Judge to Have Key Role as Vernon Casts Votes

Challengers facing City Council members who have been in office for as long as 50 years are trying to keep that city's officials from counting the ballots.

The industrial town south of downtown Los Angeles, which has fewer than 100 residents, has seen a mysterious 50% surge in its election rolls in recent weeks.

Absentee ballots sent to voters state that they must be returned in prepaid-postage envelopes. But the envelopes the city sent require stamps, prompting fears that some ballots might get lost in the mail.

And the city clerk, who is to count the votes tonight, is the same person who canceled the challengers' voter registration, a move that Los Angeles County and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge later determined to be illegal.

Despite this, Kareem Crayton, an assistant professor and election law expert at USC, said that wresting control of an election from a city, postponing it or overturning the results would be extremely difficult.

"The candidate who wants to challenge an election faces a double-edged sword," Crayton said. "On the one hand the problem is going to be showing that something bad is going to happen. And after the fact

Deborah Wright, executive liaison to the Los Angeles County registrar of voters, said it is virtually unheard of for the county to take over an election.

The only time that happened was in 2003, when the county registrar and state election fraud investigators ran a recall election in the scandal-plagued city of South Gate, a few miles south of Vernon. But that required legislative action, Wright said.

Today's hearing takes place a day after a Superior Court judge declined to issue an order giving control of the election to county registrar officials.

The challengers' lawyer, Albert Robles, said there was evidence that the election will be fraudulent and said it could not be fair as long as Vernon City Clerk Bruce Malkenhorst Jr. counted the ballots.

Robles pulled out a ballot envelope and alleged that the way it was sent, and the way the city was asking for it to be mailed, made it likely that balloting would not be secret.