A Ballad of the Ballot Follies in D.C.

News that on the eve of Tuesday's primary election, a recently mailed D.C. Voter Guide had some incorrect precinct locations on the label has produced heartburn in some voters. That's understandable. But as a wise old banker friend once told me, "Sometimes you just have to measure success by comparison." Whatever happens on Tuesday, there's a good bet that both the vote-counting and the victors will be a huge improvement over the pols and poll results that we the people of Washington have endured in times past.

If you are a recent arrival or an old-timer with your heart set on a trip down memory lane, pour yourself another cup of coffee and settle in for a reunion with D.C. election history.

My first electoral experience came during my junior year at Howard University when I volunteered with Gwen, my wife-to-be, to distribute polling instructions at a Northeast D.C. precinct in the May 3, 1960, party primary. Everything that could go wrong managed to find a way to do so. Voters voted in the wrong precincts; thousands of ballots were challenged; the vote count dragged on. For extra credit, some of us agreed to go to the National Guard Armory to help count the challenged ballots. Tired students eventually returned to their classes. Fifteen days later, the ballots were still being counted. Official figures for the contest were finally announced weeks after the election.

It was like this for years.

With help from Post archives and my personal recollections, the following gems are recalled:

· In the November 1972 presidential election, a computer leased by the elections board to count ballots in eight hours took more than 17 hours to complete the job. Said an elections chief: "It was faster than the old method or we'd still be counting now."

· In the historic 1974 home rule primary election for mayor and council, five days after the polls had closed, voters still didn't officially know who had won. Tabulation went on for days before Walter Washington was declared the winner of the mayoral contest.

· In the September 1978 Democratic mayoral primary, three weeks went by before official election returns were counted. Confusion reigned: Challenged ballots went uncounted, as many as 7,000 ballots weren't counted at all by the electronic scanning equipment, and one Northeast precinct ran out of ballots on Election Day.

· In the District's September 1982 primary, about 20,000 properly registered voters had to cast challenged ballots after their names couldn't be found on the voter rolls. On the other hand, the rolls included the names of tens of thousands of people who had died or moved or whose names were listed more than once.

A year earlier, the elections office lost its batches of "voter voted" computer cards for the 1981 election and therefore had no record of who voted.

Since the city took on the mantle of a limited home-rule government in 1975, our elections have drawn national attention. We once made news when a box filled with ballots fell off a city truck on the way from the polls to a counting room. Then there was the time that thousands of ballots had been found dumped and unprocessed in a desk drawer. But the horrors of the past are mostly behind us, with newer computerized systems and competent staff at the Board of Elections and Ethics. Anyway, we live in hope.

That even applies to this year's crop of contenders. They certainly are a cut above the politicians who used to present themselves to the electorate. The list of inductees into the D.C. Elected Officials Hall of Shame is long. We all have our favorites. Mine? Frank Shaffer-Corona, member of the D.C. Board of Education.

Where to begin? The voters sent Mr. Shaffer-Corona, a college dropout, to the school board on the strength of his work in voter education drives and perhaps because of the skills he demonstrated as a seller of chimney cleaners and as a collection manager for a finance agency.

During his four years of service to public education from 1977 to 1981 -- before voters sent him packing -- Shaffer-Corona built a record of personal irresponsibility unrivaled by that of any D.C. politician of his era.

Using school board funds, Shaffer-Corona traveled to Beirut to engage in an exchange of views with Palestinian terrorists, flew down to Cuba to share his views at a "Youth Against Imperialism" rally, ran up a $1,900 school system telephone bill making calls to the Islamic Republic of Iran ("I feel that I am serving the people of the District of Columbia," he said) and asked the board to fund a trip to Iran to meet with students holding Americans hostage ("The fascist fiends at the White House and at the State Department got us into this mess and only honest people can get us out," he declared.)

What does going to Iran have to do with District schools, he was asked. "Everything I do is educational," he replied.

Shaffer-Corona was reprimanded by the school board for misusing public funds and for repeatedly subjecting the board to "embarrassment, ridicule and consternation." The board also took him to task for having confiscated the receiver for the telephone at the desk of the board's receptionist, "thereby rendering the receptionist's telephone inoperative and throwing the daily operations of the board into a state of chaos."

Shaffer-Corona said in defense of his actions that he took away the phone receiver because he was dissatisfied with the receptionist's job performance.

'Course there have been other elected gems:

· The council member who bit a tow-truck operator in a fight.

· Another council member who punched out a staffer at a Christmas holiday event -- "I bopped him," said the council member; he "sucker-punched me," said the staffer.

· And, of course, there was the celebrated videotape seen around the world of you-know-who in the hotel with the pipe, the temptress and the FBI.

Oh, well, that was then. It's a new day in the District. So on Tuesday, let the good times roll at the polls.

kingc@washpost.com