Daily News from New York, New York • 315

KL FACES PLACES --a CI fV-ft 8 mmm A 1 5 By ERIC V. COPAGE WETERAN journalist Andrew Cooper has been awarded the 1982 D. Parke Gibson journalism award for his role as founder and director of the Trans-Urban News Service. The service is a five-year-old information organization that provides coverage of the city's minority communities and also trains fledgling black and Hispanic reporters. Cooper, a 55-year-old Park Slope resident, was honored Thursday by the New York Chapter of Public Relations Society of America's Committee on Minorities.

He was unanimously chosen by the eight-member committee of the Public Relations Society, who selected from a group of nominees submitted by the media organizations, public relations agencies, social service organizations and corporations. HAILS UTILITY AIDE Humber-to Hevia, director of art and design for urban affairs and community development at Brooklyn Union Gas, was honored recently by the Brooklyn Brown-stone Conference for his assistance in organizing the Annual Brooklyn Brownstone Fair. Hevia has organized and designed the booths, display and general layout of the two-day fair for the past 10 years. h- 5" Center Art Faculty will be exhibited through Oct 29. The paintings of Albert Kotin (1907-1980) will be shown in the three galleries of LIU's Downtown Brooklyn campus.

The exhibition, which includes work from Kotin's beginnings in the 20s to his work in the '70s, shows how the artist's evolution closely parallels what was going on in American art during these decades from Social Realism through Expressionism and Mex-. ican design to Abstract Expressionism. HONORS, AWARDS Siu Ng, a June 1982 graduate of Canarsie High School, has been award a scholarship by the Governor's Committee on Scholastic Achievement Angel Rivera was honored by the Brooklyn Lung Association with a testimonial reception. Rivera, a member of the association's board of directors, was joined during the reception by scores of other New York community leaders Berman, publisher of the Brooklyn Graphic local weekly newspaper, was honored for his involvement with the Bensonhurst community by Bensonhurst Board Trade Alberto Rivera, of Bushwick and a senior at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene, was honored at a recent luncheon for helping troubled youth at Independence House during the summer Roger Millard, a manager of Sears, Roebuck, received a plaque from the Ladies Auxiliary of the' Flatbush Boys Club. Millard received 4 X.

CP" Andrew Cooper PROVOST NAMED Ethyle R. Wolfe, a Brooklyn College professor of classics who has served the college in numerous faculty and administrative positions since she joined the college as a lecturer in 1947, has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at the college. She was one of the prime movers in bringing back core curriculum requirements to the Mid wood campus. ART RETROSPECTIVE A retrospective exhibition of the works by a former member of the LIUBrooklyn the award in recognition of his outstanding service to the Boys Club and the Flatbush community. (The Daily News welcomes items of interest about you or your organization suitable for publication in the Faces' and Places column.

Mail your item to Eric V. Cdpage, New York Daily News, 16 Court Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201. Please include the section of Brooklyn the person or event is from and a phone number where you can be reached during the day.) Umberto Hevia VOTE FROM PAGE ONE purchased from the -Board of Elections, said, an election insider. It is also possible to simply purchase completely forged petitions for the right price, he said, and they are laboriously produced by going down to the Board of Elections and copying each different signature from the buff card.

For these reasons, politicians are increasingly using the services of handwriting experts in their campaigns. Although allegations are rampant and challenges routine in just about every race, new primaries are extremely difficult to get Pols in New York succeed about once every three or four years, on an average. IN A RACE WITH only around 14,000 votes, such as the turnout for the Cuite-DiBrienza race, you would have to show 3,000 irregularities, for instance, to statistically prove that it would have affected the outcome and therefore demand a hew primary. Athough DiBrienza lost by only 525 votes, he pulled out of court because it was far too large a number to call it a really close race. There are some suggested reforms: Andrew Fisher: "The Board of Elections should be better funded and beefed up to improve its efficiency.

