Keeping an Eye on Balloting Behind the Scenes

Rosalyn Lever will sip her coffee and slip out the door for work well before 7 a.m. today. And that’s about the only part of her day that will be routine. She’s in for a 24-hour pressure cooker.

Lever is the county’s registrar of voters. You think election day creates a small disruption in your life, you should see what Lever has ahead of her. One long headache until the last votes are counted, before dawn if she’s lucky.

I asked Lever how long she’s been doing this.

“Too damned long,” she shot back, but with a laugh.

And I asked if she dared expect a smooth election. She laughed again, at my naivete.

“There is no such thing as a smooth election,” she said. “But getting all your preparation done beforehand can help keep things calmer.”

Lever, 46, is hardly a political appointee who got a plum assignment by knowing the right power brokers. She started in the registrar’s mail room as extra help 26 1/2 years ago. She was a single mother with a young child; she just needed a job.

Lever was hired as a permanent employee more than a year later. But it was a low-level position, and remained that way for several years. The office had so little turnover, she said, there were few chances for advancement. But in 1979, she got her first job as a supervisor, and in 1981, she was named chief elections officer. Lever was Registrar Donald Tanney’s top assistant when he retired in 1995. She was everybody’s choice to replace him.

All that experience will be put to good use today.

This morning she will monitor the quality control checks on the absentee ballots--called “logic and accuracy testing”--and supervise problems with the opening of the county’s 1,646 polling precincts. The polls open at 7 a.m. but almost never without a few hitches.

“One year we had an inspector whose house burned to the ground the night before, and all his election materials were destroyed with it,” she said. “Another time we had an inspector die on election eve. There was also the inspector in San Clemente who got on the freeway the wrong way and took off toward San Diego with all the election ballots. The California Highway Patrol managed to stop him around Oceanside.”

Much of her morning will be spent on the telephone, fielding trouble calls. For example, hundreds of people who say they are registered will be turned away because their names won’t be on the precinct’s voting list. This year for the first time, Lever has seen to it that all polling places have maps of surrounding sites, in an effort to help direct voters who possibly are lost.

And, of course, two years ago, you will recall, Republican Rep. Robert K. Dornan cried voter fraud in the 46th District, where he was narrowly defeated by newcomer Democrat Loretta Sanchez.

This time around Lever will have some 20 election day coordinators--more than triple the usual number--who have been trained by her staff to handle complaints throughout the county, not just in the 46th.

Lever will break from the morning crises to attend the 9 a.m. meeting of the county supervisors. She has to make sure they certify the appointments of those on the ballot who ran unopposed. Then it’s back to the phones and putting out various fires.

“It gets calmer about midafternoon,” she said.

By 5 p.m. she will be able to leave for a quiet dinner, then will return about 7 p.m. The polls close at 8 p.m., and the first truckloads of ballots from the 21 collection centers will begin coming in.

At 8:15 p.m., Lever will give a briefing to the Election Observation Panel--three Republicans, three Democrats and three members of the Orange County Grand Jury--who will then roam the premises to assure that everything is in order. Lever added the grand jury to assure a nonpartisan voice on the panel.

“The panel members will have complete run of the place, just to make sure that the machines are working properly and everything is OK,” Lever said.

Satisfaction From a Job Well Done

Almost all the trucks will be in by midnight. That’s when the 27 ballot counting machines will begin to bottleneck, and politicians will start pressuring Lever for quicker results. Fortunately this year, Lever has 40 volunteer college students to help out.

About 3 a.m., another “logic and accuracy test” will take place. It’s a computerized program built into the system to make sure that the counting machines are properly programmed.

And maybe before 5 a.m., Lever will finally return home. She’ll get three hours’ sleep while her chief assistant, Don Taylor, stays on to oversee the rest of the ballot counting. Lever will then relieve him when she returns between 8 and 9 a.m. Then it’s another full day.

“My children, who are grown now, know not to call me at home on Wednesday nights,” she said. “By then I’ve had it.”

All this is fun?

“Fascinating” is the word Lever prefers. “Someone pointed out to me that many county government workers spend three to five years before they see any results of a project. But we get to see immediate results of what we’ve done. It’s satisfying to know it went well because of what we did to prepare.”

Not that things always go that well.

Back in the early 1980s, when the county had decided to use a new set of ballot counting machines (to which then-Registrar Al Olson had objected), the result was a snafu that required several weeks to count election results.

But 1996 might have been the worst. Lever can recall having campaign managers from both the Dornan and Sanchez camps shouting at her at 6:30 a.m. when those results were too close to call.

“I threw up my hands and told them, ‘I’m going home to a pot of coffee and a shower. I’ll talk to you at 8 a.m.,’ ” she recalls with a chuckle.

She can joke about it all now, but these elections take their toll. Lever will be eligible for retirement in four years. You get the feeling she won’t stay a single day longer.

Maybe she will do some election consulting, she said. But no more pressure cookers. Maybe she’ll just watch election night results on TV.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers can reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com.