Supervisor's race still in question as LA County election ballots continue to be counted

A week after Califoia’s primary election, the race for Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich’s seat continued to be too close to call Tuesday, with more votes still to be counted.

Kathryn Barger, Antonovich’s chief of staff, has clinched a place on the November ballot, but entrepreneur Darrell Park and Sen. Bob Huff, R-San Dimas, are still battling for the second spot.

Updated results show Park with 463 more votes than Huff in the 5th District contest.

•RELATED STORY: 8 LA County supervisor hopefuls for Antonovich’s seat to square off in Pasadena

The updated figures were part of 201,020 ballots processed since the June 7 election — 187,794 “Vote by Mail” ballots and 13,226 precinct ballots. Almost 350,000 ballots overall remained to be counted, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder.

The update came the same day about 50 people complained to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors about various voting issues on election day. The complaints came from every coer of Los Angeles, and voters said they met with untrained poll workers, understaffing, incorrect registration lists with missing names, broken equipment and lack of ballots.

“We had all the problems being indicated,” said Julie Levine, who worked a polling station in Topanga. “We ran out of Democrat ballots and had to use the emergency ballots.”

•RELATED STORY: Second place in LA County supervisor 5th District race too close to call

Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan countered most of the complaints by explaining to supervisors that there was a surge of new voters and some polling places were inundated.

“There were isolated instances of precincts where emergency ballots had to be used when original voting supplies and ballots were unavailable because of a poll worker absence,” Logan said, reading from a prepared report. “Isolated situations also occurred in high-volume precincts where ballot inventory was depleted for provisional ballots.”

Logan also said that the conce about provisional ballots going uncounted was unfounded. Provisional ballots are assigned to voters in Califoia whose names are missing from polling place rosters or if there is a clerical or processing error. But the votes are not counted on the day of the election. There were about 252,000 provisional ballots handed out to Los Angeles County voters last week, or about 125,000 fewer than in the 2012 presidential primary election.

“Past election records show that an average of 85 to 90 percent of provisional ballots in L.A. County are validated and counted during the post-election canvass,” Logan said.

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“This was, in part, due to a high number of ballots with write-in votes and the implementation of new ballot accountability procedures in the registrar’s central count operations,” Logan said.

Another update of the election results is expected Friday.