Right now its treated like a mental instituiton an unpleasant necessity." Assemblyman Joseph Lentol: "I think the Board of Elections should have a number of roving troubleshooters on Election Day who know the election laws because often inspectors can't properly answer the questions. "AT THE VERY least inspectors should be better educated before they're sent out, by some formal program of schooling. "There should be some definite way of taking deceased people off voter registration rolls to avoid the temptation to use this common abuse. "The Board of Elections should be brought into the 20th century by computerization. Possibly in the future, registered voters could be better identified by a card with their picture on it State Sen.

Tom Bartosiewicz: "There should be some way for the courts to discourage outright nuisance cases from going to court Although this would be difficult to define, judges should be able to fine candidates who are shown to engage in nuisance suits." signatures being hand-written instead of signed and the wrong date beside the signature. Sometimes the really big ones get away, such as in a recent congressional election in which a primary campaign costing the incumbent at least $60,000 could have been avoided. While going over the petitions, no one at the Board of Elections, or on the legal staff of the incumbent congressman, noticed that the challenger wasn't even eligible because he wasn't a registered Democrat CARELESSNESS, IGNORANCE and often simple mistakes are routinely the deciding factors irr getting knocked off the ballot What is known as the "cover argument" could knock a candidate's entire petition out keeping him out of the primary. If there are ony 600 signatures instead of the 660 listed on the cover, it voids the whole thing. Experienced politicians routinely try to get three to four times the amount of signatures needed to be sure they won't be knocked off the ballot But the Board of Elections, however, probably will not notice petition errors, no matter how blatant Unless it is pointed out by a front man from the opposition, a petition automatically gets an aspiring candidate on the ballot Many have even charged that there is mass confusion at the Board of Elections during election time because of the heavy volume of work handled by temporary workers.

AN OFTEN-HEARD charge is that new buff cards are routinely missed and the voters declared unqualified simply because the cards are not filed properly. Instead, they end up being stuffed in a pile somewhere in a comer of the Board of Elections headquarters. This year there was a record amount of confusion caused by the llth-hour reapportionment of election districts and by a computer foulup that sent an unknown number of voters to the wrong districts, eliminating their ballots. There is also the well-known fraudulent practice of forged signatures, using dead people's names to vote, with the addresses of abandoned buildings. Some long-time observers of Brooklyn politics claim that Green-Wood Cemetery routinely voted until around 1969.

SOME CANDIDATES literally sit around a kitchen table and trace signatures off old petitions ler. "If the candidate is fighting it himself, he's not on the street campaigning." "When obtaining voter petition signatures, you have to remember that 90 of the time, signatures gotten on the street turn out to be invalid," he said. "THIS YEAR, BECAUSE of all the added confusion with the Board of Elections' sending people to the wrong polling places," said Bartosiewicz, "I saw people waiting in line for an hour to vote, then they were told they had to vote by paper. People generally believe that those papar ballots are not counted and decided to not bother voting again. "Generally, around 80 to 90 of most affidavit votes are voided because the buff cards are missing," continued Bartosiewicz.

In the primary between Cuite and his challenger, Stephen DiBrienza, out of 750 affidavit ballots cast for DiBrienza, only 173 were declared by the board to be valid. Bea Dolen, executive director of the city's Board of Elections, said that this is not an unusual amount "WE NEVER DENY A voter the right to an affidavit ballot," said Dolen. "We don't want an argument at the polling place. Instead we give everyone an affidavit ballot and check them later." DiBrienza's people, however, gave a different explanation and said that technical mistakes by the Board of Elections and polling inspectors are the cause for disqualification of such a great number of paper ballots. The thrust of legal activity takes place before the primaries, getting on the ballot and then after the primaries, when the results are challenged with show-cause orders.

One of the things wrong with the election process, said Fisher, is the confusion created by the court in handing dowm decisions about irregularities, which changes the rules of the game every year. "Sometimes they are very liberal and sometimes they are. very conservative," he said. THE BOARD OF ELECTIONS gives an opponent plenty of ammunition in challenging signatures on petitions, with 50 separate technical reasons having to do with the way a petition is filled out The reasons include such things as petition sheet not numbered, 3 3.