Kim Alexander's Weblog

What happened to CAL-ACCESS? Reporters ask, SoS explains

2011-12-15T10:52:00.000-08:00

Over the last few days there have been numerous stories about the failure of the Cal-Access online campaign finance disclosure system, operated by the California Secretary of State. The LA Times quotes Derek Cressman of Common Cause calling for hearings, and the Sacramento Bee interviewed Secretary of State Debra Bowen who stated, "We want to get it up as soon as possible, but we also want to complete the fix that will be the most stable over time."

Today, Chris Reynolds, head of the Secretary of State's Political Reform Division, sent around a document explaining why their technical staff believes Internet access to the system went down and what they are doing to restore Internet access to the system as quickly as possible. His email also says the his office is available to assist people in the meantime by phone, email, fax, or in-person visit. The main number is (916) 653-6224, email address is http://www.sos.ca.gov/webcontact/general/question.aspx, fax is (916) 653-5045, street address is 1500 11th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814.

Here is the memo:

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What happened to CAL-ACCESS?

CAL-ACCESS (theCalifornia Automated Lobbying and Campaign Contribution and Expenditure SearchSystem) is a suite of applications developed in 13different programming languages. CAL-ACCESS runs on a server cluster and associated components that aremore than 12 years old, and runs on an uncommon version of the Unix operatingsystem called Tru64.

On November 30, 2011, the disk array controllerexperienced a physical memory failure that led to the loss of its disk arrayconfiguration and the loss of three physical disk drives. The disk arraycontains a total of 90 disk drives with 15 disk drives installed in each of sixdrive enclosures. (The arrayconfiguration defines which combination of physical disk drives form the logicaldisk drive that is presented to the operating system.) When CAL-ACCESS was originallyarchitected in 1999, it was common to locate the operating system on the diskarray rather than on locally attached disks. This configuration created asingle point of failure in the array controller.

After replacing the failed memoryequipment, staff were able to reconfigure a very small portion of the diskarray that permitted the server cluster to start. The portion of the diskarray that houses the area where the databases reside was not immediatelyrecovered since a more extensive amount of time was needed to remap the entiredisk array. To make the systemavailable by Internet again as soon as possible, staff ported the servercluster to use an alternate network-attached storage device and used a backupto restore the data by December 7. The configuration functioned for about30 hours before it failed again on December 9. Staff tried multipleapproaches to recover this configuration throughout Friday, Saturday andSunday.

On Monday, December 12, staffinitiated three concurrent recovery methods to restore services:

1. Porting CAL-ACCESS off of the Tru64 cluster toa modern hardware architecture, which involves modifying the database andreprogramming websites and applications in as many as 13 different codinglanguages.

2. Virtualizing the Tru64 Unix environment to moveoff of the aged equipment, which includes building new servers and installingand configuring software that can emulate the DEC Alpha architecture to run onan Intel architecture. Once thisenvironment has been established the Tru64 operating system can be installedand configured to match the old production environment, and the databases and applicationscan be restored from backup.

3. Rebuilding the original disk array, which is expected to take 10 to14 days.

Work on the first method startedon December 12. The second andthird methods require contracted specialists and a state contract approval isexpected by December 15.

Then will CAL-ACCESS bepermanently fixed?

Created in 1999, CAL-ACCESS isnow very old and fragile, and few people in the United States are familiar withthe antiquated technology used to build and operate the system. The recovery efforts will make CAL-ACCESSstable and get it running, but it can never be more robust orfeature-laden. Ideally, we need afresh start with an all-new CAL-ACCESS.

State election websites assessed in new nationwide Pew study

2011-12-08T12:34:00.000-08:00

Today the Pew Center on the States unveiled a new, nationwide assessment of state election websites, "Being Online Is Still Not Enough."

The California Voter Foundation was a major partner in this project and undertook much of the basic research, analysis, and writing, along with the Center for Governmental Studies and the Nielsen Norman Group. Together our three organizations conducted this assessment, which reviewed all 50 states' and the District of Columbia's election websites for content, lookup tools and usability.

An article I co-wrote for electionline.org, was published today, providing additional details about this important project. It's also available via CVF-NEWS.

Unfortunately, California does not score well in the assessment, primarily due to the fact that our state election website lacks all five of the voter lookup tools the project assessed (voter registration status, polling place, ballot information, and absentee and provisional ballot status).

While many other states have made great progress in recent years utilizing the Internet as an effective and efficient tool to help voters engage in elections, California is lagging behind. At CVF we are working with a number of individuals and organizations to promote a statewide voter registration status lookup tool and hope that someday soon California voters will have as good, if not better access to modern election tools as voters in other states.

It is our hope that this study will help states better understand how their election websites compare to one another, provide useful feedback and ultimately help more voters participate more effectively and meaningfully in the democratic process.

Remembering a hero of California elections

2011-10-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a longtime friend and mentor, Tim Hodson, passed away. His departure will leave a giant hole in the fields of elections, government, voting, redistricting, and political reform. His long career in public service is covered by Robert Davila in today's Sacramento Bee.

I knew Tim in so many capacities - most recently as a member of the Fair Political Practices Commission, where he led a project to modernize California's disclosure laws.

Tim was that kind of quiet public servant who just assumed it was normal to work for the general public good - an attitude that stood out in a town where so many people are working for special, not public interests. That's one reason why Tim's commitment to public service stands out so brightly.

I knew Tim for many years, starting back in 1990 when I was working for California Common Cause and Tim was the senior consultant to the Senate Elections Committee. Tim always made time for me, and cared about the issues on our plate.

One of the best parts of my job with Common Cause was working with Ruth Holton, who would later marry Tim and end up living about a block away from my home. I'd sometimes run into Ruth or Tim at our neighborhood market and hear about their plans for dinner that night.

Those simple things, like enjoying a meal with a loved one, deserve to be cherished. Ruth urged her friends and family to treasure those moments and take joy in the simple pleasures of life. It's good advice. I'm going to try to remember it in Tim's honor.

Lively discussion marks 100th anniversary of CA direct democracy

2011-09-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

We are rapidly approaching the 100 year anniversary of the California initiative process, an occasion celebrated by some and scorned by others. The centennial of the Golden State’s system of direct democracy is provoking many to rethink this process and consider whether it needs an upgrade.

Many groups are sponsoring polls, public forums and debates, conducting research and cooking up ideas for reform. But probably no event will be like the one Zocalo Public Square sponsored with New America Foundationand the Bill Lane Center for the American West at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center last week.

I had the honor of sharing the stage with several people who, like me, have taken some time to think seriously (and occasionally humorously, thankfully) about how the initiative process works. Author and New America Fellow Joe Mathews moderated our panel and brought his lightening fast quips to our spirited discussion. My favorite Mathews line was when he compared enacting initiatives to “adding another room to the Winchester mystery house”.

Bruno Kaufmann, president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute Europe, traveled the farthest to participate. He is a strong proponent of direct democracy for Europe and is involved in the EU’s European Citizen Initiative. That’s why his observation that California is the only place in the world where we need less direct democracy was so astonishing to me. He also observed that California initiatives are about creating and mirroring conflict, not solving it, which I found to be a highly true and astute perspective, the kind you can only get from someone like Kaufmann who has studied direct democracy in many states and nations.

Perhaps the most surprising panelist was James Fowler, medical geneticist and political scientist from UC San Diego. At first, I could not figure out what a medical geneticist might have to say about direct democracy. Plenty, it turned out. Fowler studies decision-making, has researched the genetic roots of political ideology, and discussed how social networking sites are extensions of real networks and may be the key in successfully moving toward an online signature gathering platform for initiative campaigns.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic advocate for California’s initiative process was Paul Jacob of the Citizens in Charge Foundation. His organization led term limits initiative campaigns in California and several other states, and he believes California’s process works well (particularly in comparison to the majority of U.S. states, which have no initiative process). But he is concerned about the future of California’s initiative process, especially the way our Legislature deals with it, which he called “vindictive” (his case in point, passing a last-minute bill at the end of session that would prohibit initiatives from being placed on Primary election ballots).

My comments focused on the need to move toward publicized disclosure, and how the California Voter Foundationpromotes reforms to ensure information about the top donors in initiative campaigns is readily available to voters when they are asked to sign initiative petitions; when they consult their ballot pamphlets; and when they cast their ballots.

I also pointed out that on average only one in three initiatives pass, and we would serve voters better by treating the initiative process as the people’s lawmaking arena and ensuring voters have the access to the same kind of information lawmakers have when they vote on bills, such as knowing who the true sponsor of a measure is.

I anticipated a lively, engaged audience and was not disappointed! There were tons of great questions, and the discussion continued over cocktails and music well past the official end time.

Zocalo events aren’t over when the day is done. Zocalo staff write up a review of the session, called “The Takeaway”, post event photos, and make podcasts and video archives of every event. Zocalo deserves kudos for innovating a new kind of public forum for California’s communities that is engaging, interactive and much needed.

Patt Morrison Asks - LA Times interview

2011-09-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I was honored to be featured in Patt Morrison's column in the Los Angeles Times. Excerpts are below.
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What's a nice girl like you doing in a mess like this?

I love elections; I grew up with elections. My dad ran for Culver City City Council when I was 7. Election night, we had a big party and my dad was the underdog and someone was on the phone getting the numbers and I [wrote] the numbers on the chalkboard. To me, politics has been about community service.

You also learned about the political version of trick or treat.

Someone showed up at the door with a $500 [campaign contribution] check. For a Culver City election, that was a lot of money. My dad sent him away. He said: "I don't know that man, I don't want to know him and I don't want him to think I owe him anything." My first lesson in how money in politics works!

We have former Secretary of State March Fong Eu to thank for banning pay toilets -- and for the California Voter Foundation?

[It was] an offshoot of the secretary of state's office, to raise charitable funds for extra voter outreach. By 1993, it was [defunct], out of compliance with various tax filings. In college I'd worked for Gary K. Hart when he ran for Congress. It was grueling: high stakes, consultants, opposition research -- that stuff is really unpleasant. I wanted to be for all the voters, not just some of the voters. So this opportunity to restart the California Voter Foundation fell into my lap.

Even voter registration has become politicized. Someone on a right-wing website wrote that it is "profoundly un-American'' to register welfare recipients to vote.

It's unfortunate. In a lot of the world you're automatically [registered] when you become 18 and you're a citizen. Here we have this extra hurdle.

Across the country, voting rights are not shared among all Americans. In California there's a variety of practices between the counties, an unevenness. That's a big problem.

You almost weren't allowed to vote in 2008.

They told me my polling place had moved. I got my sample ballot and went back and said, "This is my polling place." They were turning other people away.

Elections are run as if they're one-day sales. We run polling places for 12, 14 hours, staffed by people with very little training working very long hours on a job they only do once or twice a year. We should have people vote over several days in an environment staffed by well-trained people. I think about elections year-round; most people only think about them for maybe two months. It's hard to sustain the momentum to implement election reform.
continued at www.latimes.com

Videos from Pew's California voter registration conference now online

2011-08-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

Last month, on July 14, the Pew Center on the States hosted a conference in Sacramento at the State Capitol to discuss ways to upgrade California's voter registration process. I participated in one of the panel discussions; videos from the entire conference are now available via the California Channel's web site. Here's a rundown:

Session 1: Conference introduction by David Becker, Project Director, Pew Center on the States, with Gail Pellerin, President of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, and Bill McInturff, Partner and Co-Founder, Public Opinion Strategies presenting Pew research findings.

Session 2: "The Role of Voter Registration in the Democratic Process", presented by Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown.

Session 3: "Our Current System - Costly and Inefficient", moderated by Catherine Hazelton, Sr. Program Officer with The James Irvine Foundation, and featuring: John Lindback, Former Director of Elections, Oregon/Alaska; Jill LaVine, Registrar of Voters, Sacramento County; and Kim Alexander, President & Founder, California Voter Foundation.

Session 4: "Achieving the Dual Goals - Protecting the Right to Vote While Maintaining the Integrity of the System", moderated by Amy Dominguez-Arms, Program Director, The James Irvine Foundation and featuring: Kathay Feng, Executive Director, CA Common Cause; Dean Logan, Registrar of Voters, Los Angeles County; Heather Smith, President, Rock the Vote; Edward Hailes, Managing Director, Advancement Project; Rob Stutzman, President, Stutzman Public Affairs; and Antonio Gonzales, President, Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

Session 5: "The Potential for Technology to Improve the Way California Maintains and Updates its Voter Rolls", discussing Pew's plans for an Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), featuring: Jeff Butcher, Executive IT Architect, IBM; Pam Smith, President, Verified Voting; Shane Hamlin, Director of Elections, Washington state; Dave Macdonald, Registrar of Voters, Alameda County; and Jim Dempsey, Vice President for Public Policy, Center for Democracy and Technology.

Election bills up in the Legislature Tuesday, May 3

2011-05-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

Both the Senate and Assembly's election committees will hold hearings on Tuesday, May 3 to take up a number of bills that would impact California elections.

The Senate Elections Committee is meeting at 1:30 in Room 3191 at the State Capitol; though no webcast is available, there is an audio stream of the hearing offered online. Bills to be taken up by this committee tomorrow include SB 397/Yee, which would allow counties to implement online voter registration; SB 334/Desaulnier, which would require the Secretary of State to identify and publish in the ballot pamphlet the top five donors supporting or opposing propositions; SB 908/Runner would allow military overseas voters and their families to submit ballots via email; SB 202/Hancock would increase the initiative filing fee from $200 to $,2000; SB 448/DeSaulnier would require initiative petition circulators to wear a badge stating whether their were volunteers or paid; and SB 348/Correa, which make vote-by-mail ballots eligible to be counted as long as they are postmarked by election day and received within six days of the election (under current law, VBM ballots must be received by Election Day in order to be counted); and SB 641/Calderon would provide opportunities for Californians to register and vote after the 15 day voter registration deadline.

The Assembly Elections Committee is meeting at the same time, in room 444 at 1:30 at the State Capitol on Tuesday. The Assembly's Daily File shows numerous bills will also be heard by this committee, and an audio feed is also available online. One bill in particular that I am paying attention to is AB 1146/Norby, which would raise the threshold for itemizing campaign contributions and independent expenditures from the current level of $100 to $200, thus enabling more donors to remain anonymous.

SacBee - Online Voter Registration Long Overdue

2011-05-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

The May 1, 2011 edition of the Sacramento Bee featured this editorial about the need to implement online voter registration in California. Excerpts are featured below.

Think about 6.4 million people. That's more people than live in 34 of the 50 states. It's also the number of Californians who are eligible to vote but are not registered.
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The Legislature approved online registration in 2008, to no avail. Clearly frustrated with delays and excuses, some lawmakers are plunging ahead with their own solutions.

Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, is carrying legislation that would authorize counties to permit online registration.
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A county-by-county system is not the preferred method of registering voters. However, it may be the only solution, given the uncertain status of a statewide online voter registration.

Back to that number, 6.4 million people eligible to vote but not registered. That's more than are registered in all but five of the 50 states. Individuals should take it upon themselves to register. But California should make it as easy as logging onto a laptop.

The Economist looks at what's wrong with California

2011-05-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

A recent edition of The Economist features a special report on "California's Dysfunctional Democracy". The magazine is full of fascinating articles about direct democracy and the state's fiscal and political problems.

In particular, The People's Will covers the pros and cons of our state's initiative process; War by Initiative tells the story of Prop. 13 and its impact; Burn the Wagons describes potential structural reforms to California governance (and features a quote from yours truly); Origin of the Species tells the story of how direct democracy came to be; A Lesson in Mediocrity tells how California's initiative process has impacted public education; The Withering Branch explains how the initiative process has weakened California's legislature; Stateside and Abroad compares the initiative process in other states and countries; What Do You Know? describes the shortcomings of California voter education; and Vox Populi or Hoi Polloi? examines the European Union's development of a referendum process.

Top 10 Ballot Design Tips from AIGA/Design for Democracy

2011-03-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

As someone who loves Top 10 lists and also cares deeply about ballot design, I was delighted to find this recent blog post by Dana Chisnell highlighting the Top 10 Ballot Design Principles to ensure usability and accessibility, generated through AIGA's Design for Democracy project.

Among the top ten principles -- avoid centered text; use clear, simple language; use contrast and color functionally; and decide what's most important.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dana over recently at the Election Verification Network conference where she and her design colleagues gave an excellent presentation about the importance of good ballot design (slides are available on her blog for downloading).

Chicago conference for better elections

2011-03-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

I've spent the past two days in Chicago at the Election Verification Network conference, where I delivered remarks this morning about the the need to modernize voter registration in California and shared the "sneak peak" findings of our nationwide state election website assessment project for the Pew Center on the States in collaboration with the Center for Governmental Studies.

It's been fantastic to be here in Chicago with all these folks - computer scientists, statisticians, election officials, activists, academics - to discuss the latest challenges and opportunities in election technology and verification. It's been kind of sentimental too, as I organized the very first convening of this group, also held in Chicago, back in April 2004. Then, about 26 people participated; now the Election Verification Network (EVN) conference has expanded to close to 100 folks.

One of the highlights of the conference was Reverend Jesse Jackson's address Friday morning, where he described our work advancing election verification as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that he pushed for and is still being fought for in many ways today. One of the topics he addressed was the impact that "states' rights" laws have on voting rights nationwide and how difficult it is to give voters any guarantee that their voting rights are protected in every state.

At these election conferences lately I am often left wondering why it is that the federal and state governments don't pay counties for the costs of putting on state and federal elections? If they did then those dollars could come with strings attached that would give voters some guarantee of certain rights and expectations of voting system performance. There'd be plenty of money to pay for more training and pollworkers and voting centers where people could register on election day and get their registration records updated.

The voting transaction is one of the rare times a person interfaces with the government as a voter and instead of making the most of the opportunity we let people fall through the cracks because we have an antiquated, 19th century system being operated out of people's garages.

Fortunately there are lots of concerned, thoughtful people around this country who care about elections and are putting their minds and hearts to the task of making elections work more effectively (and yes, even in this environment of scarce resources, that's possible to do). It's been a privilege to spend time in their company here in Chicago.

SF instant runoff voting poll finds voters remain confused on the details

2011-03-10T15:15:00.000-08:00

A new poll commissioned by San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce found that a majority of San Francisco voters don't understand how their instant runoff voting process works. Excerpts from today's San Francisco Chronicle article by John Coté are featured below.

Despite ranked-choice voting being introduced for Board of Supervisors races in 2004 and used in every city election since, 55 percent of respondents to a recent poll commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce said they didn't know whether their vote counted once their first, second- or third-choice candidate had been eliminated.

In that scenario, their vote would not affect the outcome of the race, although 29 percent of respondents thought that their vote would be counted. Only 15 percent of the respondents said that their vote would not be counted, according to the poll, which was conducted by David Binder Research and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

"It's clear that San Francisco voters understand ranked-choice voting about as well as they understand quantum physics," said Nathan Ballard, a Democratic strategist who was a spokesman for Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom when he was mayor.

