Official Leads in Hotel Employees Election

SANTA ANA —  After a long day of wrangling over election rules, it still wasn’t clear late Monday who will run one of Orange County’s largest unions.

Members overwhelmingly voted out everyone but the president in a Friday election at Local 681 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. In that last race, a union organizer fired last month by President Steven A. Beyer was leading Beyer by 43 votes, 588 to 545.

If she wins, labor leaders say, 29-year-old Angela Keefe will be the youngest head of a big union in Southern California and one of the few women to run any local union so large.

The local, which represents workers at Disneyland and some of Orange County’s larger hotels, has 5,000 members.

Keefe says she would also steer the union in a more militant direction than Beyer, 39, who says he favors a more moderate approach.

Beyer said the union election committee he appointed was debating Monday evening whether to count mail ballots that were postmarked on Friday but which a federal postal inspector says arrived at the Santa Ana post office on Saturday.

Keefe says those ballots shouldn’t be considered because the election rules say only ballots that arrived in the union’s post office box before 5 p.m. Friday--election day--can be counted.

Meanwhile, the company the union hired to run the election distanced itself Monday.

“Let’s just say we’re still involved, but we’re working at arm’s length,” said an executive at Sequoia Pacific Systems Corp. in San Francisco.

“That’s all I can say, other than this’ll probably be sorted out in a couple of days,” said Robin Johnson, the company’s director of union elections.

About 60 ballots arrived at the post office Saturday; another 40 came on Monday, federal Postal Inspector Aaron L. Ward said.

Keefe had asked Ward to find out when the ballots arrived at the post office, he said Monday.

Most of those ballots are thought to favor Beyer, both candidates said. Keefe had urged her supporters to mail their ballots early.

The election committee emptied the box at 3 p.m. Friday; no more ballots were delivered to the Santa Ana Post Office that day, Ward said.

Beyer, 39, is a local labor leader finishing his first three-year term as president of the local.

Keefe pitched her candidacy to the union’s Latino members, who make up a majority. An Anglo, she speaks Spanish, while Beyer does not, an issue she brought up in her campaign.