Campaign Ends; Low Vote Is Seen : Primary: The prelude to the election was strange and disjointed. And experts say the voters are disaffected.

A strange and disjointed California primary election campaign--beset by earthquake and riot, voter anger or indifference--lurched to the finish line Monday with age-old questions tantalizing both candidates and the experts: Who is going to vote today? How will they vote?

An estimated 6 million Californians are expected to cast ballots at 23,644 schools, churches, homes and other polling places throughout the state, Secretary of State March Fong Eu said. That would be 44.2% of registered voters, an exceedingly low turnout for a presidential election year.

Voting hours are 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. statewide.

The secretary of state’s office said there was heavy demand for absentee ballots, including about 100,000 requests from Orange County. But the return of completed ballots was slow.

The nature of the turnout was the big unknown. While the experts said voters are in a cranky, anti-incumbent mood, no one could be certain whether they will express their anger at the polls, or just stay home.

If a disaffected citizen is to be motivated to vote, there must be some outlet for that anger, said Mark Kann, a University of Southern California political scientist, citing Democrats Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, who drew support against the Establishment’s Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968.

In 1992, he added, “It is not obvious to me . . . which candidate is the voice of rage.”

Even insurgent Republican conservative Pat Buchanan was drawing only 12% of the prospective GOP vote against President Bush in the final California Poll conducted last Wednesday through Saturday.

To a large extent, the 1992 California presidential primary has been overshadowed by the prospective independent candidacy of Ross Perot, though his name will not be on any primary ballot and write-in votes for the Texas billionaire will not be counted.

Bush already has cinched the Republican nomination and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton can win enough delegate votes in California alone today to put a lock on the Democratic bid, even if he draws fewer votes than former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. But Clinton is counting on getting even more in presidential primaries in five other states, including New Jersey and Ohio.

Bush campaigned in the state Friday and Saturday while Clinton and Brown stayed through the weekend and made final appeals on Monday.

Clinton wound up a week of intensive California campaigning with stops in the San Joaquin Valley, Oakland and Los Angeles. In the valley, he told high school students in the town of Kerman that one reason he ran for President was his 12-year-old daughter.

“I did not want her, nor do I want you, to grow up in an America where you can’t do better than your parents because we haven’t given you a country worth having,” he said.

Brown concluded his campaign by acknowledging that Clinton nearly has the Democratic nomination wrapped up, but he said it still was not too late for Democrats to reject Clinton “and turn this party to a winning direction.”

The final California Poll showed Clinton leading Brown 35% to 28% among likely Democratic voters with former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas drawing 17% even though he suspended his campaign in late March.

In California’s two U.S. Senate races, Democrat Barbara Boxer and Republican Tom Campbell maintained narrow leads for their parties’ nominations for the six-year seat on the ballot, while Democrat Dianne Feinstein and appointed Republican Sen. John Seymour held commanding margins for a two-year term at stake.

Most of the 10 major Senate candidates made low-key appearances Monday, but they continued to rely primarily on a multimillion-dollar television commercial campaign that has dominated the stretch drive, increasingly using negative attacks on opponents.

One common message was that the Los Angeles riots, which blacked out political news just as the campaign was getting rolling, call for election of officials who will be tough on law-and-order issues.

Another was that voters who really wanted change can get it by voting for women.

Rep. Mel Levine of Santa Monica, the Democratic contender for the six-year seat who has been criticized for conducting almost his entire campaign by television, visited a Jewish home for the aged in Reseda.

If there is a surge of voting today, it might be in local areas drawn by fresh faces running in scores of new legislative and congressional districts, by the police reform measure on the Los Angeles city ballot, and hot contests for Los Angeles County supervisor and district attorney.

If California has any new trends for the nation to follow in 1992, they could be the nomination of record numbers of women and minorities for office, from the U.S. Senate to the bottom of the ballot.

One of the most contentious showdowns for women’s groups from around the country is in Orange County, where a former Orange County Superior Court judge is attempting to unseat Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) in the 46th Congressional District race.