"It's cloaked in mystery to the degree that most voters find it indecipherable, and will have no idea of the impact of their votes on election day," Ballard said.

Steven Hill, a consultant who helped draft ranked-choice voting systems for San Francisco and Oakland, said the poll, which surveyed 500 registered voters in the city from Feb. 16 to 20, was inconclusive. He also said the poll's questions were skewed to elicit responses unfavorable to ranked-choice voting to lay the groundwork for a repeal of the system.

"Most people don't understand how your car works, or how your computer works or how your phone works," Hill said. "But they know how to use it, and they're comfortable with it."

Also weighing in on the poll is SF Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, who speculates that San Francisco may be headed for a "ballot box train wreck" this year in the first open-seat contest for mayor since instant runoff voting was enacted. He writes:

While confusing, the system has stuck so far and it will almost certainly take a ballot box meltdown to galvanize voters - a crazy, unexpected outcome that leaves voters feeling bewildered and disenfranchised. If that's what you want, the good news is all the factors - huge unwieldy field, no clear favorite, and lots of recognizable names with strong core support - are in place for that to happen.

The Oakland mayoral election used ranked-choice voting and Jean Quan defeated former state Sen. Don Perata even though Perata had more first-place votes. The last District 10 supervisor's race, in which it took more than 20 rounds to award the seat to Malia Cohen, who was back in the pack when the counting started, seemed odd.

But November's election for a new mayor could be a much bigger deal.

"It's going to be District 10 on steroids," said political analyst David Latterman, who is advising mayoral candidate David Chiu. "There were really only three candidates in Oakland. This will be a race of several major candidates, maybe as many as 20, and at least 10 are legit contenders."

A landslide of candidates may be the new winning metric for ranked-choice voting. Candidates round up as many choices as possible, build coalitions, and then gang up against the front runners.

"I'm not sure I would want to be in first place going into the election," said political consultant Mark Mosher, who is working with candidate Dennis Herrera. "You're going to get absolutely shelled."

Pew study looks at costs of mailing California voter information guides

2011-03-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

A new study commissioned by the Pew Center on the States takes a look at how much money California counties spend on mailing ballot guides to voters and the amount of money counties could save if some voters received these guide electronically instead of through the mail. "The Cost of Delivering Voter Information: A Case Study of California" is a research brief based on a more in-depth publication called "Mailbox, Inbox, Ballot Box; Delivering Information to California Voters in the 21st Century" by Lauren Hengl of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

Some key findings:

California counties spent 11 to 46 percent of their total election costs mailing paper sample ballots in the 2008 general election. Los Angeles, the state’s largest county, spent nearly $6 million on this mailing alone.

By disseminating voter information through e-mail or the Web, counties could save up to nine percent of their election expenses if a portion of their voters agreed to cancel paper mailings.

San Francisco County could save more than $197,000, or two percent of its total election costs, if 15 percent of voters received only electronic mailings.

Los Angeles County could save an estimated $1.19 million if 20 percent of its voters opted out of paper information.

Counties could see further savings if they also mailed one copy of voting information to each registered household—instead of sending individual copies to multiple voters even if they live in one home.

Another way California government could save money is if the ballot guides produced and mailed by the state and by counties could be consolidated into one guide. Administratively that might be difficult to pull off, but it would sure be a lot less confusing to voters, who are often stumped as to why they receive two different ballot guides, one from the Secretary of State and another from their county election office.

Kudos to CA Clean Money Campaign, LWV and CCC for L.A. victory

2011-03-10T12:44:00.000-08:00

Results from Tuesday's Los Angeles election shows Measure H, a political reform measure backed by the California Clean Money Campaign, California Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, passed by a wide margin, with early results showing 75 percent of voters supporting the measure and 25 percent opposing it.

The measure has two key provisions. The first prevents bidders on city contracts from campaigning for or making donations to the politicians who will decide on those contracts. The second provision affects the City of Los Angeles' public financing program for political campaigns by lifting the cap on the city's public matching fund. Public financing proponents hope this will open up opportunities for candidates to be entirely publicly financed in the future. Supporters of public financing who were disappointed by recent ballot box defeats of statewide propositions will be cheered by this latest victory in Los Angeles.

New bill would allow online registration through counties

2011-02-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

This week Senator Leland Lee of San Francisco introduced a bill, Senate Bill 397, that would allow counties to accept online voter registration applications in collaboration with the DMV. The Oakland Tribune's Josh Richman wrote this story about this important development, which would provide a way for Californians to register to vote online without having to wait for a statewide voter registration database, called "VoteCal" to be completed. Excerpts from Richman's story are below.

Some states already offer online registration but California has put it off, awaiting implementation of a "VoteCal" statewide online database system now delayed at least until 2015.

Yee, D-San Francisco, instead wants to allow online registration through county registrars' offices: Citizens would input their voter information online and the registrar's office would use the voter's signature from the Department of Motor Vehicles to verify authenticity.

Yee says county elections officers believe this would save money and eliminate administrative errors from mistyping the data entry from a paper registration; after Arizona implemented online voter registration, he said, some counties saw their costs decrease from 83 cents per registration to 3 cents per registration.

"SB 397 will not only help protect the integrity of the vote, but will allow many more individuals the opportunity to register and participate in our democracy," Yee said in a news release.

If Yee's bill becomes law, it would let counties start using online voter registration for the 2012 Presidential Primary and General Election. Paper registration would still be available.

Contra Costa County Voter Registrar Steve Weir agrees the bill would help with data entry error avoidance.

"We make mistakes in data entry and sometimes, people's handwriting is difficult," he said in an e-mail. "In addition, with the 15-day close of registration, we can still be receiving legitimate registrations five days before an election and for major elections, it is very difficult to get all registrations into our system so that the voter's name appears on the roster (or supplemental roster).

"I like the idea that people register themselves and don't depend upon 'drives' for registration and for signature gatherers, as these folks bend the rules," Weir continued. "We have a drive that did not pay the return postage. The SOS (Secretary of State) sent them to us this month even though the registrants actually registered in time for the November gubernatorial General Election."

Weir said the DMV signature is key. People going to the DMV for the first time must produce an identifying document -- a birth certificate or some naturalization documentation, for example -- whereas standard voter registration cards aren't checked against citizenship or identifying documents.

"I am not convinced that the DMV is able (legally, we're told that a private vendor owns those signatures) to physically attach those signatures to online registrations," Weir said. "So, in concept, we like this option, although we want to see the actual language of the bill. Our Association will have a Legislative meeting on March 4 where we'll go over the details of the bill."

Governor Brown says he will investigate all vote-by-mail June ballot

2011-02-10T06:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Governor Jerry Brown said at a news conference he is pondering an all vote-by-mail ballot for the June statewide special election he is promoting. More details are featured in Sam Pearson's story yesterday in California Watch. Excerpts are below.

At his press conference today, Brown also said he would consider making the June special election one that uses only mail-in ballots, but would have to investigate whether it would disenfranchise voters and if it would be practical in a state as large as California.

Elections in Oregon already take place only by mail, and the state boasts a 70 percent voter turnout rate. Critics have said that mail-in ballots disenfranchise groups of people that move frequently or do not have a fixed address, like renters, college students and the homeless. A Pew Center on the States study said that requiring people to vote by mail decreased the odds of someone voting by 13.2 percent and had negative effects on urban and minority turnout.

Gov. Brown proposing cuts to state-mandated election programs

2011-02-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

The Sacramento Bee recently published this article by Torey Van Oot about some cuts that Governor Jerry Brown is proposing to make to programs that have been mandated by the state and are therefore subject to reimbursement by the state. The big question is if they go through, will the programs continue? Some county registrars have suggested, for example, that if the state no longer helps pay the cost for moving the registration deadline to 15 days from Election Day (from the prior 30-day deadline) then the counties will no longer offer a 15 day deadline and revert back to 30 days. It's a crazy suggestion but then again, these are crazy budget times.

Excerpts from the story are featured below.

Nearly 5 million voters chose to cast their ballots by mail when Gov. Jerry Brown was elected in November, representing almost half of all votes cast in the statewide contest.

Now election officials are warning that a piece of Brown's budget proposal could put the increasingly popular form of balloting, and the integrity of the voting process, in jeopardy.

As part of his plan to close a projected $25.4 billion deficit, Brown wants to stop reimbursing local governments for the costs of complying with various state laws, including the 1978 law that gives all California voters the option of casting their ballots by mail.

Department of Finance officials have scored roughly $32.6 million in savings by not paying the tab for several years' worth of reimbursement claims for specific costs associated with six election mandates. They include establishing a permanent absentee voter system, extending the voter registration window to 15 days before an election and processes for registering voters.

Ending the reimbursements makes the associated laws optional for local governments in the coming fiscal year.

County election officials are still assessing the actual impact Brown's proposal would have on election departments and voters if adopted by the Legislature, but California Association of Clerks and Election Officials President Gail Pellerin called the move "not a wise policy."

"Everyone is going to have to take a cut, everyone is going to have to give a little bit, but I think suspending these vital programs voters have come to rely on is not a good direction," said Pellerin, the Santa Cruz County clerk.

Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer cautioned that suspending the mandates does not necessarily mean counties will suspend the services.

Palmer said the proposal is meant to save money in the next fiscal year by freezing reimbursements for claims filed for past years. Past years' claims, but not costs in the next fiscal year, could be reimbursed later if the mandate is reinstated in future budgets.

But Pellerin and others doubted whether they could keep the programs running without the money. They warned that changes could create confusion among voters accustomed to voting by mail.

"I can already hear the screams if I take 220,000 to 230,000 permanent absentee voters and tell them, 'I'm sorry, but you're voting at the polls,' " said Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder Steve Weir.

Kim Alexander, founder and president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said failing to fund the mandates could compound the existing problem of "uneven access to the voting process at the local level."

"Given how little money counties have already to fund elections, it would be a huge blow," Alexander said.

In Sacramento County, the funding loss would be an estimated $800,000 to $1 million in the next fiscal year, according to Sacramento County Registrar of Voters Jill Lavine.

"It definitely will add to the stress if I have to find another million dollars in my budget just to maintain the level of service I have right now," she said.

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Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association, said while he thinks the state should reimburse counties for costs it forces on them, there are some cases in which removal of mandates could have a beneficial effect.

"In many instances, the state mandates things that the local governments don't want to do and sometimes the local governments find a cheaper way to do it," he said. "If there's a removal of the mandate and counties can revert to the old way of voting, there might be a better way to (provide those services)."

And some say the more costly policies, including the absentee voting and permanent absentee list laws, still merit review.

"I know the way it's working right now is not in everyone's interest and is wasteful," Alexander said, noting a report that found more than 23 million absentee ballots have been lost or never returned since California created a permanent vote-by-mail system in 2002.

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The list of more than 50 mandates slated for suspension include costs related to AIDS testing for inmates, holding periods for stray pets at animal shelters and a provision of open-meeting laws requiring public notice of meeting agendas, amounting to a total projected savings of $227.8 million in the next fiscal year.

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Election mandates Gov. Jerry Brown wants to suspend:

Absentee voting: Requires that absentee ballots are available to all voters. Projected savings: $28.6 million

Tabulation by precinct: Requires county collection officials to tabulate absentee ballots by precinct and make that information available to the Legislature. Projected savings: $46,000

Brendon Maguire Act: Requires that a special election is called in certain cases when a candidate dies before Election Day. Projected savings: $3,000

Permanent absentee voter: Requires election officials to maintain a list of permanent absentee voters and automatically mail them a ballot. Savings: $1.9 million

Voter registration: Covers voter registration activities, including allowing voters to register by mail and processing costs. Savings: $2.1 million

CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen considers run for congressional seat

2011-02-07T19:20:00.000-08:00

It's possible California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will run for a Los Angeles-area congressional seat according to a story reported today by Torey Van Oot of The Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert. Secretary of State Bowen was sworn in for a second term in January after her re-election last November.

Excerpts from the Bee's story are below.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen is considering running for the congressional seat expected to be vacated by Democratic Rep. Jane Harman.

"She is very, very seriously considering running for Congress," Bowen campaign consultant Steve Barkan said. "It's brand new news, and so she needs to take all factors into consideration."

News broke today that Harman, 65, will leave office to take a job as president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, setting the stage for a special election in the 36th Congressional District.

Bowen hails from Marina Del Rey, which is part of the district, and represented the area in the state Assembly and Senate from 1992 to 2006. She will be termed out of her job as the state elections chief in 2014.

An added incentive for seeking a job in the Beltway? Her husband Mark Nechodom works in Washington, D.C., as the deputy director for energy and climate in the office of environmental markets at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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Once the seat is vacant, Gov. Jerry Brown will have 14 days to call a special election. The election will be the state's first congressional contest conducted under the top two primary rules created by Proposition 14.

Rumors of an all vote-by-mail June Special election unattributed

2011-02-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

I can't help but notice that a dramatic headline in Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle, that has been widely reproduced by several online news organizations is based on a column that includes no attribution for the "story" itself. The headline reads (and I am reluctant to even repeat it because it is clearly a mere rumor at this point): "June special election may be vote-by-mail only". It is attached to a column by Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, who actually report that the idea is being "batted about" but don't say who is doing the batting.

My guess is that it is the county registrars of voters doing the batting. They have pined for an all vote-by-mail system ever since our neighbors to the north, Oregon and Washington, adopted the process and have sponsored legislation numerous times to try it out.

The thing is, California isn't Oregon or Washington. We are a nation-state, home to 17 million registered voters with multiple language requirements, many who rely on assistance at the polls. And we have none of the streamlining of vote-by-mail procedures that exists in our neighboring states. What we have is 58 counties running 58 different vote-by-mail systems that, while based on state laws, vary greatly in every detail, from the color of the envelope a vote-by-mail ballot is returned in to whether the cost of postage is covered and even the "rules" counties follow on accepting vote-by-mail ballots.

For example, under current state law it is not legal for someone else in your family or household to return a vote-by-mail ballot to your polling place for you unless you are ill or physically disabled. But many people have someone else in their household return their ballot to the polls for them on Election Day because they are out of town, or "something came up". Technically, this is not legal under state law. Whether counties actually enforce that law is left up to them to decide.

These varying procedures make it difficult for groups working to maximize voter participation, such as the California Voter Foundation, to provide instructions that all voters can follow and rely upon statewide. In an election where our Governor hopes to see a demonstration of voting rights similar to what is taking place in Egypt and Tunisia, it is unimaginable that polling places would not be open across the state.

Good reads from the New Yorker

2011-01-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

A few months back CVF's board chairman, Prof. Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, sent me two articles from the New Yorker that I have been meaning to read and finally got around to finishing yesterday.

The first one, "Small Change" by Malcolm Gladwell, considers what effect, if any, Twitter and Facebook might have had during the civil rights struggle. He describes the differences between hierarchical and network structures in social change, and how ultimately a hierarchical structure (such as the one Martin Luther King and his colleagues built) is more effective than a decentralized network structure. Even more interestingly, Gladwell summarizes the essential difference between today's online social activism and that of the 1950's and 60's:

Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

The entire story is available from the New Yorker's web site (thanks, New Yorker!).

The second article is "Win or Lose", a book review by Anthony Gottlieb from last summer (like I said, I am behind on my reading), the book being "Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present" by George Szpiro, a journalist and mathematician.

Apparently mathematicians have been plotting the math behind voting systems for a long time, at least since Venetian elections dating back to 1268. Gottlieb's story delves far into the mathematical differences between "winner take all" or (as they call it in Great Britain) "first-past-the-post" systems where the person with the most votes wins even if he or she fails to get a majority, proportional representation and instant run-off systems that are used in many places today and something entirely new to me called "range voting".

Hearing about the benefits and drawbacks of different voting systems from the perspective of mathematicians gives the whole debate a different and fresh perspective. Gottlieb's story is available online from the New Yorker's web site.

SoS Bowen unveils four-year strategic plan, priorities

2011-01-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

At her inauguration ceremony today, Secretary of State Debra Bowen made a point of acknowledging the important role her agency's staff play in her success. She also highlighted the fact that she is only the sixth woman to be elected to California statewide office, and how happy she was to be sworn in by the seventh woman to join the ranks, Attorney General Kamala Harris.

She was joined on stage by her agency chiefs, and several of them spoke during the ceremony. The auditorium was nearly full, and the ceremony appeared to be well-attended by agency staff.

Secretary Bowen's comments were fairly brief. She announced her office was implementing a four-year strategic plan focused on three priorities: ensuring fair and secure elections, doing business, and protecting rights and state treasures. She also listed six values that will guide the work of the office of Secretary of State: service; integrity; teamwork; openness; innovation; and consistency. She concluded by saying that standing up for the workers in her office is the most important thing she can do to make sure they deliver excellent public service, so "let's get back to work."

Gov. Brown's inaugural speech highlights importance of the people's trust in government

2011-01-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

Much of the commentary about Governor Jerry Brown's inaugural speech focused on the heavy themes of our state's budget crisis, and that's not so surprising given the yawning deficit our state faces. But what I noticed, and appreciated, is how Governor Brown continues to focus on the importance of the public's trust in a democratic system.

In his 1975 address, he remarked early on in his speech about the fact that less than half of the Californians who could vote in the election did so, and that "our first order of business is to regain the trust and confidence of the people we serve."

Yesterday he spoke again of how important it is the public have trust in the government. After describing the inability of Democrats and Republicans to agree on a path forward on the state's budget deficit, he suggested that this is perhaps "the reason why the public holds the state government in such low esteem. And that’s a profound problem, not just for those of us who are elected, but for our whole system of self-government. Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle; and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void."

Of course solving the state's budget problems is the biggest crisis on the governor's plate, but the need for improvements in the ways Californians participate in elections and government need attention as well.

Inauguration week in Sacramento - a look back, a look ahead

2011-01-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

It's a new year and there's a sense of "back to the future" in Sacramento. Jerry Brown will be inaugurated this morning as California's new Governor at 11 a.m. and is even taking up residence in an apartment within walking distance of the Capital, just as he did the last time around.

I first met Jerry Brown in Santa Barbara in 1989, shortly after working for state Senator Gary K. Hart's campaign for Congress. We talked back then about how to get young people more involved in politics.

In Brown's 1975 inaugural address, dug up recently by KQED's John Myers, he begins by noting the lessons learned from the last election, namely, that "More than half the people who could have voted, refused, apparently believing that what we do here has so little impact on their lives that they need not pass judgment on it. In other words, the biggest vote of all in November was a vote of no confidence. So our first order of business is to regain the trust and confidence of the people we serve."

Although turnout in the November 2, 2010 election was higher than it's been in the past 16 years, it's still the case that less than half of Californians who were eligible to participate did in fact vote. I'm hoping election reform and expanding voter participation will also be on his agenda in this go-around.

Gov. Jerry Brown does in fact have a longstanding interest in election and political reform. He served as Secretary of State, California's chief elections officer, before being elected Governor, and championed the Political Reform Act of 1974, which established campaign finance disclosure laws for California.

