November 11, 2004


San Jose City Council District 10 race still in limbo

Nancy Pyle still ahead by 299 votes;
negative campaign and ethics violations could have hurt De La Rosa

By Sheila Sanchez
Staff Writer

Unprecedented voter turnout and large numbers of absentee, provisional and paper ballots were being blamed this week for delaying San Jose City Council District 10 election results, which still showed candidate Nancy Pyle leading by almost 300 votes as of Tuesday afternoon.

Candidate Rich De La Rosa, who during the March primary election won by a 12 percentage-point lead over Pyle finishing with nearly 49 percent of the vote—narrowly missing the majority needed for a win—was not ready to concede until the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters revealed the final tally, which could come before the Nov. 30 date when the election has to be certified.

PREMATURE? Red and blue balloons and a sign welcomed Democrats to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers headquarters where candidate Nancy Pyle celebrated her lead in the polls on Nov. 2. Photo by Sheila Sanchez

Facing criticism over the large number of uncounted votes from the Nov. 2 election, Santa Clara County Registrar Jesse Durazo beefed up efforts Friday to count the estimated 15,000 leftover provisional ballots by hiring 10 additional temporary workers. Other ballots were reported to have been counted.

Durazo faced an accumulation of more than 200,000 votes, about a third of all cast. Of those, about 120,000 were absentee ballots, 20,000 were provisional ballots and 67,000 were paper ballots cast by voters who did not want to vote with electronic touch-screen machines at the polls. The county blamed the backlog on lack of sufficient manpower to count the ballots.

Pyle remains optimistic
In the meantime, Ana Maria Rosato, Pyle’s campaign manager, remained optimistic that the 66-year-old college trustee and career educator had won the race by working hard and simply out-campaigning her opponent doing heavy precinct walking.

“Rich De La Rosa really thought he had a chance and he lost. He’s grasping at straws. He’s a man with his last breath,” Rosato said about the 52-year-old candidate who was backed by termed-out San Jose Vice Mayor Pat Dando.

At some point, Rosato said, De La Rosa will have to concede. “He needs to do the honorable thing and put this to bed so that District 10 residents can celebrate and move forward,” she said.

Nathan Hanning, De La Rosa’s campaign manager, said it wouldn’t be unusual for his candidate to pick up 200 votes.

In the meantime, De La Rosa said he’s hoping the San Jose Elections Commission would reprimand Pyle for a last-minute campaign mailer, the second of four total slam pieces, sent out a week before the election, which contained false information to mislead voters.

Headlined, “Public interest or self interest? Who’s right for us?” the flier falsely accused De La Rosa of taking taxpayer money during an action ordered by a judge who ruled against the city’s eminent domain filing to take the Tropicana Shopping Center at the beginning of 2001.

In a letter to the commission dated Oct. 28, De La Rosa explained he was not a party on that action, did not receive any compensation and pointed out that he wasn’t even a party in the settlement.

“My role in the Tropicana issue was as spokesperson for the Tropicana Merchants Association, which was not part of the settlement. Neither I nor my company was awarded anything in this action. My only compensation at all was the return of a $500 deposit to a relocation attorney.”

Rosato said Pyle welcomed the investigation by the commission because “we have indeed crossed our ‘t’s and dotted our ‘i’s. He didn’t win. This is the sign of a desperate candidate trying to hold on to a mirage.”

The third hit piece from Pyle was mailed four days before the election. In it she again distorted the truth according to De La Rosa’s camp. She claimed, among other things, that De La Rosa had no business experience, which is not true and that he had a business on the city’s East Side, which was irrelevant and which De La Rosa claims was “racist.”

“Do I think this could have had an effect on the election? Sure I do. There’s no way of knowing how many voters were misled and believed the garbage she was feeding them. She was willing to do anything and say anything to win and I wasn’t,” De La Rosa said.

“None of our political print material mailed had her name on it. We always dealt with the issues and we always discussed my experience and my accomplishments. We never talked about her shortcomings,” he added. “A desperate person did a desperate thing and it was despicable. She should be ashamed of herself.”

