Ballot Forger Picked On the Wrong Person in March Election Mess

It was a mess, the primary election. March madness comes to California.

The rules changed. The election date changed. Some polling places had no ballots. Some polling places had ballots, but no one to hand them out. Some polling places had no places.

It was Monty Python’s Election Day, except that Monty Python would have pulled a better turnout. On March 5, only one registered California voter in three bothered to vote at all.

Unfortunately for somebody--we don’t yet know who--one of those one-in-three voters was Andrea Drever.

Andrea Drever lives in Santa Monica, the much-mocked old People’s Republic, where, I am impressed to say, every cup of coffee you drink, every buck you slip to a street character, can be considered a political act: Is that latte brewed from environmentally responsible shade-grown beans? Is that buck going to pickling the liver of a panhandler?

Andrea Drever votes. If she doesn’t, she feels guilty. Her boyfriend is from South Africa, where, a few years back, the world saw millions of people waiting stoically in the sun, in lines five and six hours long, to vote in their first free elections. Her friends are “always campaigning, always fighting for women’s rights and all kinds of things, so compared to them I feel very lame.”

But--there’s always a but, or there wouldn’t be a story--but on Tuesday, March 5, Drever strolled around the corner, to a little church on Lincoln Boulevard, to vote.

This time, she wasn’t handed the Democratic ballot and waved over to a flimsy voting booth. She was told she’d already applied for an absentee ballot.

“I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ It made me really suspicious.... It made me mad that somebody was out there voting in my name, or trying to, and maybe in other people’s names.” Drever cast a provisional ballot, and went off to work, and there, she began to lock and load those weapons of democracy: the telephone and the fax machine.

Drever is an advertising copywriter. Her words can entice people into spending thousands of dollars on cars. She knows how to write a letter. She knows how to make a phone call.

Once she got over that I’ve-been-mugged sense of violation, “I was really happy they did it to me. I’m the last person they want to do this to.... I want someone to get in trouble over this.”

She sent her complaint to the county’s registrar-recorder, Conny McCormack, with a note, “I am very upset about this. Please contact me if I can be of any help in prosecuting this person.” Two weeks passed, then two months. When she didn’t hear back--well, she figured, it’s a little gripe in a big county.

And then this week, the county’s letter arrived. There was a copy of the absentee ballot application, with “Andrea Drever” and a signature not remotely her own. A forgery.

The absentee ballot form was provided by the Committee for Safety and Modernization at Santa Monica College. That was a campaign run by former Santa Monica Mayor Dennis Zane, one of those guys who takes the trouble to find out what kind of coffee beans go into his latte and what kind of pollution is going into his lungs.

His firm, Urban Dimensions, came aboard to help pass a bond measure for $160 million for campus construction and repairs. It did pass, by more than two to one.

Zane was on a rare holiday Tuesday, but Luis Marquez at Zane’s firm said the absentee ballot applications were handled by a West L.A. company called EDH and Associates, where nobody was picking up the phone on Tuesday.

Andrea Drever’s was not the only voter complaint, or even the first. The county has sent out scores of inquiries about suspicious absentee ballots, and 177 answers have come back. Some voters say they only signed a petition to put the measure to a vote--they did not apply for absentee ballots.

The next stop for this is the district attorney’s Public Integrity Division, where only one complaint was sent so far, and that one was sent back to the county clerk for more information.

Drip, drip, drip--176 more complaints, and perhaps you wind up with something.

Whoever did this was taking a chance, but not much of one. In the electoral crapshoot, who bothers to vote? Of those who bother, how many will put up a fuss if they’re told there’s a problem?

After all, it’s not anything serious, like a forged check. It’s just one vote. Isn’t it?

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.