Meanwhile tomorrow, across town, another constitutional officer will be sworn in for another term. Secretary of State Debra Bowen will take her oath of office on Tuesday at 10 a.m. in the Secretary of State's auditorium with a live webcast. I plan to attend and am eager to hear what will be on Secretary Bowen's agenda.

Ten Tips for State Election Website Design

2010-12-10T14:23:00.000-08:00

Throughout this year I've been working with the Pew Center on the States and the Center for Governmental Studies on a project assessing the quality, quantity and timeliness of information available to voters on all 50 states and DC's election web sites. The purpose of this project is to promote election web sites that help voters get registered, find out what's on the ballot, and participate effectively in elections. It's been an incredible learning experience and I'm looking forward to seeing the results being published in 2011. In the meantime, Pew's Electionline plans to release a preview of some of our findings later this month.

This week I'm in Austin for a Pew conference with state election web site staff and gave a presentation on our project, featuring ten tips for state web site design. Here's the list:

1. Be direct. Don't fudge your information -- if something is required by law, such as re-registering to vote when you move, say "you must" or "it is required", not "you may wish to....".

2. Use common terms. "Early voting", for example, is generally understood to mean casting a ballot in person before Election Day. If states could use common terms and language to describe voting practices it would make the voting process less confusing for voters.

3. Avoid inadvertently “hiding” information from voters. In our research we found that many states have created special sections on their web sites for certain audiences, such as election administrators or candidates, but often these sections feature information that would be helpful for voters, too.

4. Be sure to link information and tools from all relevant pages. On many sites, voters in special circumstances, such as military/overseas voters, will be directed to a special page that is advertised as a "one-stop shop" for their voting needs. Too often such pages fail to link to other content on the site, such as voter registration status lookup tools, that would be useful to those voters.

5. Know your audience. Review web site usage statistics and search terms and ask someone outside your agency to try using your site (and watch them as they do so).

6. If maintaining more than one site, be sure to build links between them in both directions. Some state election offices build secondary sites designed especially for voters but often these sites do not link back to the official election web site where additional, helpful information can be found.

7. Avoid publishing multiple pages on the same topic. Too often states add new content without considering similar or related content that already exists on their sites. This can cause confusion for voters.

8. Be sure to fully advertise your site tools and features. Many states have recently added new lookup tools that allow voters to check their absentee ballot or voter registration status. Such additions will often be announced on the election web site homepage but not linked to from other relevant pages or listed on the tool interface among its functionalities.

9. If featuring information in PDF format, offer it in HTML as well. Many states publish forms online in PDF format, such as voter registration forms, and those forms will include lots of information that would be helpful to voters about eligibility and registration. It's best if this information can be featured in HTML as well so voters can more easily find it. PDF files are often difficult to search or access for many people.

10. Archive your election content. Some states remove ballot information once the election is over, but this historical information can be extremely useful to the public. One way to structure a site so it can be easily archived is to use a redirect address so the ballot information is located in a permanent place online and the redirect page sends web site visitors to the most current ballot information. For example, the state can set up a redirect page at http://www.state.us.gov/vote and tell that page to send visitors to http://www.state.us.gov/elections/2010/general/index.html.

Capitol Weekly article on slate mailers

2010-11-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

On Election Day last week Capitol Weekly published an excellent, comprehensive story by Malcolm MacLachlan about the increased use of slate mailers in California elections, the deliberate confusion and misleading of voters these kinds of publications cause, and the difficulty in tracking the responsible parties. Excerpts are below.

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“Proposition 19 allows school bus drivers to smoke pot right before work,” according to a mailer from the Small Business Action Committee. Prop. 19, of course, says no such thing, and specifically allows employers to discipline and fire employees who are impaired on the job.

A “Voting Guide for Republicans,” meanwhile, specifically makes the unlikely recommendation that members of the GOP vote for Democrat Bill Lockyer for Treasurer, instead of his Republican challenger, Sen. Mimi Walters, R-Tustin. It also urges “Republican voters” to oppose Prop. 23, even though the California Republican Party and a large majority of Republican voters support the initiative, which would indefinitely suspend the state’s AB 32 global warming law. It also states that Republicans should oppose Prop. 20 and support Prop. 27, the exact opposite of the party’s position on these redistricting measures.

Then there’s the “Californians Vote Green” slate card. It doesn’t claim to have anything to do with the California Green Party. But it’s printed in green, with images of trees. This “green” slate doesn’t endorse any Green Party candidates. Instead, it calls for votes for the entire statewide Democratic slate, except Attorney General, where it endorses Republican Steve Cooley. The card says nothing about the Proposition 19 marijuana-legalization initiative, which has the support of 95 percent of Green Party county chapters in the state. The Green Party allows county organizations to vote on initiative endorsements.

“It’s interesting they need to pretend to be us to get votes, maybe I should take it as flattery,” said Derek Iverson, a spokesman for the state Green Party. He added that his party doesn’t “have the money” to send out large numbers of mailers.

When it comes to propositions, the slate differs from the actual Green Party recommendations on all but two ballot measures. It calls for a no vote on Prop. 20 and yes votes on Prop. 22 and Prop. 27, when the state Green Party takes no position on any of those three. The slate urges a no vote on Prop. 25 and yes on Prop. 26, the exact opposite of the Green Party positions.

The Prop. 26 claim on the slate is particularly egregious, saying “26 makes polluters pay.” Much of the opposition to Prop. 26, which would re-label many fees and taxes and require two-thirds votes to pass them, is that it contains specific provisions that many say would let polluters off the hook when it comes to cleaning up their own messes.

Misleading campaign mailers have been a part of California politics for many years, of course. But Iverson said they seem to be worse this year. This may have something to do with the Citizens United case back in January, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts on campaigns if they stuck to so-called “issue ads.”

While the case had the least effect on California, which already has that system, Iverson contends the resulting blizzard of money nationwide appeared to make people more brazen.

All three mailers contain a disclaimer, usually in small print, that the mailer was not produced by “an official political party organization.”

Tracking down the companies behind these mailers can be difficult.

CaliforniansVoteGreen.com is registered to Enom, Inc., a Bellvue, Washington-based domain wholesaler which allows the actual buyers of domains to remain anonymous. The “Voting Guide for Republicans” doesn’t even list a website one can visit.

In fact, even though it contains at least one over-the-top lie, the Small Business Action Committee (SBAC) mailer is a model of honesty compared to the others. It at least links back to actual recognizable human beings — in this case, Joel Fox, the publisher of the Fox & Hounds website and the president of the SBAC. It also basically follows the CRP when it comes to propositions, though the mailer takes no position on Prop. 21, which the party opposes, and supports Prop. 22, on which the party takes no position.

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Further confusing matters is the recent “Voter information guide for Democrats,” put out by the Voter Information Guide company based in Sherman Oaks. The guides contains the same “not an official party organization” disclaimer, but agrees with the California Democratic Party on everything.

AP report on glitches around the state

2010-11-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press' Gillian Flaccus wrote this article about scattered problems and glitches around the state - most notably that many polling locations ran short on provisional ballot envelopes due to a higher rate of provisional voters than apparently was expected. Excerpts about problems in Santa Clara, Fresno, San Diego, and other California counties are featured below.

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Midterm elections in California went off smoothly overall on Tuesday, with voters in Fresno County battling long lines due to a cut in the number of precincts and elections officials reporting spotty shortages of ballots and ballot envelopes in some precincts.

In Northern California's Santa Clara County, ink smudges were erased from 100,000 mail-in ballots because they appeared to confuse vote-tallying optical scanners, and in Los Angeles a watchdog group reported that two dozen residents received Spanish language robocalls and mailers instructing them to vote a day after Election Day.

U.S. Justice Department officials were investigating the robocall complaints from the watchdog group Election Protection, the group's Los Angeles hot line director Kathay Feng said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Dennis Mitchell, who is overseeing voting-related claims for Southern California, confirmed he had received "one or more" complaints, but was unable to comment on them.

Overall, Election Protection received 20,000 requests for assistance nationwide, with more than 3,400 of them coming from California voters, said Feng.

"I think that there were problems both at the institutional level as well as with human error and also a few sporadic instances of intentional voter intimidation," she said.

The Secretary of State's election results page crashed because of heavy Internet traffic, but by 8:45 p.m. PDT election officials were posting periodic summaries of results, said Nicole Winger, spokeswoman. The full site, with maps and other interactive features, remained down, she said.

In Fresno County, officials reduced the number of voting locations by nearly half due to budget cuts and saw long lines outside the remaining polling places. An activist group called Communities for a New California called upon the county to set up mobile polling stations and released photos showing long wait times at some precincts.

Victor Salazar, the county's registrar, said his office had Saturday voting at 20 locations the weekend before the election and sent postcards to registered voters alerting them of the changes.

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Elsewhere, election officials reported temporary ballot or ballot envelope shortages at a handful of locations.

In San Diego, between 10 to 20 polling locations at San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego, temporarily ran out of envelopes for provisional ballots because of the number of students showing up to vote, said Deborah Seiler, the county's registrar. The stations did not run out of regular ballots, she said.

Poll workers had voters write their information on slips of paper that were stapled to the ballots until the county could deliver several hundred more envelopes, Seiler said.

In Santa Barbara County, one polling station either on or near the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus ran low on envelopes for provisional ballots, said Billie Alvarez, the chief deputy registrar.

"It's been a pretty steady turnout," she said.

In El Dorado County, several polling places also ran low on ballots but election staff replenished the supply, said Norma Gray, the assistant registrar.

Reports of scattered problems in California on Election Day

2010-11-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

Overall things appear to have gone pretty smoothly in California on Election Day yesterday, but there was a report, apparently not yet substantiated, of a dirty trick played on Latino voters in Los Angeles. Excerpts from Jim Sanders' story in the Sacramento Bee are featured below.

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California election watchdogs were attempting today to track down reports of a dirty trick aimed at keeping Los Angeles Latino voters from the polls - but no hard evidence of wrongdoing had surfaced by early evening.

Shannan Velayas, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, said the office could not confirm that Spanish-language robocalls or a mailer had been sent to Los Angeles Latinos urging them to cast votes Wednesday - the day after today's election.

"The secretary of state takes these allegations very seriously," Velayas said. "We are asking anyone who may have a recording to share it with the secretary of state's office because our investigators have not heard an actual recording."

Efrain Escobedo, spokesman for the Los Angeles registrar of voters said much the same thing: The office had received unconfirmed reports of such shenanigans but nobody had stepped forward with proof.

Los Angeles' voter officials routinely contacted the secretary of state and the attorney general's office about the reports. Meanwhile, it is stressing to voters that polls will be open until 8 p.m. today.

Kathay Feng, executive director of California Common Cause, said she is participating in a nonprofit coalition, Election Protection, that received from the California Democratic Party the addresses of about two dozen people who allegedly had received a robocall or mailer providing an erroneous election date.

Feng said the affected voters live in south or central Los Angeles, within heavily Latino neighborhoods encompassing about six zip codes.

"We don't know if it's real or not," Feng said, noting that many hours had passed since the initial reports and no hard evidence had surfaced.

Tenoch Flores, California Democratic Party spokesman, described the reports as "rumor and second hand."

"We're looking into (the reports), but more importantly, we're reminding people that today is, in fact, Election Day," Flores said.

The attorney general's office released no information today about the alleged wrongdoing.

Feng said there have been other incidents of political dirty tricks targeting minority communities in years past.

In 2006, thousands of naturalized citizens with Latino surnames living in Orange County received a letter falsely stating that they could be arrested if they tried to vote in balloting for the seat of Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Anaheim.

Secretary of State election results site inaccessible on election night

2010-11-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

Last night I, like many other people, hopped on the Secretary of State's election results web site after the polls closed at 8 p.m. to find out what the early vote-by-mail election results would be. These are the votes normally reported by counties to the Secretary of State as soon as the polls close, and give folks who are watching election results a preview of what's to come over the next hours and days as votes are counted.

But I could not get into the site. I kept getting a message saying the site was unavailable. I tried repeatedly over the next few hours with no luck. So I changed CVF's election returns web page to also feature results from the Sacramento Bee, which was providing updated numbers online throughout the night. I tried accessing the site up until 11 p.m. at which point I gave up and called it a night.

Today the Secretary of State's elections results server is operating once again and the Los Angeles Times' Patrick McGreevy reported that the reason it had failed was because traffic to the website was "exponentially higher than what was even projected". This is surprising to me. I have been accessing election returns online through the California Secretary of State's web site since 1994, when California became the first state in the nation or world to provide such a service to the public. Over the many years of presidential elections, special elections, and incredibly high turnout elections such as we saw in November 2008, I have never found the site to be totally inaccessible. Slow at times, yes. But never "not available".

For more see excerpts from McGreevy's article below.

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The state agency, which has notoriously had problems with its computers, put up an alternative posting of all election results while it tried to work out the problems, according to spokeswoman Nicole Winger.

The state was using a "cloud computing" system in which at least 50 servers outside the Secretary of State’s office were being used to manage the heavy traffic.

"The traffic to the website has been exponentially higher than what was even projected" by the state’s IT experts, she said. "The traffic basically blew up the cloud." She said web traffic at the Secretary of State’s site was higher than experienced during the last presidential election.

Former Rep. Gov. Pete Wilson cited the "crash" of the Secretary of State’s computer site as one reason results were slow in coming in the governor’s race.

Millions of Calif. Vote-by-Mail ballots unreturned

2010-11-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press' Robin Hindery reported yesterday that millions of vote-by-mail ballots have not yet been returned. Many of those voters will be casting ballots at polling places today instead. Some will bring their vote-by-mail ballots with them, and some won't. Those who don't will have to cast provisional ballots instead which require extra paperwork and handling so election officials can be sure nobody is voting twice. All of this means it may be a long wait to learn the final results of contests where the results are close. See more details in the excerpts featured below.

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The state's 58 counties had reported receiving just under 3 million absentee ballots as of early afternoon Monday — less than 40 percent of the 7.6 million ballots requested statewide for the general election, according to the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

In some counties, vote-by-mail is expected to exceed in-person voting.

That means a huge number of last-minute returns will not be processed Tuesday, and the most competitive races may remain too close to call.

"The ballots are coming in later than average and there's more of them than average, which means more uncounted ballots on election night," said Contra Costa County Clerk Steve Weir, who estimated that one-quarter of his county's absentee ballots would not be included in Tuesday's tally. Recent polls show a number of extremely close contests in California, including the races for lieutenant governor and attorney general. In addition, about half a dozen congressional seats and several state legislative seats are thought to be in play.

Gail Pellerin, Santa Cruz County clerk and head of the statewide clerks association, said Monday that the return rate so far was about what she expected.

"When you issue 7.6 million (ballots), you're not going to get 7.6 million back," she said. "Ideally, there would be more at this point, but you take what you can get."

Experts say turnout this year will likely hover around 60 percent — similar to past midterm elections but significantly lower than 2008, when more than 79 percent of registered voters participated.

Counties started sending out vote-by-mail ballots the first week of October. Since then, almost all of the calls received by the nonprofit California Voter Foundation have been procedural questions about how to fill them out, said the group's president, Kim Alexander.

"Even though vote-by-mail continues to be popular, I expect more than half of the ballots will still be cast at the polls," she said.

Some voters may not have returned their ballots early because they lost them or filled them out incorrectly, Alexander said.

Pellerin had another possible explanation.

"I guess we're just creatures of procrastination," she said.

Voter registration in California: 17.3 million are registered, 6.3 million are not

2010-11-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

The Secretary of State released a new Report on Registration, reflecting all the registrations that were processed before the November election deadline. Currently 73 percent of Californians who are eligible to vote are registered, while 27 percent are not, accounting for almost 6.3 million Californians. While some of those who are not registered to vote are people who deliberately sit out at election time, many are people who have been registered to vote before but are not registered at their current address.

Ten Great Online Resources for California Voters

2010-10-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

There are some fantastic resources on the Internet this election season to help voters. Here's a round-up of some of our favorites, including those provided by the California Voter Foundation.
Enjoy!

1. California Online Voter Guide

This nonpartisan guide covers all nine California propositions including the top five donors for and against each measure and provides contact information and web links for all state and federal California candidates. A Voter FAQ, political district maps, and voting system information are also featured.

2.  The Proposition Song

This three-minute long music video produced by the California Voter Foundation provides a lyrical overview of the nine propositions on the ballot. Sing along because the ballot is too darn long!

3.  California Choices

One of the most popular election applications of the year, this web site offers a section on the propositions featuring positions from dozens of organizations and a tool that allows you to share your own positions with your friends.

4.  SmartVoter.org

This site is produced by the League of Women Voters of California in cooperation with many California county election offices. SmartVoter provides a tool that allows voters to call up their own ballot and access information on just those candidates and measures.

5.  Easy Voter Guide

Produced by the League of Women Voters and the California State Library, this is an easy-to-read 16-page pamphlet providing nonpartisan information on all statewide candidates and propositions. The online version is expanded to include videos promoting voting participation.

6.  TheBallot.org's California voter guides

TheBallot.org features voter guides posted by many different organizations all in one place and allows users to create their own voter guide to share. It's an innovative use of technology to allow the public to effectively disseminate their own opinions.

7.  California.Evoter.com

This site was developed by Adam Kravitz, the same person who developed the "J-Date" dating web site for Jewish singles. You can put in any address in California and it will turn up a ballot showing all the candidates and choices that will appear on a ballot for that address. Candidates can pay a small fee to have their listing expanded to include a photo and candidate information. It's an attractive interface and to my knowledge also the first comprehensive online tool providing a personalized voter guide to all California voters.

8. Google Voter Info

Google's Voter Info service allows voters anywhere in the country to look up their polling place location and provides links to government agencies where voters can confirm that location.

9. Roster of County Election Offices

Though not the most exciting resource, it is the one voters with questions are more frequently referred to by CVF, since it is county election offices that administer elections. CVF's roster provides contact information and web site links to all 58 county election offices, many of which provide online tools that allow voters to check their polling place location, registration status, call up a sample ballot and find out the status of their absentee ballots.

10. California Voter Information Guide

This is the go-to resource for California voters produced by the Secretary of State and featuring the text, nonpartisan analysis and arguments for and against state ballot propositions, plus statements from many state candidates. When it's the night before the election and you can't find your printed guide, you can use the online version instead.

Voter registration conflict between Secretary of State and San Diego Registrar of Voters

2010-10-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

A reporter with the San Diego weekly newspaper CityBeat has turned up an troubling conflict between Secretary of State Debra Bowen and San Diego County Registrar of Voters Deborah Seiler.

The article by David Maass, published on October 18, called "Voter Beware" reports on the journalist's and others' receipt of a letter from the San Diego registrar stating that their voter registration applications were not fully processed due to the information about their birth place missing from the form.

The reason this information was missing is because Maass and other San Diego voters used the online system set up by the California Secretary of State, which utilizes the National Voter Registration Card. As I understand it, it is the position of the Secretary of State's office that the California voter registration card cannot be used because to complete it online and print it out on plain paper does not meet the specific printing requirements mandated under California law. Seiler apparently disagrees, and has made an online version of the California form available on San Diego County's election web site.

