Ballot Snafus Plague Reform Party as Convention Nears

Less than a week away from the start of the Reform Party’s presidential nominating process, party members in California and elsewhere complained on Tuesday that they have not received ballots--or have found their mailboxes stuffed with duplicate ballots.

Already distressed by similar snafus that plagued presidential preference surveys mailed last month, some members are threatening to quit the party founded and funded by Dallas billionaire Ross Perot.

“It’s shameful because [party leaders] said they would take care of these problems,” said Nancy Couperus, of Los Altos Hills in Northern California. “Yet I’ve got three ballots. One has my first and last name. Another has my first, middle and last name. The third misspelled my last name.

“I’m inching my way toward quitting because of these foul-ups and other obstructionist things going on,” she said.

The glitches are particularly disturbing for supporters of Perot’s one rival for the new party’s nomination, Richard D. Lamm. The former Colorado governor already faces an uphill battle challenging Perot, given that the party is an outgrowth of the Texan’s 1992 presidential bid as an independent. And some of Lamm’s supporters have become suspect about a process managed by officials bankrolled by Perot.

At the party’s headquarters in Dallas, spokeswoman Sharon Holman conceded: “We expect to have some bugs in the system--we deeply regret them--and have tried everything in our power to correct all the errors we have been made aware of.”

She also urged party members “not to panic if they have not received a ballot since we started mailing on Friday and Saturday, with the last batch going out on Monday.”

But party member Margaret Lorette of Menlo Park was worried because her husband has received a ballot but she has not. “The real heartbreaker in all of this is we want to make a difference,” she said.

Party leaders have sought to assure Lamm and his backers that the voting process will be fair and impartial. But in Denver, Lamm spokesman Eric Anderson said of the early reports of problems: “If these are more than isolated incidents, it is cause for great concern.”

Ballots, which also may be cast by telephone and on the Internet, will be counted during the week between a party gathering Sunday in Long Beach and a “campaign kickoff rally” Aug. 18 in Valley Forge, Pa., with the winner announced at the Valley Forge event.

A major headache for party officials has been confirming names and addresses of people who wound up on a master database of an estimated 1.3 million voters who joined the party through Internet messages, telephone calls and letters.

In some cases, Holman said, prospective party members signed petitions but did not include the name of their city. As a result, party officials had to “guess the city they live in,” Holman said.

It is conceivable, she added, that if a member mails back more than one ballot under slightly different names, their vote could be tallied more than once.

“We know the list is not 100% foolproof,” she said. “But we expect to be 99% accurate.”