LA Times Front Page. Ballot Reveiw Favors Frye

[rumpel]

Counting San Diego's disputed votes shows write-in candidate would have beaten the incumbent mayor, already sworn in.


SAN DIEGO MAYORS ELECTIONS BALLOTS

By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer

SAN DIEGO — The hotly disputed race for mayor here took a sharp turn Tuesday as a review of disputed ballots showed that Councilwoman Donna Frye would have beaten incumbent Mayor Dick Murphy if all votes had been counted.
Tuesday's review looked at ballots that had not been counted in the official tally. It was conducted at the request of The Times, four other news organizations and two pro-Frye voters.

Full Story

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sdmayor15dec15,0,7127322.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[rumpel]

1. here some more

  
 The results threw the politics of the state's second-largest city into confusion more than a month after the Nov. 2 election. The disputed election comes at a high-stakes time for San Diego. Whoever is mayor will face a deep financial crisis and a federal investigation of city officials. Both stem from the city's failure to properly fund its employee pension plans.
As the candidates and their lawyers and advisors plotted their next moves, Republican and Democratic political consultants and activists said the ballot review had severely weakened Murphy's position.

Just a week ago, Murphy, a Republican, was sworn in after being certified as the winner with a margin of 2,108 votes over Frye, a Democrat who was a write-in candidate.

The ballot review Tuesday uncovered at least 4,854 additional, uncounted votes for Frye. That total will probably grow today as thousands more absentee ballots are surveyed. In all, 455,694 votes were cast.

[New Earth]

2. uh

how bout we just count ALL THE VOTES THE FIRST TIME.


hello???? :hi:

[unpossibles]

3. HAHAHAHAHA

sorry. I agree. It's funny how the "common man" represented by the thugs never realizes that the "common man" is never counted nor cared for.

It sickens me to hear people slander the left/liberals and say we do not accept others and that we are not accepting of anyone but ourselves, yet they are the ones trying hard to not hear the voice of the people....

[henslee]

4. Fight the good fight San Diego. Wonderful American town. Almost a part of

Mexico. Home of the Marines, Navy, city that helped win the war with its shipbuilding and airplane factories. Stand up and fight for democracy once again!

[rumpel]

5. LA Times among others requested the review

The new tally came after requests by The Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS radio and television, KGTV television, and KNSD television to examine the ballots, which under state law must be open to public scrutiny. A similar request was filed by Fredric Woocher on behalf of the two Frye backers.

It get's better here

At issue in the balloting are thousands of "empty ovals" — ballots in which a voter wrote in Frye's name but failed to fill in the small oval next to the write-in line. Election officials had declined to count those ballots, and a Superior Court judge last month upheld their decision, saying that state election law required that ovals be filled in for a write-in to count.

The impact of the ballot review could be seen Tuesday afternoon on the faces of the two candidates as they answered questions from reporters — Murphy appearing somewhat stressed while Frye seemed buoyant and upbeat.

"I have no objection to the examination of the ballots, but the bottom line is: Illegal votes don't count," said Murphy at a news conference at his City Hall office.
"To me it's clear. I'm the legitimate mayor," he added. "The state Legislature passed the law that says you must fill in the oval …. That's the way it works in America. We are a society that follows the rule of law."

Election law experts, however, say the law is far less clear. The question of whether to count the empty-oval ballots pits two principles of election law against each other: honoring the intent of voters versus requiring compliance with rules.

"The question is how much knowledge of the process can you require on the part of voters?" said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "Are you going to disenfranchise people who didn't follow the rules?"

[rumpel]

6. I would like to hear this in Ohio and elsewhere for

the presidential election

same article

"Dick Murphy is now the phony mayor," said Scott Barnett, former executive director of the San Diego County Taxpayers Assn. and a Republican. "He already had only about a third of the vote; now there's an incredible cloud over him."

A phony president?