Voting materials in post office trash may point to Compton election hanky-panky

In the dumpster

Tuesday was a busy day and night for the city of Compton, as the morning hours were spent by sheriff’s deputies sorting through and confiscating pieces of the city’s April 16 election balloting materials found in trash bins at a local post office, and the evening hours were spent in a heated City Council meeting where the citizenry attacked elected officials with accusations of engaging in election hanky-panky.

Elections in Compton have traditionally been messy affairs, so it came as no surprise when William Kemp, one of the candidates for mayor in the April 16 municipal election, received a telephone call from a whistle blower who told him a great mound of political material, including sample ballots and requests for absentee ballots, were in trash bins on the dock of the Santa Fe and Alondra Post Office awaiting pick up and disposal by a trash company.

Kemp, who was born and raised in Compton, said to himself, “Of course, there is,” and then called former Mayor Omar Bradley, who is Kemp’s friend and is also seeking to regain the mayor’s seat next month, and the two of them went to the post office to check this out.

“We saw three tubs of election materials being treated as trash and a gentleman, who identified himself as a supervisor, said he was having a trash company pick up these tubs,” Kemp said. In the meantime, Bradley had called City Manager G. Harold Duffey, City Clerk Alita Godwin and the Sheriff’s Department, all of whom rushed immediately to the post office.

Alarm bells reached a deafening decibel in Kemp’s head when he saw a trash pick up truck drive up to the dock and then back out of it and drive away once the driver saw the sheriff’s deputies around the bins he was to pick up. “I asked myself: ‘Why would a man doing a legitimate pick-up job drive away from the job with nothing?’ It became clear to me that nothing about this was right,” Kemp said.

City Clerk Godwin, who is in charge of running the election and who is also seeking re-election next month, appeared on the dock briefly but drove off when Duffey arrived. Duffey, who has been Compton’s city manager for nine months, took complete charge of the situation and began going through the bins and extracting ballots from the trash.

“I was there all the time along with three sheriff’s deputies and a lieutenant,” Duffey said. The city manager said he counted 13 trash bins which contained about 50,000 pieces of trash — all the trash accumulated by the post office between March 20 and March 26.

Duffey said he found sample ballots that would normally not be returned to the sender if they did not go to the addressee, but he also found absentee ballots that are first class mail and should have gone back to the city that sent them. By the time Duffey left the dock, he had received formal notification that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the United States government were launching investigations into the matter of the Compton election ballots being found on the dock of the post office.

Standing on the sidelines through all of this, Bradley remarked that Tuesday was not the first time election mail has gone awry. He said the same thing happened in 2001 when he was running for his third term as mayor.

He was running against current Mayor Eric Perrodin, one of the district attorney’s prosecutors. Back in 2001, election mail came up missing; Bradley filed a complaint; the complaint was dismissed; nobody investigated and Perrodin beat Bradley by 183 votes.