Re-established ethics committee calls for Pyle retraction
In the meantime, a re-established ethics committee made up of VEP Community Association members David Noel and Bob Aquino and AVCA member Bob Hughes reviewed the first hit piece, in the form of a news release, and demanded that Pyle issue a retraction.

Hanning and De La Rosa said Pyle, however, didn’t comply with the committee’s request by the deadline. To add injury to insult, the committee, which had been accused of bias before being reformed with new members, disbanded right after reprimanding Pyle.

“We tried our best to stay out of the negative campaigning,” Hanning said. “We could have just as easily made up accusations against her. It’s unfortunate because campaigns should be about ideas.” he said.

Rosato, from a small town just outside of New Orleans, is credited for revamping Pyle’s campaign. The Democratic South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council helped propel the candidate to victory by launching a massive grassroots efforts that included telephone calls, precinct walking and dispersing literature. Rosato, who moved to the valley two years ago after living in Washington, D.C., is said to be a political bulldog who has been involved in many successful political races across the country for 20 years. There are rumors that Pyle will hire Rosato as her chief of staff.

Bob Boydston, president of the AVCA and VEP ethics committee, which sanctioned an earlier De La Rosa campaign attack on Pyle, said he and Lee Dimmitt, who were original members of the committee, resigned for fear of being perceived biased since Pyle served on the association’s board of directors.

He regretted that the re-established ethics committee had not been successful at staying together long enough to follow through with Pyle’s sanction.

Boydston said the committee disbanded because it couldn’t agree on the legal ramifications of coming up with sanctions.

“I was disappointed by the negative campaigning,” Boydston said. “The primary election was clean. I was disappointed that the candidates didn’t apologize. I was disappointed that they attacked the committee.”

In its sanctioning letter, the re-established ethics committee wrote that it had reviewed the information Pyle submitted in support of the first hit piece and found that it didn’t support her claims and that her statements were unsubstantiated.

“The tone of the entire release, which you published through your Nancy News, was inflammatory due to the unqualified use of the word ‘threaten’ in the headline and in several places in the body of the text.

“We request that you remove the press release from your Web site, post a retraction there and e-mail the retraction to the same mailing list that you used to publish the press release,” the committee wrote Pyle.

An Oct. 29 Mercury News editorial slammed Pyle, saying her second hit piece on De La Rosa fell “squarely in the category of downright lies.

“Not only did Pyle mangle the truth, she also attributed her supposed facts to the Mercury News—even attempting to reproduce the paper’s masthead. (She’ll never make it as a counterfeiter),” the newspaper editorialized.

After the re-established ethics committee resigned, its president, David Noel, wrote the candidates telling them he was disappointed the group deactivated.

“As a member, I assure you that we were very dedicated and tried hard to regain the momentum lost after our recent transition. Unfortunately, our foundation was not strong enough to carry us through the stormy waters that we found ourselves in,” Noel wrote.

He added that as Election Day was approaching, he saw an alarming trend from the Pyle campaign to produce unsubstantiated inflammatory negative attacks. “Even as our committee was investigating the attacks and asking for supporting information, the very piece in question was issued to wider distribution, and additional attacks were in the works. I hope the electorate is as disappointed with these pieces as the committee was.”

He then urged Pyle to refrain from stating unsubstantiated assumptions as facts, from making unsubstantiated associations between facts and people, and from crafting text that may be literally true, but is carefully structured to cause the reader to make false conclusions and associations.

Noel then chastises De La Rosa saying that while he was not serving on the ethics committee in September, he was “repulsed with the piece Tab Berg issued in response to Nancy’s lobbyist statements at the Almaden Valley Community Association election forum. This negative piece was worse than the issue it was raising. I commend your campaign for refraining from such attacks since that event.”

Noel points out that even if the committee hadn’t deactivated, it wouldn’t have been in a position to prevent unfair campaign practices during the last five days of the election and urged the candidates to abide by the code of fair campaign practices that they signed in January.

For updated results of votes in the District 10 City Council race please log onto the Santa Clara Registrar of Voters Web site, www.sccvote.org or call (408) 299-8683.Updates will be posted on Tuesdays and Fridays after 4 p.m.