52 Candidates Crowd Into Mayoral Race : Elections: As filing ends, the size of the field complicates matters for serious contenders and voters. ‘In this race, anybody could be mayor,’ one analyst says.

Fifty-two candidates--the largest field this century and the most diverse in Los Angeles history--crushed into the mayoral derby by the time the clerk locked the door at precisely 5 p.m. Monday, the filing deadline.

Though there are likely to be dropouts before the final petition deadline next month--an even though fewer than 12 are considered viable candidates--the size of the field is giving rise to the mathematics of hope: experts estimate that anyone who captures as little as 17% of the vote could move into the June runoff. With margins that small, every ballot counts.

“In this race, anybody could be mayor,” said Eric Rose, City Hall lobbyist for the Patrick Media Group, a billboard firm that contributes heavily to city candidates. “It’s a chance they are willing to take. By luck, one of these people might make the runoff and become mayor of Los Angeles.”

The long list of candidates means that life is about to become considerably more complicated for the scores of people assigned to stage this election, not to mention the voters.

Debate organizers are baffled over how to create a robust discussion when they have more debaters than Baskin-Robbins has flavors. The city clerk’s office will have to hire extra checkers to validate what could be nearly 50,000 petition signatures required from all the wanna-be mayors.

The printer of the ballots is agonizing over how to fit 52 names on a page big enough for 16. And to add to the confusion, this is the first year ballots will be printed not in two languages, but seven.

“It’s a real pain in the (behind),” one printing official groused. “Someone hands you 50 pages of Chinese and if you drop it, you don’t know if it’s upside down or downside up. But I feel much better now that I’ve given up all hope.”

Even if some of the early candidates drop out or fail to gather enough signatures to qualify by Feb. 13, election officials are certain the final list will easily exceed the record of 19 contenders set in 1981 when Tom Bradley ran for a third term.

That means the average voter is likely to be on the receiving end of more junk mail than even Ed McMahon could generate. This is a nonpartisan race so voting the party line will not resolve the dilemma. And if you close your eyes and pick one, you may well cast your vote for a woman who sought to be identified on the ballot as a “dancing landmark.”

If all of that isn’t enough, there are eight City Council races, three school board seats and three college board seats on the ballot. The offices of city attorney and controller are also up for grabs.

Altogether, 115 candidates have filed their intention of running for all those seats, including strong challengers to Councilwomen Joan Milke Flores and Joy Picus. Twenty-seven candidates, including a number of gays and Latinos, have swarmed to the races for two soon-to-be open council seats now held by mayoral hopefuls Michael Woo and Ernani Bernardi--although those fields could shrink by Feb. 13.

But most of the hopefuls have set their sights on the mayor’s office. This is the first mayoral election without an incumbent since 1929 and, evidently, the word is out that power in the nation’s second-largest city is up for grabs.

The mayoral field includes a bus driver, a banker, four city councilmen, two millionaires, one student, a disabled vet, a railroad worker, a tax preparer/actor, a medical doctor, a retired policeman, a plumber and a couple of attorneys.

Ethnically, the list of top candidates is nearly as diverse as the city itself: two African-Americans, two Latinos and an Asian-American. Genderwise, it is not: only one of the leading candidates is a woman.

The major contenders are Woo, Nate Holden, Joel Wachs and Bernardi; millionaire businessman Richard J. Riordan, state Assemblyman Richard Katz, county transportation Commissioner Nick Patsaouras, Deputy Mayor Linda Griego, Julian Nava, a former school board president and ex-U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and Tom Houston, a former deputy mayor, and attorney Stan Sanders.

Some of the rest were probably fueled by the surprisingly resilient presidential attempts of Ross Perot and former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. that made any political miracle seem possible.

“We’ve seen a number of successful people come out of nowhere, and that fuels the fantasies and ambitions of people who would not normally think of themselves as having a chance,” said Bruce Cain, associate director of the Institute for Governmental Politics at UC Berkeley.

It is not all that hard to get on the ballot. Candidates must gather 500 voter signatures and pay $300. Or they can collect 1,000 signatures and avoid the fee entirely.

Fewer than a dozen have a real shot of becoming mayor, most experts agree. But the very length of the ballot is causing even the big name contenders to worry that they may be lost in the shuffle.

It could take as many as four pages to get every name on the ballot in the April 20 primary. Voters could get confused. Will they remember to turn the page to survey all of the contenders, campaign strategists wonder? The usually dull lottery held to decide the order of the names on the ballot could be critical this year.

“There are more candidates than there are ZIP codes in Los Angeles,” said Rose of Patrick Media Group. “If Mike Woo is 26th versus first, the voter may never get down to his name.”

Political contributors--who want to be sure that when the race is over, they gave something to the winner--are holding strategy meetings to decide where to put their money. New ethics rules decree that only $7,000 can be donated to all municipal elections combined and contributors want to make sure the donations go to “the real horses in the race.”

“As a political contributor, it’s a nightmare,” Rose said. “There are 11 people who could potentially win the race with six being in the top tier. We’re going to cover our bets.”

For the past several days, the city elections office on the 23rd floor of City Hall has been teeming with candidates, some accompanied by aides with home video cameras to capture the moment they officially threw their hats into the ring.

There have been disagreements over how certain candidates should be identified on the ballot. Eileen Anderson, the lady in green who spent years dancing on a downtown street corner and finally retired her leotard when the city would not give her a parking space, is running for the seventh straight time. She wanted to be identified as “a dancing landmark.” The city attorney said no.

Another candidate wanted to appear on the ballot as a “doer.”

“Doer is an action, not a vocation,” an election worker barked.

The candidate settled on “florist-accountant.”