However, the federal form does not include birth place, which is required to be provided on the California form. This is where the difference of opinion between the Secretary of State and San Diego County comes into play. An excerpt from Maass' story is below.

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Thousands of San Diego County residents who downloaded voter forms from the California Secretary of State’s website are receiving letters bearing mixed messages about the status of their registrations.

In the letters, the San Diego County Registrar of Voters’ office tells voters that their registrations have not been fully processed due to “missing birth place” on their paperwork.

“This form is being sent to you because your original affidavit of registration was not properly completed,” the letter says. “Before we can complete the process of your Affidavit of Registration, we must have additional information from you.”

The letter is incorrect.

There are two types of voter-registration forms that are valid in California. The state’s official form includes a blank for a birth place. But the Secretary of State’s website provides the National Mail Voter Registration Form, which does not require the information. San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler prefers the state form. As a result, her office automatically interprets a correctly filled-out federal registration form as incomplete.

By sending out the letters, Seiler is ignoring a November 2009 advisory the Secretary of State sent to county elections officials that unequivocally states: “Elections Officials Do Not Need to Determine Registrant’s Country or State of Birth” if the voter is using the National Mail Voter Registration Form.

Seiler says that her letter does not actually prevent the affected voters from casting a ballot on Nov. 2. Instead, she describes it as a “soft pend” against their voter registration. In other words, they will be allowed to vote, but the county would still like to collect more information from them.

This is not spelled out the letter. Rather, it says: “IF THE MISSING INFORMATION IS ON LINE 5, THIS FORM MUST BE RETURNED TO OUR OFFICE BEFORE YOU WILL BE ALLOWED TO VOTE.” The letter then lists “birth date” and “place of birth” as lines 5 and 6, but does not clearly state which is which. (Line 5 is the date of birth, while Line 6 is place of birth.)

After reviewing a copy of the document, a lawyer with Project Vote in Washington, D.C. says the letter would discourage many voters from visiting the polls.

“There are people who get something like this and say, ‘I guess I screwed up, so I won’t bother to vote,’” Estelle Rogers, Project Vote’s director of advocacy, tells CityBeat. “That’s the problem, especially since the language is so unclear and doesn’t say ‘Go vote!’”
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Taking a second look at the language, Seiler acknowledges the letter should be rewritten.

“We need to separate lines 5 and 6 at a minimum, and reword it to be clearer,” Seiler tells CityBeat.

Seiler estimates that between 400 and 2,000 voters per month submitted these national forms throughout the current election cycle, and, consequently, all of them received the automatic “missing birth place” letters.

While the office must accept the national form, Seiler says she prefers voters use the state’s version. San Diego is one of the few counties to provide the state form online. This move also ignores the Secretary of State’s November 2009 directive.

In the memorandum, state Chief of Elections Cathy Mitchell told county officials that the state registration form could not be distributed online because California Election Code requires forms to be printed on perforated paper of a certain dimension and thickness, use multiple ink colors and include pre-paid postage. The national form is not subject to the same requirements—and that’s why the office uses it on its website.

Seiler argues that using the federal forms just creates more paperwork. “Here we have a form that’s put out there that doesn’t have all the critical information,” Seiler says. “Then we have to collect the critical information because it’s always missing from the form.”

This practice is not consistent with the Secretary of State’s interpretation that the law “does not require a person using the National Form to provide any additional information beyond what is contained on the National Form in order to register.” In contrast to San Diego, the Orange County Registrar of Voters does not send out a letter and instead enters “U.S.” on the voter’s behalf in its database.

No matter the form, Rogers believes the birth-place requirement is illegal. “I would argue that it is a straight-up violation of federal law,” Rogers says. “States are allowed to have their own voter registration forms, but it is supposed to approximate the federal form and require no more information than is necessary to evaluate if you are eligible to vote.”

Since both the state and federal forms ask voters to swear they are citizens, Rogers says a voter’s birth place is “completely immaterial.” Rogers also says that changing the language of Seiler’s letter isn’t enough to satisfy her organization, considering the thousands that have already been mailed.

“As a minimum, there needs to be a directive from the Secretary of State about how to fix this,” she says. “Also, there should be public-service announcements in the media between now and election day that say, ‘If you got this letter, you are still registered to vote and you should show up at the polls.”

17 web resources to help you decide on Election Day

2010-10-26T07:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a great roundup by Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation and featured on Mashable.com of 17 innovative web sites to help voters make choices in federal contests. I particularly like TheBallot.org, which lets people create their own personalized voter guides and send them out to their friends, and FactCheck.org where you can find out the truth behind claims made on political ads.

"Proposition Song" on Capital Public Radio's "Insight" show today

2010-10-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

I'm heading over to Capital Public Radio's studio at Sacramento State University this morning, along with Jana Coyle, one of my fellow players on the "Proposition Song". We'll be on the "Insight" show with Jeffrey Callison to talk about the song, which they will play a recording of during the show. Tune in on 90.9 FM in Sacramento or online to hear the segment. The show airs from 10-11 and we're the last segment, around 10:45.

"Am I registered to vote?" Find out from your county. Oct. 18 is the voter registration deadline!

2010-10-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

California is home to more than 23 million potential voters, but 6.5 million of them are not registered to vote. Some might think this is a sign of apathy, but the truth is that many of those millions of people have been registered to vote before. A 2004 survey conducted by the California Voter Foundation of eligible, nonregistered Californians found that nearly half - 44 percent - had been registered to vote before but were not registered at their current address.

Californians move around a lot, and that mobility presents a significant barrier to voter registration and participation. You have to reregister every time you move. In a few years, California, like a growing number of other states, will offer voters the ability to register and re-register online which will be an enormous convenience to California's mobile citizens. States are also increasingly offering voters convenient, online lookup tools to verify their registration status; a 2008 study by the Pew Center on the States found that more than half the states are currently offering voters this service.

Sadly, California is not among them. However, though we lack a statewide online registration status lookup tool, a number of counties do provide this public service. The California Voter Foundation's County Election Office roster identifies the 22 counties offering this tool, including many of the most populous counties in the state such as Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego. Typically all that is required to check your status is to simply enter your street number, birthdate and zip code in an online web form. The return screen indicates whether the county's registration database includes a voter registered at that address or not.

Unfortunately, it seems many voters don't realize that counties administer elections in the first place. The most frequent question voters ask CVF is "Am I registered to vote?" We inform them they need to check with their county election office and direct them to our online roster. But I wonder what percentage of Californians even know the name of the county in which they live?

If all California voters had access to a statewide voter registration status lookup tool, the task of determining your status would be much simpler and more straightforward. In the meantime, Californians living in those 22 counties offering a lookup tool can go online to verify their registration status; the 5.5 million voting-eligible Californians living in the counties that do not offer this tool must call during business hours to check their registration status. Don't wait - the deadline is October 18. Voter registration forms are available at most post offices.

California counties offering an online voter registration status lookup tool: Alameda, Butte, Colusa, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Marin, Monterey, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Shasta, Solano, Sonoma, Ventura and Yolo.

Tracking California independent expenditures

2010-10-14T20:07:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to track down what kind of independent expenditures are being made in California statewide and proposition contests. I dug around a bit and found a few sources for this information -- one is the Late Independent Expenditure search tool available in the "Advanced Search" section of the Secretary of State's Cal-Access campaign disclosure web site. Another source is the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) tracking page. I'm still looking for good sources of this information, particularly for tracking outside money in federal contests.

New "Proposition Song" debuts on YouTube!

2010-10-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased to announce the debut of our new "Proposition Song", a nonpartisan, educational sing-along song and music video about the nine propositions on California's ballot.

CVF issued this news release today announcing the song's debut. This page includes an mp3 file of the song, lyrics, photos from recording sessions and more.

Enjoy, and be sure to sing along, "cuz the ballot is too darn long!"

Four states to weigh calls for constitutional conventions

2010-10-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

The latest edition of Stateline, a newsletter published by the Pew Center on the States, includes this story about four states considering ballot questions to undertake a process of rewriting their state's constitution. Although there was an effort to place a similar measure on the ballot in California, it was not successful in qualifying for the ballot this year. The Stateline story, by Melissa Maynard, does an excellent job of considering the pros and cons of undertaking such a process. Excerpts are below.

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The measures in Iowa, Maryland, Michigan and Montana would be on the ballot this year with or without the Tea Party movement, however. Those four states are among the 14 that ask voters at set intervals of between 10 and 20 years whether they’d like to write a new constitution.

During a busy election season, the constitutional convention ballot questions have received surprisingly little attention. Many voters are likely to hear of the issue for the first time when they step into the voting booth, even though a “yes” vote could have far-reaching consequences and allow a full-scale overhaul of everything from term limits to the fiscal relationships between state and local units of government.

In the past, voters confronted with the question of whether to call a constitutional convention have tended to say no. The most recent convention to be triggered through this mechanism was Rhode Island’s in 1986. But at a time of economic angst, high unemployment and distrust of government at all levels, anything could happen. In Michigan, supporters of calling for a constitutional convention include the outgoing governor, Democrat Jennifer Granholm.

Opponents of calling a convention in Michigan have said it wouldn’t be worth the estimated $45 million cost of bringing delegates together for weeks or perhaps months to hammer out a new document. There’s also a fear that a convention, especially in an angry political environment, might end up doing more harm than good. “I’m really scared by what might happen if there were a convention,” says Michigan state Representative Jim Slezak, a Democrat. “You don’t want bad decisions made based on something that happened a month ago or a year ago instead of focusing on what’s happened over the course of the last 30 years.”

The protocol for throwing a convention and chartering a new constitution varies significantly by state. One common feature is that the delegates of the convention don’t get the last word: Voters must approve the new constitution before it can take effect.

In Montana this year, the idea of holding a constitutional convention isn’t generating much enthusiasm. In part, that’s because the state’s 1972 constitution is among the country’s youngest. It’s also a source of state pride. Montana’s constitution is distinctive in its emphasis on environmental protections, for example. The last time the automatic call for a convention came up on the ballot in 2000, it was rejected by 86 percent of the voters.

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Dorothy Eck of Bozeman, Montana, now 86 years old, was among the 100 delegates who produced the state’s 1972 constitution. She remembers the process as challenging but rewarding. “The smartest decision we made was to seat everyone alphabetically, so that you had people from both parties working together,” says Eck, a Democrat who served in the legislature for 20 years before retiring in 2000. “I sat with Republicans on both sides of me. On my left was a Republican who really thought through the issues and was helpful.”

Eck worries that a new constitutional convention might jeopardize some of the provisions that she and her peers worked so hard to put into place, especially the provisions related to government transparency and the environment. “A convention is a hard thing to do, and it was difficult here,” she says. “It’s a threat to everyone’s interests.”

"Fresh Air" program highlights federal campaign disclosure loopholes

2010-10-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

Today's edition of "Fresh Air" hosted by Terry Gross features a fantastic, in-depth analysis of the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision and its impact on campaigns and elections -- specifically, how corporations are now able to spend money in campaigns without limits or disclosure requirements. Her guests include Peter Stone with the Center for Public Integrity, "Politico" reporter Kenneth Vogel, and Center for American Progress blogger Lee Fang. An audio archive will be available after 5 p.m Eastern.

CVF Debuts new Fall 2010 California Online Voter Guide!

2010-09-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the debut of the latest edition of our California Online Voter Guide! Way back in 1994 the California Voter Foundation produced the very first California Online Voter Guide. Our nonpartisan election guide is now in its 20th edition!

Secretary of State candidates debate the issues on KQED

2010-09-29T17:49:00.000-07:00

Last Friday KQED FM's Dave Iverson hosted an excellent show on the "Forum" program featuring the major and minor party candidates for Secretary of State. The first half of the one hour show includes a lively discussion between Democratic incumbent Debra Bowen and Republican challenger Damon Dunn on topics such as election security and the status of the state's voter registration database program. An archive of the show is available from the KQED web site.

Riverside Press-Enterprise: Online Voter Registration still years off

2010-09-29T17:44:00.000-07:00

Last week's Press Enterprise featured this excellent story by Jim Miller describing the obstacles California is facing in implementing a new statewide voter registration database that would enable online voter registration in California. Excerpts from the story are below.

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SACRAMENTO - California residents can go online to pay car fees, check out library books and enroll in college courses.

Yet when it comes to one of the biggest parts of life in a democracy -- registering to vote -- the Internet remains a bit player.

The deadline to register to cast ballots in the Nov. 2 election is a month away. But it likely won't be until the Nov. 4, 2014, election, at the earliest, that voters will be able to sign up electronically.

In May, the secretary of state's office canceled a contract with a Chicago-based company to design a new, federally required database of California's nearly 17 million voters. The state office said the company was in default on parts of the agreement, which was supposed to produce a new database by early 2012.

The cancellation delays indefinitely the implementation of a related state law that calls for online voter registration, but only after the new database is in place. That database, known as VoteCal, now is not scheduled to be finished until 2014.

Inland election officials and others around the state, meanwhile, have rebuffed a recent pitch by a Northern California software company to allow people to register electronically right away using touchscreen devices such as Apple's iPhone. The secretary of state's office maintains that state law currently prevents online registration.

The situation, in the home state of Silicon Valley, where the Internet is a major part of people's lives, frustrates voter groups.

Online voter registration, they say, would increase voter participation by making it much easier for new voters to sign up and voters of all ages to re-register after they move. In addition, supporters say, online registration would save money by reducing the number of paper forms election offices must handle.

Arizona, Washington and Kansas were the first states to offer online voter registration. Louisiana, Colorado, Oregon, Indiana and Utah are expected to have online registration systems up and running for the November election.

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One California county already is pushing the envelope.

Santa Clara County has accepted seven electronic voter registrations since earlier this year, a spokeswoman said. The registrations were a test by Verafirma, a Silicon Valley company that has developed software letting people register to vote using touchscreen devices.

"We are in favor of them. We'll definitely continue to accept them," said Santa Clara elections spokeswoman Elma Rosas.

Late last month, Verafirma sent letters to other county election offices asking them to accept electronic registrations, as well. There have been no takers.

"At this time the secretary of state's position is that these registrations are not legal," said Keri Verjil, San Bernardino County's registrar of voters, who received the letter.

In a May 25 memo to counties, the secretary of state's office wrote, "It is clear the law does not provide a framework" for accepting electronic voter registrations right now. The state, though, has not moved to void the Santa Clara County registrations.

Verafirma argues that current state rules require only that voter registration forms be "mailed or delivered."

The rules don't specify that the "delivered" form has to be paper; it would be fine for counties to accept e-mailed forms created by the company's software, the company contends.

Jude Barry, Verafirma's co-founder, said the firm's software "is not only the wave of the future, it's the reality of the present.

"We can do this in California today, without spending millions of dollars or missing two election cycles," Barry said.

Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, said Verafirma has a different reading of the law than does Bowen's office.

"We also understand they have a financial stake in that," Winger said.

Database problems

Congress, meanwhile, is weighing a bill that would require states to make online voter registration available by 2016. The measure is pending in the House.

It's the latest federal proposal dealing with election procedures. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act to prevent the kinds of ballot problems that marred the 2000 presidential campaign.

The measure required states to improve their voter registration databases within a few years; California received more than $50 million for the project. The state, though, is still using an earlier system.

The latest setback came in May, when Bowen's office canceled an $18.3 million contract with Catalyst Consulting Group Inc. of Chicago. It settled with the company for about $1.8 million, Catalyst principal Travis Bloomfield said.

Catalyst had been the only bidder from an earlier bid process. In a May 4 letter to Catalyst, Bowen's office said the company had failed to post a performance bond, missed key deadlines and had other problems.

Recent state history is filled with troubled computer upgrades, such as a botched database project at the DMV. Bowen canceled the Catalyst contract to "avoid the potential of drawn-out process, litigation and delays," Winger said.

Bloomfield, though, said the company had its own issues with the secretary of state's office. Catalyst had built the same kind of voter database in Illinois with no problems, he said.

"We didn't get stupid overnight," Bloomfield said.

Damon Dunn, Bowen's Republican opponent in November, accused her of bungling the VoteCal database project. If he wins, Dunn said, he also would not allow people to register to vote online before the new database is in place.

The VoteCal bidding process is scheduled to start again in mid-2011. It's unclear how many would-be database vendors who didn't finish, or ignored, the last bidding process would participate this time.

Catalyst won't be among them, Bloomfield said. Other companies also will be leery of dealing with Bowen's office, he predicted. "Everyone knows who's there, which might make people reluctant to bid on it," he said.

But Winger said Bowen "is confident there are many talented technology company that have dealt with large IT projects" that will bid on the database work.

Politics and Social Media panel this evening in Sacramento; live on Ustream at 7 p.m.

2010-09-21T17:09:00.000-07:00

This evening I'm on a "Politics and Social Media" panel organized by the Sacramento Social Media Club, taking place at the Urban Hive in midtown at 20th and H. Here are all the event details - program starts at 7 p.m. and will be streamed live via Ustream until 8:30 (that's the plan, anyway!). It should be an interesting discussion -- the Sacramento Social Media Club has put together a diverse set of panelists:

Kim Alexander, President and Founder, The California Voter Foundation

Steve Maviglio, Principal, Forza Communications

Bryan Merica, President, ID Media and co-founder, Fox and Hounds Daily

Chandra Sharma, Director of Technology and New Media, Meridian Pacific, Inc

Seth Unger, Communications Director for the Assembly Republican Caucus

Torey Van Oot, Capitol Alert correspondent, Sacramento Bee

Here's the gist of what I'll be saying:

When I think of political practices online, I think about what the founders of the Internet envisioned this technology could create. They had a very egalitarian, inclusive view of the world and hoped the Internet would democratize politics, enable more people to participate more effectively, help raise the public’s voice, balance out the imbalances between big money and grassroots. I would say that while the Internet is probably a lot more “dot com” than what they imagined, it is still a place where a true grassroots cause can take off like wildfire, and where someone can put a creative, low-budget video together and post it on YouTube and get a million views.

Online Voter Registration Stalls in California

2010-08-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we put out this edition of CVF-NEWS about the cancellation of the Secretary of State's contract to develop VoteCal, a new statewide voter registration database. The cancelled contract further delays the implementation of online voter registration, which was covered in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday. Excerpts of that article by Patrick McGreevy are included in the newsletter.

Parting Thoughts on the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy

2010-08-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

The two back-to-back initiative conferences I attended in San Francisco last week were incredible - agendas packed with many speakers from all over the U.S. and the world sharing their experiences with direct democracy.

As a Californian, I take the initiative process for granted. It's been around for almost one hundred years (next year is the initiative's centennial) and while I have often thought about ways it could be improved, these conferences have added a sense of scope and urgency. There is broad consensus around the globe (at least among folks attended these conferences) that California's initiative process sets an example - both good and bad - for direct democracy.

