The Altadena Town Council certified last month's election tonight, amid protests that there were multiple irregularities in the election process.
While complimenting and congratulating his election opponent, Alice Wessen, outgoing councilman Walter Olszewski read a letter urging investigation of 11 alleged irregularities during the election, including: candidates actively campaigning within 100 ft. of a polling place; people "wearing uniforms of a certain (unidentified) organization" actively campaigning while staffing polls; polls not requiring identification; polls closing early; inaccurate maps that resulted in a number of people voting outside of their census tract; and councilmembers Eugene Sund and Ken Balder determining polling locations and staffing in their tracts, which they were not to do.
Polling irregularities were also cited during public comments, after the vote was certified. William Bowen, a neighbor of Olszewski's and in his census tract, said that he was originally assigned to the wrong census tract due to an inaccurate map. After phone calls to other polling places, that was corrrected, but he wondered how many people cast votes in the wrong tract before it was corrected.
Likewise, Regina Grimes, another losing candidate, said that she had found suspicious signatures on the sign-in sheets, suspicious addresses, evidence of children voting, as well as the Farnsworth Park polling place running out of ballots.
There were also multiple wrestlings with Robert's Rules of Order during the council's election discussion, and disagreements as to whether Steve Haussler, a member of the ethics committee appointed by chairman George Lewis, could present a report of the committee's investigation into election irregularities. Some members of the council thought that the ethics committee itself was irregular ("illegal," said Balder), and by majority vote decided not to hear Haussler's report.
Eventually, the majority of the council did vote to certify the election, but in the "new business" section decided that an investigation was in order by the new board, but the method seemed to be left up in the air. The new board was seated (Lewis lost the election, but will maintain his chairmanship until the start of the next meeting), and a committee formed to select officers for the new council.
Update 7/16 8 PM: PSN is running a story on the council meeting, and it looks like they have a copy of Haussler's report.