It is the first time in his 14-year political career that Dornan is being challenged for reelection by a fellow Republican, and the national tidal wave of support for his opponent even has caught the veteran conservative by surprise.

Judith M. Ryan didn’t announce her campaign against Dornan until March, just days before the filing deadline. But with help from some of the nation’s largest and most powerful groups for women’s issues and abortion rights, she has launched a major challenge.

The California Abortion Rights Action League said it launched the largest independent expenditure campaign in its history on behalf of Ryan. It has opened headquarters in Santa Ana to coordinate the Dornan attack, including a series of letters, radio ads and door-to-door canvassing.

In response, Dornan launched a series of attack letters of his own, portraying Ryan as a single-issue candidate and a puppet of the political left. He also has labeled Ryan a carpetbagger because she does not live in the 46th district and she has declined to move her residence from Yorba Linda.

Actually, throughout California, today’s voting consists of six separate elections. The 12.3 million voters registered in five officially recognized political parties in California--Republican, Democratic, American Independent, Green, Libertarian and Peace and Freedom--will pick their nominees to run in the November general election for offices ranging from president to members of the parties’ county central committees.

Independents, who register in California as “decline to state,” can vote too. But these 1.3 million are limited to nonpartisan offices such as county supervisor, district attorney, judges and ballot issues.

Perot’s name will not appear on any ballot and he was not qualified as a write-in candidate for president in the California primary. Petitions being circulated in California on behalf of Perot are seeking to place him on the November general election ballot.

Any Perot write-ins will not be counted by election officials, but their presence could slow the vote count, particularly if a voter also punches the voting card for a Republican or Democrat for president. In those cases, the vote for president will be invalidated, officials said. While the rest of the ballot will be counted, such ballots will be set aside and may take days to count.

“This could be a nightmare,” said Caren Daniels-Meade, chief of the elections division in the secretary of state’s office.

In Orange County, Registrar of Voters Donald F. Tanney said the Perot factor should not have much impact on the vote count. “I don’t see any kind of meaningful delay,” he said. “We’ll be doing a little extra step to handle any ballots where Perot’s name appears, but we don’t see that affecting us.”

Tanney said Orange County election officials should be able to more easily handle the write-ins because space is provided right on the ballot itself, instead of on the envelope containing the ballot, as in Los Angeles County. Thus, it’s easier for election workers to spot write-ins and handle them accordingly.

Experts also were watching for the outcome of several key battles for the soul of the GOP.

Does the party’s future rest with moderates such as Senate candidate Tom Campbell of Stanford, an abortion rights advocate, or with conservatives such as commentator Bruce Herschensohn, who billed himself as a keeper of the flame of the Reagan Revolution?

Likewise, moderate Republican Gov. Pete Wilson put his political credibility on the line by endorsing nearly a score of like-minded candidates for the state Legislature in hopes of purging the party of the “caveman” Assembly members who voted against his budget last year. With the 1994 campaign for governor just over the horizon, the outcome could strongly influence the success of the Wilson governorship.

Los Angeles Times Poll Director John Brennan said the major impact of a low turnout is on the age of voters, since older citizens tend to vote in larger numbers than the young. In the presidential primary, he said, this could benefit Clinton more than Brown, whose supporters tend to be younger.

Even with a small turnout, he added, a majority of Democratic voters will be women--good news for Boxer and Feinstein.

Political observers said early on that today’s vote has a good chance of reversing the long decline in primary election turnouts.

But on April 25 and 26 came the major earthquakes on California’s North Coast. Then, on April 29 came the verdicts in the Rodney G. King case and the Los Angeles riots. Suddenly some people were too numbed, fearful or busy reconstructing their lives to care about an election. For some, the riots only underscored how out of touch and unresponsive elected officials really are.

The unrest “exacerbated everybody’s frustration with the way things are,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the Claremont Graduate School’s Center for Politics and Policy.

“You did see anger (in and after the riots), and there are several ways in which you could articulate that,” Jeffe said. “My guess is that people will walk away instead of getting out to vote. Their perception is that voting hasn’t mattered before”--and doesn’t now.