Our process is much shorter than in other countries and even states, it has practically no interaction with the legislative process (unlike other nations and states), there is no independent legal review of measures put before voters (as Colorado has) and despite all our disclosure, money used to qualify measures is not well-disclosed early on, and money given to nonprofits can be obscured from public view.

Basically, there is much room for improvement and this needs to happen not only because California voters deserve better but also because, whether we like it or not, California is setting an example for direct democracy around the world. And I can think of a number of countries where the people living in them would benefit greatly if they could have a direct say on the policies and laws of their government.

I made lots of great new friends, both in the U.S. and abroad during my stay in San Francisco and hope in the months and years ahead we will work together to make the initiative process better in California and beyond.

The Omnibus for Direct Democracy

2010-08-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

The initiative/direct democracy conference I'm attending in San Francisco is fascinating - one of my favorite things about going to conferences is meeting new people and learning about what they do to promote democracy, here in the U.S. and especially abroad. One project I learned about is Omnibus for Direct Democracy -- an organization of folks traveling around Germany via bus since 1987, spreading the word to folks about the initiative and referendum process. Check out this video and this one too to learn more about their story.

Ten Things to Know About California's Initiative Process

2010-07-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm in San Francisco for two back-to-back initiative conferences, one focused on the United States, the other on global direct democracy, and put together a top ten list in honor of the occasion.

After twenty years of involvement in California elections, I've learned a thing or two - okay, I'll share with you the top ten things to know - about this state's initiative process and its unique quirks and characteristics. Here is the list:

1. Californians have a love-hate relationship with the initiative process. It is the most powerful political tool the people of California have, and they will never give it up or allow it to be weakened. But they complain about initiatives, too. A 2008 study by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that most voters think there are too many initiatives on the ballot, and say the wording of initiatives is too complicated and confusing for voters to understand what happens if the initiative passes.

2. Voters support certain reforms to the initiative process. They want to know, for example, how initiatives will be funded. A 2009 California Field Poll for Next Ten found that 75 percent want initiative sponsors when they submit new measures that call for additional spending to identify new funding sources or to explain areas of the existing budget that will be cut. Fully 56 percent of voters also support the idea of increasing the vote requirements needed to approve initiative amendments to the state constitution from a simple majority to two-thirds of those who vote in an election. An earlier, 2008 PPIC poll found that 75 percent of Californians favor a system of review and revision of proposed initiatives to try to avoid legal issues and drafting errors.

3. It is hard to pass an initiative. Voters on average defeat two out of every three initiatives put before them, while two out of three legislative measures placed on the ballot are approved. The conventional wisdom among voters appears to be when in doubt, vote no, or skip it altogether. There is always an undervote rate on every measure, which is higher or lower depending on the amount of campaigning about it. In the past five years, voters have considered a total of 47 measures - 17 were legislative measures, of which ten passed (59%), while 30 were initiative measures, of which only 8 passed (27%).

4. Passing an initiative is expensive. The rule of thumb is that you need at least $1 million to qualify a proposition for the ballot. Even initiative proposals with strong grassroots support have to pay for signature gathering to collect the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed, within a five-month time frame, to qualify a measure for the ballot. Waging statewide campaigns on initiatives is also expensive, chiefly because of high media costs. New communication technologies hold the promise of reducing some of these costs, and social networking tools are already being used by initiative proponents to develop a grassroots base of support.

The one component of the process that is clearly too inexpensive is the entry fee, currently set at $200, even though it costs an average of $6,800 to process each California initiative. The low entry fee is an incentive to file initiatives not seriously intended to change state law but meant rather just to make a statement. Some proponents submit several versions of the same initiative with slight modifications so they can take more time to decide which version they want to circulate.

5. You cannot win an initiative campaign without money, but neither can you win with money alone. A rich person with a million dollars can put an idea on the ballot. But over the years initiatives that have one or two rich backers but no broad coalition of support have invariably failed. In the case of Proposition 16 on the June 2010 ballot one company, Pacific Gas and Electric, led a 46 million dollar effort to make it more difficult for Californians to obtain public power services in their communities. Opponents raised and spent less than $100,000. This was clearly a David and Goliath contest in money terms, yet the measure was still defeated, with 47 percent of voters voting yes, and 53 percent no.

6. Disclosure matters. California has very strong campaign finance disclosure laws, requiring large contributions to be disclosed online within days of being made as election day approaches. Initiative advertisements on television must disclose the top two contributors to the committee sponsoring the ads, and the committee name itself must include the names of the top two contributors. This all adds up to the kind of transparency in the process that serves voters well. It lets journalists and nonpartisan voter education groups, like the California Voter Foundation, analyze data to "follow the money" and help voters identify the top donors for and against each measure on the ballot. Indeed, voters favor even more transparency. According to a PPIC study, 77 percent of Californians support better disclosure of signature-gathering funders, which would help voters overcome the difficulty they now have understanding who is funding an initiative campaign while the measure is in circulation.

7. Although there are two sides to every issue, voters may not learn that there are good legal arguments against a measure until after the vote. Sometimes initiative opponents withhold their best legal arguments, hoping to sue and invalidate a measure after the election, if it passes. In the case of Proposition 8, the campaign to make gay marriage illegal, opponents' message was that it was "wrong and unfair". Their ballot pamphlet arguments spoke in terms of constitutionally protected rights, but they did not say directly that the proposition was an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause. Nor did they say that the proposition was unacceptable because it was a constitutional revision. Although both these legal objections were later made in court, and that may be good legal strategy, voters were deprived of a full rehearsal of the relevant legal arguments before they voted. Californians would be better served by having the kind of pre-election, independent, legal review that Colorado conducts on initiatives.

8. Initiatives can motivate more people to vote. In California, 23.5 million people are eligible to vote and 17 million are registered. In a high turnout election, 12-13 million participate. When turnout is low, only five or six million Californians vote. In a 2004 survey of occasional voters, the California Voter Foundation found that the most important reason for voting was "to make your voice heard/express your opinion," and when initiatives on the ballot capture the public's attention and get people talking it can motivate more people to vote than would otherwise be the case. The survey also found that the opinions of friends and family are a big influence in deciding whether to vote. As voters increasingly turn to social networking tools to share their opinions about propositions this friends and family effect can be reinforced.

9. What happens to initiatives in California can have nationwide, and even global impacts. Property taxes, political reform, term limits, recycling, gay marriage, and, coming up this fall, global warming and marijuana legalization are all examples of subjects that have been put before California voters to make public policy changes via the initiative process and have then spread to other states. The way Californians vote on initiatives can, thus, have political ripple effects.

10. Californians think voters are better at lawmaking than lawmakers. A 2008 PPIC study found fully six in ten Californians say that the public policy decisions made by voters through the initiative process are probably better than those made by the governor and legislature.

U.S. and global conferences on direct democracy in San Francisco

2010-07-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Two conferences focused on direct democracy and the initiative process are happening back-to-back in San Francisco beginning this weekend that I'm attending.

The US Conference on Initiative and Referendum is followed by the 2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, all taking place at UC Hastings in San Francisco. The schedule begins Friday evening, July 30, and concludes on Wednesday, August 4. People are traveling to San Francisco from all over the U.S. and from numerous countries to participate and I'm looking forward to learning more about how the initiative process operates in other places.

12,563 disputed Riverside County absentee ballots will be counted

2010-07-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a Riverside County judge ordered the Registrar of Voters to count 12,563 absentee ballots that the county failed to retrieve from a regional post office before the 8 p.m. cutoff on Tuesday, June 8. This blunder rated as the worst election fiasco of the California Primary election season -- many, including myself, were incredulous that thousands of ballots that were cast in a timely manner would go uncounted because of bureaucratic mix-ups. Fortunately a group of voters sued and a judge agreed that these voters should not be disenfranchised.

Today's Riverside Press-Enterprise features this excellent article by Duane Gang that summarizes the basis for the judge's decision and the implications of counting these ballots. The story is below.

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A Superior Court judge Friday ordered Riverside County elections officials to count 12,563 disputed mail-in ballots and include the results in the final tally from the June 8 primary.

County officials began counting the votes shortly after Riverside County Superior Court Judge Mac R. Fisher issued his ruling and expect to complete the task by tonight.

The results could affect the outcome of at least one state Senate race where only 12 votes separate the top two finishers.

"Voting is a right that many have sacrificed lives and liberty to protect," Fisher said Friday. "The court will not disenfranchise 12,563 voters."

A mix-up with the U.S. Postal Service kept the ballots out of the hands of elections officials until after the polls closed Election Day -- the legal deadline to count the ballots.

The Riverside County Democratic Central Committee and three Moreno Valley voters sued last week to have the ballots counted under the state Constitution. A 2002 amendment gave voters a right to have their ballots counted.

Fisher ordered Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore to count the ballots expeditiously in order to meet the California secretary of state's July 16 deadline to certify the statewide results.

Many in the packed Riverside court room exclaimed, "Thank you," and applauded after the judge issued his ruling.

"I am very happy that my vote is going to count," said Naomi Ingram, one of the three Moreno Valley voters to file the lawsuit.

For Jennifer Christina Riegel, another plaintiff in the suit, the June 8 election was her first. She said she was upset when she learned her ballot was among those that languished uncounted.

"I really wanted mine to count," she said.

Sherri Lynn Riegel, the third voter to join the lawsuit, said, "We are ecstatic."

Counting nonstop

County spokesman Ray Smith said elections officials will work around the clock until they're done counting the ballots.

As soon as the count is complete, Dunmore will certify the results and forward them to the secretary of state Monday, Smith said. According to Friday's court ruling, elections officials have until July 15 to certify the local results.

The disputed ballots were sorted at a U.S. Postal Service facility in Moreno Valley by 8:30 a.m. on Election Day. But no one from the registrar's office picked them up from the Moreno Valley site.

As they had done for the past 12 years, county officials retrieved ballots at the Chicago Avenue post office in Riverside twice June 8 and visited a distribution facility in Redlands in the evening to pick up ballots.

They had never gone to the Moreno Valley site before. But since officials had visited the processing facility in Redlands, the Postal Service assumed the registrar would check for ballots at the processing facility in Moreno Valley, according to statement of facts filed with the court.

When no one arrived in Moreno Valley, the ballots were loaded on a truck and taken to the Chicago Avenue post office where the registrar's office picked them up June 9.

James Harrison, an attorney for the voters and Democratic committee, argued that the Postal Service agreed to hold mail for pick up, rather than deliver it to the registrar's street address.

That meant the ballots were received on time and voters shouldn't be penalized for any glitch by two governmental agencies, Harrison said.

Voters approved Prop. 43 in March 2002 and amended the state constitution to give every voter a right to have his or her ballot counted. Under that provision, the votes must be counted, Harrison said.

The county did not dispute the fact that the ballots were sorted June 8. But County Counsel Pamela Walls argued the Postal Service is not an official agent for the registrar of voters.

Nonetheless, Walls said outside of court that the county was pleased by the judge's decision.

"We are very happy and relieved to get a decision so we can get the certification done," Walls said.

Smith said the county needed the court's intervention because the registrar was constrained by the law. Ballots not in the possession of the registrar by 8 p.m. on Election Day cannot be counted.

"We have said all along that we want to count every vote," Smith said.

The ballots were the most high-profile glitch from last month's election and could affect the outcome of at least one contest. The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will discuss an election review, which recommends a formal agreement with the Postal Service, more ballot-counting machines and better communication with the public.

Only 12 votes separate frontrunner Juan Vargas and Assemblywoman Mary Salas in the fight for the Democratic nomination in the 40th state Senate District, which includes parts of Riverside and San Diego counties and all of Imperial County.

As many as 890 votes from the 40th Senate District may be among the 12,563, registrar of voters records show.

California voters pass open primary proposition, defeat big money measures

2010-06-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

California voters spoke yesterday, and the results are in. Prop. 14, which sets up a new open primary election system in California, passed by a wide margin. This kind of surprised me, given that it was a Primary election and by definition more likely to attract partisans and less likely to draw out independents, who would benefit most from a change that would allow them to vote for any candidate of any primary. But I guess partisan voters want that kind of flexibility, too.

Frankly I was also surprised that California's minor parties came out so strongly against Prop. 14 – seems to me it is likely to boost their registration numbers because voters registered with a minor party, like the Green Party or Libertarian Party, could do so without having to sit out competitive primary elections in other parties.

Prop. 16 was defeated, which was something of a relief. If it passed I would be forced to revise my personal conventional wisdom about the initiative process in California. As a twenty-year observer of California elections, I've long said that you can't win an initiative campaign without money, but you can't win with only money, either. PG&E spent over $46 million getting Prop. 16 on the ballot and attempting to get this measure passed to change state law to benefit a single corporation. Opponents raised less than $100,000. It was truly a "David vs. Goliath" type of battle.

A lot of people I know, people who are smart and thoughtful and read the paper and listen to NPR, were unsure of how to vote on Prop. 16. The commercials were so seductive - who doesn't want to protect their right to vote? PG&E bought one of the best campaigns I have ever seen in this state. And yet in the end voters defeated Prop. 16, and Prop. 17 as well, which also represented a single company's (Mercury General Insurance Corp.) attempt to bend California law in its favor.

I believe disclosure made a difference - not just timely and robust campaign finance disclosure, which enabled CVF and the news media to inform the voting public about the millions being spent by private companies to promote these measures, but also disclosure laws covering television ads and campaign committee names that require top donors to be identified. Such laws help level the political playing field, especially in high-stakes initiative battles such as we saw on this ballot.

Top Ten Do's and Don'ts for California Voters

2010-06-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

I give a lot of interviews this time of year and get lots of questions from voters -- here are the top 10 voting do's and don'ts on my mind this election season:

1. You DON'T have to vote on everything on the ballot. You can skip contests if you like.

2. If you moved since the last election but didn't re-register, DO vote today if you moved within the same county. Go to your new polling place, fill out a voter registration card and cast a provisional ballot.

3. If you don't know where your polling place is, or if you are registered to vote, DO contact your county election office (some have polling place and registration lookup tools on their web sites).

4. You DON'T have to show ID to vote, unless you are voting for the first time and are a newly-registered California voter.

5. You DO have to sign the poll book under penalty of perjury - signing and voting for someone else could land you in jail.

6. If you are registered "decline-to-state" you DO have the right to cast a partisan ballot in either the Democratic or Republican party's primary.

7. If you are a Decline-to-state voter, DON'T rely on your pollworker to ask you which ballot you want - procedures vary from county to county. Remember to speak up and ask for a partisan ballot at the polls if you choose to cast one.

8. If you've misplaced or didn't receive your vote-by-mail ballot, DO still go to your polling place and vote today. You will be voting a provisional ballot so the county can verify you are not voting twice.

9. If you have a vote-by-mail ballot but didn't mail it yet, DO take it to your polling place, or any polling place in your county and cast it there.

10. DO check the back side of your ballot for additional contests - some ballots are double-sided.

KCRW election discussion hosted by Warren Olney

2010-06-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing with Warren Olney, host of KCRW's "Which Way LA?" program. Other guests included Peter Schrag and Allan Hoffenblum - good discussion all around. An archive of the show is available online.

Campaigns raise $70 million to support and oppose state ballot props

2010-06-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

Today the California Voter Foundation issued this news release highlighting the findings of our recent campaign finance data analysis of state proposition fundraising.

Overall $70 million has been raised to support and oppose the five measures on the ballot. Two-thirds of all the money raised comes from just one donor, Pacific Gas & Electric, which has donated $46 million in support of Prop. 16, a measure the company is sponsoring that would impose new two-thirds voter approval requirements for local public electricity providers if enacted. CVF's online voter guide lists the top five donors for and against each measure - this kind of information is a great short cut for voters looking for last-minute, reliable information on the state propositions.

New study finds California lawmakers receive 79% of campaign money from out-of-district

2010-05-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

This week Maplight, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization shining a light on money in politics, released a new study, titled Remote Control, highlighting the findings of a data analysis of California lawmakers' campaign contributions. The study found that 79 percent of the funds raised by California lawmakers come from outside of the district. Maplight uses data compiled by the National Institute for Money in State Politics, which gets its raw data from California's online campaign finance disclosure data.

The study highlights how many incumbents who are in what would be considered "safe seats" nonetheless raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, generally to ensure their place of power within their caucus in the Capitol. Not surprisingly, the Remote Control study found that four zip codes in Sacramento rate among the top ten donor zip codes; Sacramento is home to hundreds of lobbyists who attend dozens of fundraisers every year in order to gain the access they need to succeed in the legislative process.

It's exciting to see this kind of advanced analysis being conducted of California political fundraising. This is not the only eye-opening research study that Maplight has conducted; the web site offers a bounty of fascinating findings as well as the opportunity to look up your own legislator's outside money and donations from interest groups. While the Secretary of State's Cal-Access disclosure site is a fantastic resource, many voters do not have the time, computing power or familiarity with campaign disclosure to make much sense of raw online campaign finance data. Maplight is providing a great public service by analyzing that data and turning into knowledge that voters will find useful.

On Monday, May 24 at 10 a.m. I will be on Capital Public Radio's Insight show along with Maplight's executive director, Daniel Newman, discussing this new study and campaign finance trends in California. Tune in online for a live audiocast.

Santa Clara first county in the nation to accept voter registration forms signed via e-signature pad

2010-05-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

Last Friday Santa Clara County announced it was accepting voter registration forms completed and signed using a new technology developed by California company VeraFirma. Earlier this year VeraFirma made headlines when the company attempted to submit initiative petitions signed with an electronic-signature pad such as an iPad or iPhone. San Mateo County rejected those signatures, the matter went to the courts and the ruling came down on the side of the county (Verafirma is appealing the decision).

Things are going much better for Verafirma in the neighboring county, where the company won support from Santa Clara county supervisors, county counsel and registrar of voters Jesse Durazo to use its technology for voter registration.

I'm cautiously optimistic about these developments. For many young people, using a computer screen to complete a voter registration form will be a much more user-friendly experience than filling out a paper form. However, the state lacks standards, statutes and regulations to specifically govern these signatures and their use in elections and voting. All of the election statutes that exist today are based on the presumption that voters are signing on paper, not an e-pad. And as anyone who has signed with an e-pad knows, the signature that results may only vaguely resemble one made on paper. If registrars are to verify an absentee ballot request that comes in on paper against a voter registration form signature that was made on an e-pad, will they be able to successfully do so?

Other counties may follow Santa Clara's lead and given the absence of a robust statewide voter registration database that would facilitate online voter registration, the Verafirma technology may be the next best avenue for utilizing new technology to get more of California's 6.5 million nonregistered, eligible voters into the voting habit.

For more on these developments, see Ken McLaughlin's May 14 story in the San Jose Mercury news. Excerpts are featured below.

Some election officials have raised concerns about possible voter fraud, as well as privacy and security issues, in regard to electronic signatures. But the founders of Verafirma point out that Wells Fargo Bank is so confident in the technology that it allows customers to open a bank account with an electronic signature.

