Dukakis Forces Cry Foul as Phones Go Dead

Pacific Bell mistakenly cut off telephone service early Tuesday to the Dukakis-Bentsen campaign headquarters in San Diego, confounding campaign workers throughout the county and interfering with Election Day plans to get out the vote.

A phone company official said the problem was the result of an inadvertent clerical error, but campaign officials, who were without service for several hours Tuesday, said they are skeptical of Pacific Bell’s explanation.

“It seems to us extraordinary and inexplicable that any inadvertence was involved when all of the lines at the main Dukakis office were cut off in the midst of the most ambitious effort to get out the vote in the history of San Diego County,” said Byron Georgiou, chairman of the county Dukakis-Bentsen campaign.

Missed Precinct Reports

“They disconnected all of the lines into the office,” Georgiou said. “All our morning calls from precinct leaders were unable to be taken. . . . We missed all the reporting calls from our precinct volunteers.”

Service to the headquarters at 3659 India St. was cut off sometime between 2:30 a.m., when Democratic workers quit for the night, and 6:30 a.m., when they came back to work and discovered the phones were dead, Georgiou said. It took Pacific Bell until 10 a.m. to restore service, he said.

Terry Churchill, Pacific Bell’s vice president for San Diego and Imperial counties, described the problem Tuesday as a “computer input error” and said he intervened to restore the service as soon as he learned of the problem. He said service was restored by 9:30 a.m.

“It was a simple typing error,” Churchill said. “I know they would like to make more of it.” He said no sabotage was involved.

Sheet Marked Incorrectly

The campaign had placed an order to have the phones disconnected Thursday, which would be represented numerically as 11-10-88, Churchill said. However, the phone company employee who took the disconnection order inadvertently put the numbers in the wrong boxes on a computer input sheet, he said. As a result, one of the eights in 88 was read by a computer as the eighth day of the month, which was Tuesday, he said.

Georgiou said he found the explanation “pretty unbelievable” and added that telephone companies are supposed to take special precautions to ensure that political campaigns are protected from sabotage.

Hundreds of campaign workers were at various locations throughout the county Tuesday morning and attempted to call the headquarters to coordinate plans, but heard only a recording saying that the phones had been disconnected, Georgiou said, adding “I guess they made do and figured it out.”