THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 2, 1996 TAG: 9602020400
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
The State Board of Elections decided Thursday to challenge the wording of a Virginia Beach ballot question asking voters whether the city should adopt a partial ward system.
The question is slated to be posed in the May elections.
Council members, who drafted the question, said they were just trying make it understandable.
But clarity was not enough for the three-member elections board, which concluded that the question violated state law.
The board voted unanimously to ask the Virginia Beach Circuit Court ``to reconsider the wording of the ballot question,'' board secretary M. Bruce Meadows said after the meeting.
As approved by the council in December, the question was to read:
``Should the city council member elected to represent a particular borough be elected by all qualified voters throughout the city (an at-large system) rather than only by the qualified voters residing in that particular borough (a ward system)?
``If you wish to vote for all 11 council seats, vote YES! If you prefer to vote for only 5 of the 11 council seats, vote NO!''
It is the second part, which is more of a statement than a question, that troubled the election board.
``The concern of the board was that the instructions following the question were not really a ballot question as required by law,'' Meadows said.
``We are mandated by law to make sure elections conform to Virginia election law,'' he continued. ``We're saying it does not conform with Virginia election law, and that's why we're going to take it up in court.''
In December, Circuit Court Judge Jerome B. Friedman sided with the council against the election board's representative in the attorney general's office.
The court decided that the language complied with the General Assembly's mandate to hold an election on the ward issue. In the bill, passed last year, the legislature gave the Virginia Beach City Council authority to draft the ballot language.
Meadows said Senior Assistant Attorney General James W. Hopper will go to court soon with the election board's concerns.
Virginia Beach City Attorney Leslie L. Lilley said he was ``disappointed'' with the election board's decision, ``because frankly we feel that it complies with all aspects of the law.''
Lilley said the real problem is that state law does not provide enough guidance in the drafting of such ballot initiatives.
Virginia Beach City Council member John A. Baum, who wrote the language that the elections board is contesting, said he just wanted to make sure voters understood the implications of their voting booth decision.
After a similar ballot initiative was approved in 1994, many voters said they had been confused by the question. Baum said he was trying to avoid another misunderstanding.
Maurice B. Jackson, a civic activist who has fought for five years to change the city's system of government, said he was pleased with the election board's decision. Jackson said he and other ward-system supporters thought the council's question was biased in favor of the at-large status quo.
Under the current system, everyone in the city can vote for all 11 council and School Board members. Seven members on each body, however, are considered ``borough representatives,'' and must live in their respective districts.
The boroughs range in population from under 1,000 in Baum's rural Blackwater district to nearly 150,000 in suburban Kempsville.
Last year, when demanding the ward-system referendum, the General Assembly required the City Council to redraw voting district lines into seven equally populated boroughs. Each would have approximately 56,000 people. On Tuesday, the council is scheduled to pick new district maps from among four that have been proposed.
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA BEACH CITY COUNCIL ELECTIONS WARD SYSTEM by CNB