The new technology also appears to be speeding ahead of current election laws. Nicole Winger, spokeswoman for California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, expressed some concern that the state's election codes don't mention things such as the three-year-old iPhones or the brand-new iPad. But Bowen does not have the authority to tell the county registrar to reject the signatures of the Santa Clara County voters who agreed to be guinea pigs, Winger said. Unless someone sues to stop Durazo from registering the voters, the electronic signatures will stand.

Barry, who called electronic signatures "the future of voter registration," said Verafirma has developed new software on a website that will allow people to use the National Voter Registration Act form to produce a "secure electronic signature" in the same way shoppers sign their name after swiping a credit card at supermarkets and large drugstores.

Sacramento County pioneers Ballot-on-Demand in California

2010-05-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

Today I became one of the first voters in California to receive a ballot-on-demand. Sacramento county, where I live and vote, has implemented a new ballot-on-demand voting process where a voter can come to the county election office, request a ballot, and the ballot is printed on the spot. This new approach to balloting will save Sacramento county potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars each election year by avoiding pre-printing thousands of ballots for early voting purposes. In the long run, it may open the door to new approaches to voting altogether, enabling county-wide voting centers to serve voters from all precincts. Kudos to Sacramento County for pioneering this innovation in California voting!

Certified list of candidates for June ballot now online

2010-04-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

The Secretary of State recently published the final, certified list of candidates for state and federal offices that will appear on California's June 2010 Primary election ballot. Open seat contests for statewide offices such as Governor have attracted a large number of candidates from all parties. The 177-page PDF-format list features candidate contact information and web sites.

Controversy over Prop. 14 ballot language

2010-03-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

Today's Los Angeles Times features this column by George Skelton outlining the controversy over the ballot title and summary for Proposition 14, a measure on the June 2010 that, if passed, would create an open primary process for California elections. Excerpts from Skelton's column are below.

The fate of an open primary proposal on the June ballot may well hinge on the outcome of a bitter court fight this week over a dozen or so words.

The words will be seen by millions of voters -- everyone who casts a ballot in the June 8 primary. They will summarize what Proposition 14 is all about and undoubtedly influence more votes than any endorsement or mail piece.

It's language that will be used in the "ballot label" printed right on the ballot, and the "title and summary" included in the secretary of state's official voter guide mailed to households.

"If we win the case, we win the election," says David Townsend, a strategist for the Prop. 14 side. "If they get their language, we lose the election."

At issue is whether the proposed open primary amounts to "reform" or merely "change." The current ballot language states the former; opponents contend the latter. Also, would Prop. 14 really lead to "greater participation in elections," as the language claims? Not necessarily, opponents argue.

There are other disputes: Opponents want to point out that candidates would not be required to list their political party. They could list it voluntarily. Also, the anti-14 side wants the summary to state that the measure eliminates the guaranteed rights of political parties -- and write-in and independent candidates -- to be on the general election ballot.

And they dispute the nonpartisan legislative analyst's finding that an open primary system would result in "no significant" increase in government costs. It could raise costs by "between $10 million and $20 million," they say, and insist the summary should point that out.

Accusations are flying all around the Capitol, mainly from Prop. 14 backers, who claim they were blindsided when a labor union, the California School Employees Assn., filed a suit against the Legislature without notifying them.

Most legislators -- both parties -- strongly oppose an open primary system. But they placed Prop. 14 on the ballot as part of a late-night deal last year to buy the budget-and-tax vote of Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria).

Now proponents suspect that the union and legislative leaders conspired to change the ballot language in the opponents' favor by attempting an out-of-court settlement -- a sort of bait-and-switch on Maldonado.

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But let's back up: Prop. 14 would create a "top-two" open primary. There would no longer be party nominating elections, except for president.

There would be one primary ballot, open to all candidates and voters. The top two vote-getters, regardless of party, would advance to the general election. In a heavily Democratic district, it's possible that two Democrats could face each other in the runoff. Ditto for two Republicans in a GOP district.

The goal is to force candidates in primaries to appeal to a wider range of voters than merely their own party members -- and elect some pragmatic moderates who can crack Sacramento's partisan gridlock.

Because the Legislature produced Prop. 14, it was allowed to write the ballot label and title and summary. When a ballot measure originates as a voters' initiative, the attorney general composes the language.

The legislative counsel wrote the Prop. 14 language with aides to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who strongly supports an open primary.

Testimony from SoS hearing on the Future of Voting in California

2010-02-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

On Monday I attended a hearing sponsored by the Secretary of State to examine the future of voting in California. The hearing was well-attended, although there were some notable absences, including Secretary of State Debra Bowen herself, who was held up in Washington, DC due to weather.

I know many folks were watching the hearing online via the Secretary of State's web site and a few even stuck around until the bitter end when I delivered my testimony in the "Public Comments" portion of the agenda around 5:15 p.m. I believe there may be a video archive of the hearing available at a later time. Staff did inform the audience yesterday that there would be transcript and that public comments will be posted on the Secretary of State's web site.

My remarks are available here.

What do you envision as the future of voting in California? The Secretary of State is still accepting public comments, which can be sent via email to votingsystems@sos.ca.gov.

Secretary of State hearing Monday - Future of Voting in California

2010-02-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

On Monday, February 8th California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will hold an informational hearing, on the topic of "The Future of Voting in California: the People, the Equipment, the Costs". The Secretary of State has arranged for speakers from across the country to come to Sacramento for this event (see the agenda for a complete lineup of speakers).

In her media advisory announcing the hearing, Secretary Bowen had this to say:

“Demands for increased transparency and services, shrinking government budgets, and technological advances that outpace elections laws and regulations have combined to challenge what many thought were ‘permanent’ solutions developed as part of the 2002 Help America Vote Act,” said Secretary Bowen, California’s chief elections officer. “Many in California and across the nation are ready to move in a new direction. The question is, what should Californians seek in the next generation of voting equipment and how can new products truly serve the interests of voters?”

The hearing begins at 10 a.m. in the Secretary of State's auditorium in downtown Sacramento, at 1500 11th Street, first floor. For those who cannot attend in person, there will be a live webcast available online.

Application deadline for Citizens Redistricting Commission is Feb. 12

2010-02-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

California's first-ever Citizens Redistricting Commission will be created by the end of this year. According to the Bureau of State Audits, which is responsible for managing the commission selection process, the Bureau has received over 15,000 eligible applications from Californians to serve on the commission! The response is overwhelming and inspiring. I had thought maybe a few hundred people would apply -- I never imagined it would be more than 15,000! This tremendous groundswell of interest shows that many Californians care deeply about the quality of representative democracy in our state.

The Bureau has been compiling statistics showing who is applying by gender, party, ethnicity and geographic location -- they can be found online here. The deadline to apply is February 12. Visit www.wedrawthelines.ca.gov for additional details and to access the application process. The Dec. 18 edition of CVF-NEWS also provides additional information about what will be expected of applicants and those who are selected to serve on the new commission.

This morning on Capitol Public Radio's "Insight" show - using iPhones to sign initiative petitions

2010-02-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

Can you use your iPhone to sign an initiative petition? A northern California-based company, Verafirma, has developed an application that makes it possible. But is it legal? Is it secure? These are the questions that remain unanswered. Election officials will need to start figuring it out soon, though, because the proponents of an initiative seeking to legalize marijuana use in California have submitted their petitions for verification, and the batch includes a smattering of signatures submitted not on piece of paper, but on thumb drives that display the initiative petition along with an image of a voter's signature captured when the voter wrote that signature on his or her iPhone screen using the Verafirma app.

And it's not just an image of a signature - it's something called "signature dynamic" that captures the pressure, speed and other special characteristics of the signature-in-the-making. This data can also be used for verification purposes - however, I do not believe the 58 county registrar offices have that technology in-house at this time. The counties that received these thumb drives have to either accept or reject the signatures on them. If they are rejected then there will likely be a legal battle and/or a legislative effort to change the law.

The advantages of collecting initiative signatures using iPhones or other kinds of personal digital assistants (PDAs) are substantial, especially if you have an initiative that is likely to attract grassroots support. Using PDAs to sign initiatives will allow for more successful viral marketing campaigns and can lower the cost for qualifying an initiative, which experts estimate is a minimum of $1 million, even for the most grass-rootsy of measures.

The technology may also lend itself to voter registration, which is currently an all-paper affair in California. Although the Secretary of State is aiming to create an online voter registration process, it is not likely to be up and running for several more years. From an election officials' point of view, it will likely be far easier to verify petitions or registration forms that come in a digital format because the information on them is more accurate and easier to read, and it will also greatly reduce the number of paper petitions that get submitted, thus saving paper.

The downside? From a voter's perspective, it may make initiatives easier to qualify so we may end up with even more measures on the ballot, which can overwhelm voters. There are also potential security and privacy risks that must be addressed. How does the voter know that a company collecting their information and signature image isn't storing it somewhere to use later for commercial or fraud purposes? How do you know the initiative you are signing is the actual one you want to sign and not an imposter petition? These kinds of questions typically get worked out during legislative and regulatory proceedings. But in this case, as in so many other instances in the past 16 years*, public policy has not kept pace with technology.

And we know from experience where that can lead. Remember electronic voting? It was so appealing to the registrars -- no more paper ballots, a fast, accurate count. The problem was there was no transparency or accountability either. California spent hundreds of millions of dollars on 40,000 paperless, electronic voting machines that ended up later being replaced with paper-voting systems or retrofitted with printers to produce a paper trail. We learned an expensive lesson -- paper is low-tech and perhaps not what's best for the environment, but in an election process marked by a tangle of procedures and varying degrees of technical sophistication in county election offices and at polling places, paper is the safest, most transparent method for transacting ballots.

Of course, voter registration forms and initiative petitions are not the same as ballots. While they are in the same "class" of transactions, they are fundamentally different; a ballot is secret, and your name is not allowed to be on your ballot. Once you cast a ballot it must be anonymized, mixed with other ballots and never tied back to you. These rules are what keep the ballot secret. But initiative petitions and voter registration records are public records, and election officials must know the names and addresses of people who sign and submit them. Signatures must be visible and verifiable. Consequently, I am cautiously optimistic about the prospects for the iPhone initiative petition application. But first, election officials will need to figure out how to protect the security of these transactions and the privacy of the information contained in them.

For more on this topic, tune in to the Capitol Public Radio's Insight show today, hosted by Jeffrey Callison, where I will be a guest along with Sacramento county Registrar of Voters Jill Lavine and Steve Churchwell, counsel for Verafirma. The show starts at 10 a.m. at 90.9 FM in Sacramento or online at www.capradio.org.

For additional details, take a look at this article by Ken McLaughlin from earlier this month in the San Jose Mercury News.

* Incidentally, I mention "the past sixteen years" above because it marks the time when I took up my role as the head of the California Voter Foundation, and today happens to be my sixteen year anniversary on the job. It has been a phenomenal experience watching, and participating in the changes technology has brought to the democratic process! I look forward to the challenges ahead.

A new initiative aims to derail redistricting reform

2010-01-20T15:53:00.000-08:00

George Skelton wrote an insightful column for the Los Angeles Times this week discussing some of the formidable hurdles Proposition 11, the redistricting reform initiative, must overcome before the initiative's results are achieved. His column is online and excerpts are below.

Remember redistricting reform, the effort to strip from legislators the power to choose their own voters?

It's the power that leads to gerrymandering or, in effect, lawmakers rigging their own elections.

Proposition 11, sponsored by a coalition of nonpartisan good-government groups and heavily funded by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed by a thin margin (1.8%) in November 2008. It called for creation of a 14-member independent citizens commission to draw districts for the Legislature and state Board of Equalization.

The next once-a-decade remapping will occur in 2011, and take effect with the 2012 election.

Here's an update: Things aren't going all that smoothly.

Two problems:

* Not enough women and minorities are applying for seats on the commission, officials report. The panel's pool of applicants is heavily tilted toward old white guys. There's a concerted effort underway to recruit a more diverse pool by the application deadline, Feb. 12.

* It all could be moot anyway. A small group of Democratic political insiders is trying to repeal Prop. 11 and also torpedo a sequel that would extend the redistricting reform to congressional seats. They've filed an initiative for the November ballot.

The odds are that Prop. 11 will survive. The repeal effort is blatantly cynical, and Californians probably will see through the bunkum. But this election year is unpredictable.

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At last count a week ago, about 6,000 people had applied. But 73% were male, and 52% were 55 or older. Whites represented 80% and Latinos only 8%. A mere 14% were from Los Angeles County, but 20% -- not surprisingly -- lived in the capital county of Sacramento.

Still, it should all work out. There'll be a large enough pool of women and minorities to seat a diverse commission representative of the state's demographics.

A bigger threat to reform is an initiative conceived by Michael Berman, a longtime Democratic strategist, redistricting guru and brother of U.S. Rep. Howard Berman of Van Nuys. The Bermans' goal is to kill an initiative that would also hand congressional redistricting to the independent commission.

The Berman proposal would commit a double execution by simultaneously burying Prop. 11. All redistricting would be returned to the Democratic-dominated Legislature.

But that's not how the so-called "findings and purpose" of the Berman initiative read. Titled "the 'Financial Accountability in Redistricting Act' or 'FAIR,' " the measure begins: "Our political leadership has failed us. California is facing an unprecedented economic crisis and we, the people (not the politicians), need to prioritize how we spend our limited funds. We are going broke. . . . "

And so forth with paragraph after paragraph of pot and kettle bilge. Based on Sacramento history, the independent commission won't spend any more money on redistricting than the Legislature has, and its meetings will be open, unlike the lawmakers' plotting behind locked doors.

"I'd be embarrassed to write that, and I'm a hack," says Rick Claussen, campaign consultant for the congressional redistricting reform. That initiative is being funded so far by wealthy Silicon Valley physicist and political activist Charles Munger Jr., a bankroller of Prop. 11. Half the necessary voter signatures have been collected to place the measure on the November ballot.

"I'm trying to uproot this evil" of gerrymandering, Munger says. "It's a national problem, but this is my state so I'm starting here. Whenever the politicians get into the game of selecting the voters, instead of the voters being free to select the politicians, that's bad for democracy."

The Berman measure, which hasn't yet been cleared for signature-gathering, actually was officially submitted by UCLA law professor Daniel Lowenstein. He is an election law expert, first chairman of the state Fair Political Practices Commission and a Berman chum. For decades Lowenstein has opposed independent redistricting and is straight up about it.

"I believe that in almost all respects, redistricting is a political matter," he says. "There's one institution set up especially for resolving political matters and it does so entirely legitimately. And that's the state Legislature."

As for the majority party gerrymandering to minimize campaign competition, he says: "It's a complicated process of self interest, group interest and public interest. . . . A fair redistricting plan is whatever emerges from the political process of compromise and competition."

"If the other party doesn't like it, they should win the next election."

One hazard for reformers is that voters could become confused and vote against both measures. That would be fine with the Berman group. They'd at least prevent pesky citizens from drawing congressional districts.

A fresh perspective on reforming California government

2010-01-07T12:29:00.000-08:00

These days everyone is talking about reform, many initiatives are in circulation and voters are likely to face various, and possibly competing approaches on the November 2010 ballot. One of the freshest perspectives I have heard recently came from Susan Rose, a former member of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors whose essay, "State Government Badly in Need of Reform", appeared in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle. An excerpt is below:

Is it possible to reshape the way California is governed?

At a time of continuing unhappiness with the governor and Legislature, several groups have issued proposals that would redesign the financial structure of the state. But now is the time to not only rethink the fiscal systems of California but to redesign how services are delivered.

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Here are areas that need to be considered in the reform movement and in any debate about governing the state:

Special districts

Special districts are a holy grail in California communities, but are they still needed? Many began when and where services did not exist. Today, according to Peter Detwiler, staff director of the state Senate's Local Government Committee, California has about 3,400 special districts. Many counties have multiple water, sewer, fire and transportation districts. Why not consolidate or annex them to local municipalities? The administrative savings alone would be worth millions to taxpayers, and more-efficient services would result.

Regional government

Counties have been the real losers in this last budget go-round. They perform many of the same services that cities provide and also those that are mandated by the state: public and mental health, social services, tax collection, courts and probation.

Why not create regional forms of government that would reduce duplication? Counties can provide services that cover larger geographical areas, and cities can serve the day-to-day needs of their communities such as land-use planning, public works, building safety, parks and recreation, and police.

If cities are too small to provide their own police departments, they can contract with neighboring communities; it is done frequently throughout the state. Counties can contract with nearby cities to provide day-to-day municipal services for their own rural areas. The elimination of some of these functions would result in huge savings to local governments and more streamlined delivery of services.

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Consolidating services

California has 58 counties. Each presents a laboratory of opportunities for reshaping government. Santa Barbara County has a population of 405,000 and 10 fire protection agencies. Services are provided by some of the cities, the county, special districts, and state and federal programs that include firefighting. In some areas, training and communication systems have already been combined. Small communities can be very protective of their fire departments, but a single consolidated fire service program could provide greater resources and increased service levels. Why not unify all county fire programs into one area-wide agency?

What I especially like about Ms. Rose's suggestions is that not only would streamlining and reorganization of government services likely result in the provision of better services, it also would improve government accountability. Right now just about every level of government in California is involved in just about every kind of government service. This overlapping of jurisdictions makes it difficult, if not impossible for voters to know who to go to when they need help or have a complaint or question. Streamlining government services would make it easier for the public to know which political leaders are responsible for delivering those services and rewarding or punishing them according to performance.

Carnegie Corporation report looks back on election reform

2010-01-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

The Carnegie Corporation of New York recently released this report summarizing the election reform work it has funded over the past eight years, following the 2000 Presidential election and Bush v. Gore. The report provides an historical overview of a pivotal time in U.S. democracy, featuring comments and stories from many of the people and organizations that Carnegie has supported. It also contains a fascinating map (on Page 7) of the 50 United States and the circumstances under which voters in those states who are felons can get their voting rights reinstated, produced by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Please donate to the California Voter Foundation!

2009-12-28T11:48:00.000-08:00

There is still time to donate to CVF before the end of the year and get a deduction on your 2009 tax return! Learn more about why the California Voter Foundation needs your help, then make a secure donation online or mail your contribution. Thanks to all who have already given generously to support CVF!

Initiatives aplenty coming to California voters in 2010

2009-12-28T11:33:00.000-08:00

Folks who keep an eye on initiative trends have been noticing a significant uptick in the number circulating and attempting to qualify for the 2010 ballot. Recent articles by Eric Bailey in the Los Angeles Times and Torey Van Oot in the Sacramento Bee discuss the prospects for these measures and their likely impact on voters next year (excerpts below). For those interested in tracking initiatives in progress, you'll find the links you need in CVF's 2010 California Election Preview Guide.

Here are some excerpts from the December 27 Los Angeles Times story:

With heated contests looming for U.S. Senate, governor and other statewide posts, 2010 stands to be a blockbuster year in California politics.

The state could also see a bumper crop of ballot measures.

In recent weeks, nearly 90 proposed initiatives have been in the pipeline, elbowing to become the latest entrants in the state's century-old tradition of direct democracy.

