Questions raised over Long Beach Election Day tactics of Dee Andrews' campaign

A Long Beach City Council candidate ruing in the 6th District said he believes the incumbent councilman’s supporters improperly flooded the area with Election Day advertising by posting campaign signs on public property.

“It was just blatant and egregious. I made multiple calls to the City Clerk’s office,” said Erik Miller, who finished in second place to incumbent Councilman Dee Andrews. “I truly think it had an impact on the election.

Andrews, ruing as a write-in candidate for a third term on the council, is competing with Miller to represent the city’s 6th District, which includes the area around Long Beach Poly and parts of the Wrigley and Cambodia Town areas. Polling places opened on Tuesday for the Primary Election and as of Friday’s updated vote count, Andrews has a big lead in the four-way race to represent the 6th District. He has claimed 49 percent of the vote to Miller’s 27 percent.

Candidates who pass the 50 percent threshold in a Long Beach primary win election without facing their next closest challenger in a runoff election. Any runoff election in this race would take place on June 7.

Signs of disagreement

Miller is not the only person to raise conces about over-aggressive campaigning on the part of Andrews supporters. Another man, Steven Edwards, said he worked as a clerk at a polling place at Buett Branch Library and repeatedly had to inform Andrews supporters to refrain from posting signs or otherwise electioneering within the 100-foot radius where political activities are forbidden around a polling place.

Andrews’ campaign consultant Derek Humphrey, said it’s possible that an overzealous supporter may have planted pro-Andrews signs on city property, but he also said that’s a commonly-committed error in local elections.

Humphrey also said Andrews’ strong showing followed traditional shoe-leather campaigning in which supporters went door to door to teach prospective voters how to vote for a write in candidate.

What’s more, Andrews himself said he was unaware of Miller’s allegations and discounted the likely impact of campaign signs on the actual election.

“Tell him (Miller), that signs don’t vote,” Andrews said.

Miller provided photos of pro-Andrews signs posted on a fence near the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, as well as another on a telephone pole near where Willow Street crosses Pine Avenue, that he asserted were illegal. Miller also saw he observed several signs planted in the Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue median near its crossings with 17th and 20th streets, but acknowledged he did not have a photograph.

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Official responses

Long Beach City Clerk Maria de la Luz Garcia said her office does not investigate or seek to impose any kind of penalty when campaign signs are posted on public property. Instead, standard operating procedure is to refer the problem to code enforcement officers who simply remove the signs.

In Long Beach, the Development Services Department oversees code enforcement work and department spokeswoman Jacqueline Medina said in an email that code enforcement officers responding to a complaint filed on Election Day removed about 30 signs in the 6th District. Most of those signs advertised Andrews’ candidacy.

On a related note, Edwards, the polling place worker, said in an email and a Friday telephone interview that he repeatedly had to remove pro-Andrews campaign signs that had been posted too closely to a polling place. He also said he had to tell a campaign supporter that electioneering within 100 feet of the polling place.

“She said, ‘How can I get to the voters?’ I said, ‘You’re not supposed to get to the voters. We can have no electioneering,’” Andrews said.

Garcia said in an email that her office has no records of any problems reported at the Buett branch library and that poll workers are trained to deal with improper electioneering on their own, so issues can be handled without having to call the City Clerk’s office.

On Andrews’ side, Humphrey said official campaign volunteers are trained not to engage voters so close to a polling place.

“I’d be very surprised if any of them were electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place,” he said.