Gay-rights activists, abortion foes, marijuana proponents and government-reform advocates are getting into the act of citizen lawmaking. Insurance companies and consumer groups appear poised to rumble.

There is also the possibility of a high-stakes proposition fight between business and labor interests that some pundits liken to state politics going nuclear.

If historical trends hold, many of the proposals will fail to garner enough support and voter signatures to qualify. But the state remains on track to potentially see dozens of measures on the ballot.

The record of 48 initiatives set in November 1914 -- in the era of Gov. Hiram Johnson, progressive politics and the birth of the ballot measure -- almost certainly is safe. But in a state with a rich tradition of lengthy and complex ballots, "2010 is going to be extraordinary," predicted Kim Alexander, founder of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation. "Voters are going to be cramming like never before."

Here are some excerpts from the December 28 Sacramento Bee story:

Even if just a small percentage of proposed initiatives clear the signature hurdle, voters are likely to face another long ballot in November, with anywhere between 10 to 20 measures having a shot to qualify. A legislative measure asking voters to approve an $11.1 billion bond has already been placed on the November ballot by state lawmakers and proponents of a measure that would legalize and tax marijuana for recreational use say they have gathered more than enough signatures to qualify.

Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said a crowded ballot can cause challenges for communicating to voters the implications of the various initiatives as well as which wealthy interests put up the cash to put the measure on the ballot.

"There's a lot of mystery already in voting in California, and then that problem is compounded with the initiatives process and the fact that we have so many state and local measures to vote on," she said.

The ballooning ballot and increased role of money in both the qualifying and campaigning process have prompted calls to update the initiative system, which was adopted in 1911 as a direct democracy fix for widespread corruption caused by the railroad industry's control over state politics.

"The history of the process is just the opposite of what has evolved over time," said Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, the co-chairman of a select legislative committee that is generating recommendations for improving state government, including the initiative system.

"I think there is certainly strong recognition by voters that it's really important to constrain special interests from capturing the initiative process," Feuer said.

Ideas for updating the system include offering proponents the option of lowering the signature threshold if they give the Legislature a role in a measure, requiring two-thirds voter approval for passing constitutional amendments and mandating that initiative proponents identify how new programs would be financed.

Others have suggested raising the fee for filing an initiative to lower processing costs for the state – an estimated $6,800 for the attorney general's office to prepare the title and summary describing each proposal – and discourage the submission of less serious initiatives that clog the system.

But despite voters feeling fatigued by the lengthy list of measures at the polls and concerns over the role of money in the process, getting them to change their cherished initiative system could be a difficult task in itself. Polls have consistently shown that while voters recognize the shortcomings of the process, huge majorities support it.

"California voters have a love-hate relationship with the initiative process," Alexander said. "People love to complain how difficult it is, but don't even think about taking it away. It is sacred in this state."

Apply for the Citizens Redistricting Commission -- Deadline is Feb. 12

2009-12-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

The California State Auditor's office is now accepting applications from Californians interested in serving on the new Citizens Redistricting Commission. To learn more about what to expect if you apply and find links to the application and additional resources, take a look at this CVF-NEWS commentary I recently wrote about the application process.

Live webcast today, 10:30 a.m. -- California Redistricting Reform

2009-12-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

I'm heading downtown today for the State Auditor's event to kick off the new web site and application process for the Citizens Redistricting Commission, created through the passage of Prop. 11 last year. The event will be webcast live at 10:30 a.m..

The new "We Draw the Lines" web site will begin accepting applications next week on December 15. Already people can see drafts of what the applications look like and find out what will be asked of folks who want to apply.

Some have been wondering whether at the end of the application process there will be enough money to fund the actual commission? The initiative called for $3 million to fund the new commission, but the first time around there are of course start-up costs, like creating regulations and an application and selection process. The Legislature has allocated the $3 million Prop. 11 calls for, but clearly more money will be needed. Even the Legislative Analyst's analysis of Prop. 11 in the ballot pamphlet said $3 million was insufficient and the actual costs just given inflation would be $4 million.

Fortunately John Myers at KQED Radio has taken a closer look at this question, and today published a very thorough description of what is likely to be the biggest implementation challenge Prop. 11 faces -- how do you get more money for a worthy program in this fiscal climate?

Reform proponents have a good opportunity to try to lock additional funding in, but the window is closing. The current Governor of the state was the biggest champion of all of redistricting reform and Prop. 11. He used his fundraising powers to raise millions to support the measure, which barely passed. If it's going to take more than $3 million to do it right, proponents need to figure out how much and ask for it sooner rather than later while Gov. Schwarzenegger is still in office. There's no guarantee the next Governor, whoever he or she will be, will have such a soft spot for redistricting reform, and certainly most members of the Legislature aren't exactly eager to get this done, either.

Please donate to the California Voter Foundation!

2009-11-19T12:01:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year -- a time for giving. We at the California Voter Foundation are looking for your support to help fund our important work! Please read our appeal and donate online or by check to CVF. Your tax-deductible contributions make a huge difference!

Twitter changes policies to improve nonpartisanship

2009-11-19T11:52:00.000-08:00

Last month Don Thompson of the Associated Press wrote this story calling attention to the fact that Twitter, the popular social networking web site, appeared to be favoring Democratic candidates for Governor of California by highlighting only Democrats in its list of suggested users.

This week, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said they would change their policy and practices. Excerpts from Thompson's follow-up story are below.

"That list will be going away," Stone said at a conference in Malaysia. "In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions."

Names on the suggested user list are selected by company officials. In California, Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls were placed on the list, a move that greatly boosted their number of followers. Republican candidates were left off until recently.
The difference in treatment drew outcries from good government groups and contributed to a decision by the California Fair Political Practices Commission to hold hearings next year. The commission plans to examine whether it needs to regulate how campaigns intersect with social media.

In the three weeks since an Associated Press story about the suggested user list, Twitter executives added all three of the Republican candidates seeking to replace Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is termed out of office after next year.
The switch gave each Republican a significant bump in followers, demonstrating the list's reach and influence.

Former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman, who led the Republican field with 4,160 Twitter followers, jumped to nearly 61,000 followers. Former Congressman Tom Campbell went from 1,660 followers to 57,500, while state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner's nearly 2,600 followers increased to 56,500.

By comparison, Attorney General Jerry Brown, the presumed Democratic gubernatorial candidate, increased from 960,000 followers to 1 million during the same three-week period.

Twitter also added Carly Fiorina, who is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer next year.

The list's expansion drew praise from Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation. She wants to see the site continue as an avenue for political discussion, saying it can serve as a valuable tool for voters who are just starting to get engaged in next year's campaign season.

California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring, however, urged Twitter to drop politicians from its favorites list if it doesn't end the list entirely.

"To include political candidates among suggested users is begging for some government entity to come in and regulate it," Nehring said.

State Auditor Q&A, WeDrawTheLines.ca.gov site launch

2009-11-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

Today's Capitol Weekly features this Question and Answer interview by Malcolm Maclachlan with State Auditor Elaine Howle, whose office is charged with implementing the new Citizens Redistricting Commission. The interview coincides with the Bureau of State Audits' launch of its new web site, WeDrawTheLines web site, featuring a growing bounty of information about the new commission, including the draft initial and supplemental applications and a description of the role of a commissioner. At a news conference at the Sacramento Public Library today, Ms. Howle was joined by Rivkah Sass of the Sacramento Public Library, who said all 27 of Sacramento's libraries will help the public access the application process.

Excerpts from the Capitol Weekly Q&A are below.

What kind of commitment are we talking about if you’re on the Commission?

The Commission has to be established by the end of calendar year 2010, so our job is to get this commission established. We actually pick the first eight names, randomly draw them in November, and then those eight commissioners pick the remaining six. There are 14 commissioners in total.

The commission is required to commence its work in January of 2011. They must have the maps drawn by September 15th, that’s about an 8 ½ month time frame. How frequently the commission will need to meet, how long they will need to meet on a particular day is going to be entirely up to the commissions depending on the workload. We’re in the process of putting some materials together that we can get on our website to try to educate people so that they’re making an informed decision when they decide to apply.

The commission is in all likelihood going to be meeting in a variety of locations in the state, because they need to hear public input from people from throughout the state. Beyond that, we don’t have any more specific information as far as the commitment. But again, we’re working with some re-districting experts who have done this in the past, who can help us develop some more materials that will educate the public about what the expectations will be.

It’s a big commitment, but it’s also a huge opportunity for you to be the first citizens’ commission in this state. There are some commissions in other states. Most of them are either appointees of the legislator or appointees of the governor. This is truly going to represent the citizens of the state because the commissioners are actually going to be everyday people. Not only is this an opportunity to be on a commission for the first time in California but it could end up being a national model.

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Don’t you have a difficult job even when this process isn’t going on? Do you have extra staff?

We actually do not have extra staff. We have lots and lots of work. It was kind of thrown in our laps, a bit of a surprise to us. It’s a huge challenge, but to be quite honest, we are flattered that the voters have that kind of confidence in my office. As I said in an editorial, the voters picked the right agency to do this job. We’re going to do it well. We have some funding that was appropriated by the Legislature, and I will keep asking for additional money. But we’re committed to doing this job as well as we do our audit work.

Study finds demographic differences between vote-by-mail voters and registered voters

2009-11-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

Today's Ventura County Star features this column by Timm Herdt discussing the recent findings of a California Field Poll study on the turnout and demographic characteristics of California's permanent vote-by-mail voters. Excerpts are below.

Excerpt:

There’s a new study out this week that documents the extent to which California has transitioned to a new way of voting, one that has created a pool of 6 million voters who may participate in every future election but never again set foot inside a polling place.

These are people who have signed up to be permanent mail-in voters, and their numbers are growing at a breathtaking pace: from 2.7 million in the 2004 election, to 4 million in 2006 to 5.6 million in 2008. They now represent more than a third of all California voters.

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In his paper on the growth in permanent mail voters published in this month’s Survey Practice, a journal for pollsters, Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo notes that turnout among permanent mail voters was significantly higher than total voter turnout in the last two statewide general elections. In 2006, when overall turnout was 56.2 percent, the voting rate of permanent mail voters was 77.7 percent. In 2008, the comparable numbers were 79.4 percent and 86.3 percent.

In low-profile elections the difference is even more striking. In last May’s statewide special election, overall turnout was just 28.4 percent. But almost half, or 48.6 percent, of permanent mail voters returned their ballots.

Much about this phenomenon is overwhelmingly positive.

Permanent mail voting has increased voter participation, made it possible for voters to take their time and consult reference materials when completing lengthy and complex ballots and, judging from the public response, provided a great many Californians with a convenient voting option that they like and prefer.

Unfortunately, DiCamillo’s research also reveals an unfortunate side effect: Permanent mail voting has intensified the demographic disconnect between the California populace and the California electorate.

The pool of registered voters in the state has always been older, more affluent and more Anglo than the adult population at large. With the growth of permanent mail voting, the differences among actual voters appear to have become even more pronounced.

Based on data collected from the Field Poll’s pre-election surveys, DiCamillo concludes, “There are significant demographic differences between the state’s permanent mail ballot registrants and other registered voters.”

There are geographic, age-based and ethnic disparities.

For instance, voters ages 18 to 29 make up only 13 percent of permanent mail voters, but 19 percent of all other voters. Those over 65 make up 29 percent of those who always vote by mail, but only 15 percent of all other voters.

Latinos are vastly under-represented among permanent mail voters, accounting for just 14 percent. Among all other voters, 24 percent are Latino.

Kim Alexander, founder of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, says permanent mail voting may be exacerbating the lack of diversity among California voters. “Policy-makers need to be mindful of that,” she said.

Alexander notes that the impulse of county elections officials — who now must conduct essentially two elections every Election Day, one through the mail and the other in person — has been to reduce the number of polling places and, in many cases, to urge that voting be conducted entirely by mail.

“Just because the vote-by-mail rate keeps going up doesn’t mean it’s time to start closing polling places,” Alexander said. “All voters should be able to vote in the way they’re most comfortable.”

Alexander said DiCamillo’s data also reveal the importance of getting elections officials in every county to uniformly promote vote-by-mail registration.

Until very recently, officials in Los Angeles County — the state’s largest and most diverse — had been decidedly cool to mail voting and did nothing to promote permanent mail registration. The result is striking: DiCamillo’s data show that LA County voters account for only 10 percent of permanent mail voters but 32 percent of all other voters.

The Voter Foundation not long ago commissioned a survey of 1,000 registered but infrequent voters. It found the No. 1 reason they cite for not voting regularly is that they don’t have time on Election Day. Yet, more than half were unfamiliar with mail-in voting. “That was kind of astonishing,” Alexander said.

DiCamillo’s study shows that the popularity of permanent-mail voting has continued to increase dramatically even nine years after the option was established. It’s not going away.

The challenge to those who would like to see a California electorate more reflective of its people is to educate young and minority voters about an option that makes voting more convenient.

Lobbyists sue to block state public financing proposition

2009-11-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend the Sacramento Bee published this story by Andy Furillo reporting on recent legal actions taken by California's association of lobbyists to block a proposition that, if passed by voters would create a public financing system for the Secretary of State's elections in 2014 and 2018. The measure relies on fees paid by lobbyists and lobbying firms to fund the public financing system. Excerpts are below.

Excerpt:

California lobbyists have filed a lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court to stop the vote on a ballot measure scheduled for the June primary election that would make them the guinea pig in an experiment on campaign finance.

The lobbyists say the measure to make them collectively pay approximately $34 million to fund California's statewide secretary of state campaigns in 2014 and 2018 unfairly restricts their free speech rights and restricts people's constitutional right to petition their government.

"Our view is that the First Amendment isn't up for election," said Jackson Gualco, president of the lead plaintiff in the suit, the Institute of Governmental Advocates, and himself a top-level California lobbyist.

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Hancock's Assembly Bill 583 cleared the Legislature on tight votes that showed no Republican support and a smattering of Democratic opposition.

It won only after it was amended to knock out the governor's race and elections for two legislative seats from the pilot project in public financing. The bill was sponsored by the California Clean Money Campaign, the California Nurses Association, other labor, environmental and consumer groups, and Common Cause.

Gualco's lobbyist association opposed the bill when it was in the Legislature, along with the California Chamber of Commerce, other business and anti-tax organizations, as well as the state Fair Political Practices Commission and Schwarzenegger's own Department of Finance, even though the governor later approved the measure going to the ballot.

The plaintiffs filed the suit Aug. 25 in Superior Court only after they had registered an identical action in U.S. District Court in Sacramento and saw it dismissed June 15 by Judge Frank C. Damrell. The federal judge threw it out on grounds of lack of "ripeness," because voters had yet to approve the measure and there was no imminent threat of damage to lobbyists.

Loyola Law School professor Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law, said the lobbyists can expect another tough legal go when their suit comes up for a scheduled Nov. 20 county court hearing in Sacramento in front of Judge Michael P. Kenny.

Hasen said the "ordinary rule" is that lawsuits contesting the constitutionality of ballot measures have to wait until the public votes them in, "on the theory that the voters might turn down the measure and save the court from having to address the constitutional question."

2010 California Primary Election Preview debuts

2009-11-09T15:58:00.000-08:00

Last week we began publishing this new June 2010 California Election Preview providing dates, links and resources to help the public keep track of the election as it takes shape.

So far three measures have qualified for the ballot:

Senate Constitutional Amendment 4 of 2008, authored by Senator Roy Ashburn (Property tax: new construction exclusion: seismic retrofitting)

Assembly Bill 583 of 2008, authored by Senator Loni Hancock (Political Reform Act of 1974: California Fair Elections Act of 2008)

Senate Constitutional Amendment 4 of 2009, authored by Senator Abel Maldonado (Elections: open primaries)

See the election preview for links and more details.

Bureau of State Audits finalizes regulations for Citizens Redistricting Commission application process

2009-10-21T16:23:00.000-07:00

This week the Bureau of State Audits released the final regulations that will govern the new Citizens Redistricting Commission application process. The commission was enacted by California voters via Prop. 11 in 2008. CVF worked with a number of other organizations to help shape and refine these regulations; overall they are good but there were several important changes CVF sought but was not able to achieve. One was to define the term "state office" in a way that would not restrict thousands of former and current state board and commission members and their families from applying to serve on the new commission. CVF also urged the Bureau, unsuccessfully, to refrain from using the Form 700 conflict of interest form as a tool to vet applicants for the commission, as we are concerned that doing so will be both invasive and burdensome for applicants.

CVF's letter regarding use of the Form 700, it is online here. The final regulations are online here. More information about California's Redistricting Reform is available from the CVF web site.

Legislative hearing Thursday Oct. 22 on political reform

2009-10-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

The leaders of the California State Senate and Assembly recently announced a new committee made up of ten lawmakers from each house that will explore reform proposals. The Select Committees on Improving State Government have scheduled their first, day-long hearing for Thursday, October 22, at the State Capitol, Room 4202. The hearing begins at 9 a.m. and concludes at 4:30. Topics to be covered include possible legislative branch and budget process reforms. Speakers include Mac Taylor, Bill Hauck, Fred Silva, Bruce Cain, Laura Chick, Bill Lockyer, Robert Naylor and others.

"Getting to Reform" conference - a brief review

2009-10-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

Last week on Oct. 14 I attended a conference in Sacramento organized by a number of academic organizations at UC Berkeley, CSU Sacramento and Stanford called "Getting to Reform". The event was sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation and was extremely well attended; over 300 people came for the day-long conference, the purpose of which was to assess the pros and cons of various reform approaches being discussed throughout this year, such as convening a constitutional convention or a constitution revision commission.

If you were not able to attend the conference and would like to see what you missed, there are six free videos available for viewing online from the California Channel web site. One of the panels I found most fascinating was the first one, titled, "What do Californians Think About Reform?" where Mark DiCamillo presented findings from a Field Poll commissioned by Next Ten and a number of other groups involved in the conference. Among the key findings:

* 52 percent of California voters oppose changing the current two-thirds legislative vote requirement to pass a state budget with a simple majority vote;
* 69 percent of voters oppose amending Prop. 13 to allow the state legislature to increase taxes with a simple majority vote;
* 56 percent support the idea of increasing the vote requirements needed to approve amendments to the state constitution from a simple majority to a two-thirds majority vote of the people in an election; and
* 75 percent support requiring initiative sponsors to identify funding sources or areas of the budget to be cut when submitting new initiatives that call for additional spending.

More details about this Field Poll are available here.

I think the most salient point I came away with from the conference was made by Bill Hauck of the California Business Roundtable who served on a constitution revision commission convened in the 1990's following a recession and budget crisis. Hauck noted that it took several years for his commission to complete its work and make recommendations, and by the time that happened the call for reform had died down as the economy had picked back up. Assemblymember Anthony Portantino, who spoke at lunch, made a similar observation about a Constitutional Convention, stating the whole process would take five years and by that time the momentum for change is lost.

It seems like a serious dilemma; if meaningful structural or governance reform is going to be achieved in California, setting the stage to get there may take several years, but it is unclear whether the voting public, or the organizations that would back various reforms, would maintain the long-term commitment needed to see reform measures all the way through.

CVF applauds 2009 EFF Pioneer Award winners

2009-10-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow night in San Francisco, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will celebrate this year's Pioneer Award winners. As a Pioneer Award judge (and former recipient) I am very pleased with this year's crop of winners, which includes hardware hacker Limor "Ladyada" Fried, e-voting security researcher Harri Hursti, and public domain advocate Carl Malamud.

More details about this year's Pioneer Award winners and tomorrow's awards dinner are available here.

Nonprofit news ventures flourish in California

2009-09-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

Over the past year or so, a number of new, nonprofit news ventures have been announced, serving both a national and California audience. Largely funded by foundations, these ventures are designed to help plug the news reporting hole resulting from severe staff cutbacks at news organizations across the country in recent years. The four ventures are ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch, the Voice of OC (Orange County) and the Bay Area News Project.

Recognizing that the for-profit business media business model is not so profitable these days, a nonprofit model is now being pioneered. First the San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation stepped up in early 2008 with a $10 million, three-year minimum investment to launch and fund ProPublica which is producing hard-hitting investigative pieces and collaborating with commercial news organizations to produce and distribute its stories.

This year, the Hewlett, Knight and Irvine foundations announced their multi-million, multi-year investment to support California Watch, whose staff and editors include many of the finest journalists I have known in California, such as former San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Bob Salladay. The mission of this project, according to its web site, is to "emphasize story telling that holds powerful interests accountable and shines a light on key areas of interest – education, health care, criminal justice, the environment and government oversight. The goal of our reporting is to expose hidden truths, prompt debate and spark change."

More recently, on September 15, down in Santa Ana, the seat of Orange County, The Voice of OC was announced, which is yet another non-profit news venture, but focused specifically on Orange County issues and featuring exclusively online reporting. According to the LA Times' story about this project, the seed funding was obtained from the Orange County Employees Association. The key backers include former state senator Joe Dunn and former veteran LA Times reporter Dan Morain who is serving on the Voice's board.

And just last week, it was reported that San Francisco investor (and host of the beloved Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park) Warren Hellman's family foundation is donating $5 million to start up the Bay Area News Project, in collaboration with KQED and the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

It's exciting to see all these new ventures get underway, and to see so many public-spirited journalists finding new, innovative avenues for sharing their talent. In the past few years the number of reporters covering Sacramento has dropped significantly. Fortunately now there is a growing number of reporters who will keep tabs on what's happening in Sacramento, Santa Ana, San Francisco and beyond.

I believe a significant precursor to all this public-interest journalism was the civic journalism movement, which was supported back in the 1990s by the Knight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, which funded the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. I participated in a number of the Pew Center's projects and conferences, and recall how skeptical and even hostile journalists from commercial news organizations were to the notion of civic journalism, and the Pew Center's mission to "create and refine better ways of reporting the news to re-engage people in public life".

Technology and necessity have changed the reporting equation. Of course, nonprofit news is not quite the same as civic journalism, but it stems from a similar sentiment, which is the idea that news coverage is something that should be designed to benefit the public interest and hold politicians accountable. By taking the profit requirement out of the equation the public will hopefully benefit enormously from all these ventures letting loose dozens of public-spirited reporters to watchdog politicians, and will succeed in establishing a new model for journalism.

Comments on draft redistricting reform regulations

2009-09-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

On Monday I attended a public hearing at the Crest Theater in Sacramento where the Bureau of State Audits' staff and attorneys (and State Auditor Elaine Howle herself) listened to comments made by a number of people on the regulations the Bureau drafted to facilitate implementation of Proposition 11, the redistricting reform initiative passed by California voters last November.

I was one of about a dozen people who testified; most of the other people who spoke participated in a working group that CVF was also involved with to develop joint recommendations for changes to the regulations. (The organizations that signed on to the joint letter and accompanying appendix include California Common Cause, CA NAACP, Asian Pacific American Legal Center, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Center for Governmental Studies, the League of Women Voters, the Rose Institute, California Forward and the California Voter Foundation).

While the working group members were successful in reaching consensus on 25 issues and recommendations, there was one issue where we could not agree, and that is the question of how "state office" and "appointed to state office" should be defined in the regulations. Because Proposition 11 was not clear on this issue, these definitions are open to interpretation.

The basic difference of opinion is that some think the definition should be left as the Bureau has drafted it, which would prohibit anyone appointed to a state board or commission in the past ten years, or anyone in their immediate family, from serving on the commission, with the belief that someone who has received an appointment is beholden to their appointer for it and may be perceived as a political insider. Others, including CVF, argue that this broad definition will unnecessarily limit the applicant pool and do a disservice to the initiative by prohibiting too many people and their family members from applying. As is stated in CVF's letter to the State Auditor:

Excerpt:

The philosophical question that the State Auditor needs to consider is whether to create a narrow funnel on the front end of the application process that dramatically restricts applicants in such a fashion in order to effectively preclude any possibility of a political insider or crony from applying and serving on the commission, or whether to have a wide funnel on the front end and rely on other provisions of the initiative to weed out any applicants who have a potential partisan or political agenda?

It is the view of the California Voter Foundation (CVF) that there are many other opportunities in the applicant selection process to review applicants for their ability to be impartial; indeed, it is one of just three qualities that determine whether an applicant is qualified to serve on the commission or not. CVF believes it is better to allow a wide funnel at the beginning of the application process and rely on the work of the Applicant Review Panel, the public comment process, and the legislative strikes process to weed out any applicants with a partisan or political agenda. To place such a narrow funnel on the front end of the application process will do a disservice to the initiative, in that it will wipe out large numbers of potential applicants who otherwise may be highly qualified to serve on the commission, and would be inclined to do so.

There were strong views expressed on this issue on both sides during Monday's hearing, and it will be interesting to see how the State Auditor decides on this matter. One issue that the working group did arrive at consensus on is that people appointed to boards or commissions that are advisory only should not be prohibited from applying to serve on the commission. The Auditor's staff plans to have revised regulations published on their site on September 28, followed by an additional 15-day public comment period. More information about California's Redistricting Reform is available from the CVF web site.

Bureau of State Audits issues Prop. 11 redistricting commission regulations

2009-08-03T10:06:00.000-07:00

When voters passed Proposition 11 last fall to establish a new, citizens redistricting commission to draw legislative district lines starting in 2011, they gave the job of implementing the measure to the Bureau of State Audits, the state's independent, external auditor. The job went to the Bureau because it is one of the few state agencies truly insulated from political or partisan influence by design. However, implementing an initiative and creating a new state program is not the kind of job usually thrown to this agency and its staff, who more typically focus on the effectiveness and efficiency of existing government programs.

However, it is clear the Bureau is dedicated to successfully implementing Prop. 11, and its staff members and consultants have worked hard throughout this year to gather public input before producing regulations to govern the new commission application and selection process. CVF weighed in with a letter of recommendations, focusing on the need for transparency throughout the process, the random selection process, funding, and other topics.

Over the weekend, the Bureau published on its Prop. 11 homepage the new, draft regulations to guide Prop. 11 implementation. These cover a variety of important topics that will impact significantly the application and selection process. For example, the proposed regulations provide definitions for numerous terms that appear in Prop. 11, including key phrases such as "ability to be impartial", "analytical skills" and "appreciation for California’s diverse demographics and geography" that will be judged by the Bureau's Audit Review Panel in deciding which applicants are most qualified to serve on the new commission.

The new regulations are quite comprehensive, and the package on the Bureau's web site includes a number of supporting memoranda that further explain the thinking and legal basis for the various judgment calls the Bureau's staff made in deciding the specific details on how to implement Prop. 11. A public hearing will take place on September 14 at the Secretary of State's office in downtown Sacramento to gather public input on the draft regulations. The Bureau also invites the public to submit written comments. More information on Proposition 11 is available from the Redistricting Reform section of the CVF web site.

Youth help bridge the digital divide in a Central Valley town

2009-06-30T16:13:00.000-07:00

The California Report featured this inspiring radio story reported by Sasha Khokha about a group of teenagers in the Tulare County town of Pixley who are getting training that helps them connect their community to the Internet. As a recent released Public Policy Institute of California/California Emerging Technology Fund study found, the "digital divide" in California persists for Latinos and Californians living in the Central Valley. CETF has invested millions of dollars to close California's digital divide, and programs like Pixley's "Digital Connectors", sponsored by the Great Valley Center, are providing crucial training and assistance to provide high-speed access to underserved Californians.

More talk about a possible constitutional convention

2009-06-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

In the weeks following the May 19th special election which saw the Legislature and Governor's attempt to close the budget gap go down in flames, talk about a possible constitutional convention has flared up again. Next Monday in Sacramento, representatives of the Bay Area Council and California Forward will hold a public forum to discuss the pros and cons of this reform approach. In this week's Sacarmento News and Review cover story, "California Renovation", reporter Cosmo Garvin takes a comprehensive look at what a Constitutional Convention might achieve. Excerpts are below.

The California Constitution is no work of art.

It’s more like the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. Lots of little rooms, stairs that lead nowhere, doors that open onto blank walls and windows set into the floorboards. “We keep adding rooms, but the hallways don’t connect together,” says state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, of our state’s constitutional house of mystery. “There’s not a lot of thought given to the overall architecture.”

Since 1879, the state constitution has been amended 512 times. Compare that to the U.S. Constitution, which you just don’t mess with. Its 27 amendments are straightforward principles concerning the essential function of government and the rights of the governed.

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Support is building for a “constitutional convention,” where delegates from all over the political spectrum would hash out a package of fundamental government reforms and then present them to the voters for approval. One group, called Repair California, is hoping to get a measure on the November 2010 ballot that would call a constitutional convention, the first one in California since 1879.

But a constitutional convention is just one way to give state government a makeover. A group called California Forward, led by former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, is hoping to convince the Legislature to put a package of reforms, called a “constitutional revision,” on the ballot in November 2010. “We have a significant challenge here in California, and we need to fix it as quickly as possible,” Hertzberg told SN&R, adding that his group’s approach would be quicker and more predictable than a constitutional convention.

A convention, a revision … or something else entirely. What’s the best blueprint for fixing California’s ramshackle, dysfunctional mystery house of government?

Assembly bill would give overseas and military voters more time to vote

2009-06-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Should military and overseas voters be given more time to get their ballots delivered? That's what would happen if AB 1340 is enacted. The bill, authored by Assembly Member Bonnie Lowenthal and sponsored by Secretary of State Debra Bowen, would require county election offices to count absentee ballots from overseas and military voters that arrive within ten days of Election Day, as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day. Last Thursday it sailed out of the Assembly on a unanimous vote and is now headed to the Senate.

As the Pew Center on the States highlighted in its landmark study, No Time To Vote, military voters from half of the U.S. states are not provided ample time to successfully request and cast their absentee ballots (California was found to provide ample time, but only if military voters return their ballots back by fax). A recent Congressional Research Service study requested by Senator Chuck Schumer found that among the seven states with the highest numbers of people serving in the military (including California), more than 25 percent of the ballots requested or returned went uncounted in the last Presidential election. California's Secretary of State has also compiled county-by-county statistics showing how many absentee ballots get sent out, returned, and counted.

While Lowenthal's bill is enjoying strong, bipartisan support in the Assembly, its passage would mark a significant departure in California election policy, representing the first time that ballots received after the close of polls would be eligible to be counted. As the Assembly Elections Committee consultant Ethan Jones points out in his bill analysis. The analysis also notes that Lowenthal's is not the only bill to extend the deadline for receiving and counting overseas absentee ballots; two other bills - AB 1367 by Nathan Fletcher and SB 582 by Robert Dutton - were also introduced. Although neither bill has advanced, the fact that they stalled out may have more to do with the fact that they are authored by Republicans operating in a Democratic-controlled Legislature than with the substance of the measures. There are, however, some significant differences between Dutton's bill and Lowenthal's bill; SB 582 would have given both overseas and domestic military voters the ballot deadline extension, but excluded overseas non-military voters ballots from the change. The extension deadline in Dutton's bill was also longer, 21 days compared to 10 in Lowenthal's bill.

If California were to make the process for voting overseas more reliable and successful, it would likely alleviate pressure from some quarters to move toward Internet voting. While some argue that Internet voting is the solution to time delays involved in casting a paper ballot from overseas, the truth is that Internet voting would create a whole new set of problems that would relegate overseas ballots to security risks and second-class status. There are, however, a number of ways the Internet can and should be used to facilitate overseas voting, such as providing an easy way to request an absentee ballot, look up one's registration or absentee ballot status, and access reliable election information. For California's overseas and military voters, their access to such services largely depends on where they are registered and whether that county provides them.

Of course, such services are beneficial for all voters, not just those stationed or living overseas. And inevitably, if AB 1340 or other similar bills are enacted, some may wonder why we don't give all absentee voters the right to have their ballots counted if they are received a few days after the election but postmarked by Election Day? This is, in fact, one of the complaints I hear the most from absentee voters. Many want to hold on to their ballots as long as possible so they can benefit from all of the election discussions and news coverage, but they don't want to wait too long to drop that ballot in the mail and risk the chance that their votes will not be counted.

So what's the downside? Postmarks may be hard to validate, especially if they are from overseas. Postmarks can also be created using in-house postage meters, which opens up the possibility for fraud. In a close contest, ballots received after Election Day may be viewed as suspect and possibly attempts to tilt the outcome.

California already has taken a number of steps to facilitate timely balloting by overseas and military voters. These include giving such voters their ballots sixty days prior to the election (a full month earlier than regular vote-by-mail voters) and also the opportunity to return their ballots by fax. Whether the Legislature will go even further and take the unprecedented step of extending the ballot return deadline for overseas and military voters remains to be seen. The next stop for AB 1340 is a hearing in the Senate Elections Committee on July 7.

The saddest little election ever

2009-05-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

Another election day has come and gone, the voters (at least some of them) have spoken, and now the legislature and governor must try again to close the gaping hole in California's budget.

Tuesday was the polar opposite of last November's General Election when there was so much excitement and so many new voters eager to participate. A few million voters participated in the statewide special election, but many more stayed home. The number of voters who cast ballots Tuesday will come out somewhere over 4 million, compared to November 2008, with a turnout of 13.7 million California voters. This week's total turnout numbers may not even exceed those of June 2008 (4.5 million), which also was a pretty sad election.

It's clear voters are eager to participate when there are issues or candidates on the ballot that draw them out and where they feel their vote can make a difference. That was not the case for millions of Californians with this statewide special election. For more thoughts on voter participation trends in California and the election process, take a look at my paper, The California Voters' Experience, published last October.

Election news stories - Capital Public Radio, SF Chronicle

2009-05-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday I was a guest on Capital Public Radio's Insight show, talking about the campaign money behind the six propositions on tomorrow's ballot. During the interview a clip from the "Proposition Song 2009" was played - probably the one and only broadcast of the song anywhere! Cap Radio played it as a "fair use" clip - just thirty seconds or so. If you'd like to hear it, an archive of the show is available online.

On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article by John Wildermuth about the likelihood that more vote-by-mail ballots will be cast in tomorrow's election than ballots cast at the polls. Excerpts are below.

"Mail voters might be a majority next Tuesday, but it will be an anomaly," said Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization promoting the responsible use of technology in voting.

"While the actual number of mail voters doesn't fluctuate that much, the percentage does," she added. "In a high- turnout election like November's presidential, the mail voters are a smaller fraction of the total."

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Schwarzenegger's decision to release the devastating budget details just days before the election points out one of the problems with mail voting.

Up until the day of the election, "news stories are being produced, ads are coming out, more information is becoming available," said Alexander. "Maybe the governor's budget plan changed someone's mind, but if they've already voted by mail, they're out of luck."

While Alexander and other election reformers would like to see the state count every ballot that's postmarked by election day, that's not the way it works in California. Ballots that arrive after the 8 p.m. close of the polls remain unopened and uncounted.

My election Q&A with Channel 10 is available online

2009-05-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

This election, like never before, many friends and family members are scratching their heads, extremely confused by the propositions on the ballot, and why we are having the election at all. Yesterday I was Sharon Ito's guest on the Channel 10 (Sacramento's ABC affiliate) "Live Online" show. For a half hour Sharon and I talked about the election and took questions from online viewers. Channel 10 has archived the entire webcast on its site, and you can find it here. The discussion will hopefully help answer many of the questions voters have during this confusing election season.

Channel 10's "Live Online" program today at 11 a.m. - May 19th Election

2009-05-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'll be Sharon Ito's guest today on Sacramento Channel 10's"Live Online" program, talking about and and answering questions from viewers about next week's statewide special election. Log in here if you'd like to participate. One thing I'll be talking about is the updated Top Contributor Data in our California Online Voter Guide, now showing the top five donors for and against each of the measures on the ballot as of May 2. I'll also be talking about the Proposition Poem we debuted last week.

A "Proposition Poem" for the May 19th special election

2009-05-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

From time to time my friends and I create a "Proposition Song" to help get voters acquainted with the propositions on the California ballot (see this 2006 video as an example).

For the May 19th election, I wrote new lyrics to an old tune, "San Francisco Bay Blues", composed by Jesse Fuller. Unfortunately the song is still copyrighted and the copyright owners would not give me permission to release the song we recorded, even though it is nonpartisan and noncommercial. Thus, I can only share the sung version on a strictly private basis.

So, I instead present a bit different of an offering this time, a "Proposition Poem". If you are familiar with "San Francisco Bay Blues" you can of course still sing along! (see this Youtube video of Jesse Fuller, a "one-man band" performing it in 1968). The poem is featured in CVF's special election California Online Voter Guide.

Donations pour in for special election measures

2009-05-04T15:18:00.000-07:00

After a rather slow start, it appears the committee supporting Propositions 1A through 1F, "Budget Reform Now" has cranked up the fundraising engine. As can be seen in their late contribution report filings the committee has raised several six-figure donations in recent weeks, including major financial transfusions from Governor Arnold Schwarzegger's "Dream Team" committee.

Some of the big donors giving to support the special election measures include Universal City Studios ($250,000), San Francisco Giants, Golden State Warriors, LA Clippers, and LA Lakers ($25,000 each) Altria ($350,000), Occidental Petroleum ($250,000), and Edison International ($100,000). While there are other committees raising money for an against the ballot measures, none come near to the amount of funds being raised by "Budget Reform Now". Whether all this fundraising and spending will be enough to put the measures over the top remains to be seen. But one thing that is not in doubt: Governor Schwarzenegger is a prolific fundraiser, even in a major economic downtime.

CVF will update its top donor pages of our online voter guide after May 7, when the next periodic committee reports are due.

New California Online Voter Guide for May 19th election

2009-04-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

The California Voter Foundation's new California Online Voter Guide is now available online, providing voters with easy access to reliable, nonpartisan information about the six propositions on the May 19th statewide special election ballot. See CVF's news release for more details about the project.