Secretary of state candidate speaks at local luncheon
Sitting down in a chair in the Woodbridge Golf and Country Club’s restaurant, California secretary of state candidate Mark Meuser took a break after speaking at the Lodi Republican Women Federation’s monthly luncheon to discuss his decision to challenge incumbent Alex Padilla.
The California-born graduate of the Oak Brook College of Law opened the Meuser Law Group to help fellow small business owners navigate the state’s regulations, and now hopes to improve California’s election process as secretary of state.
“According to the Pew research Center, California has the secondworst elections in the nation,” Meuser said.
Meuser listed reasons such as deceased people not being removed from voter rolls, people moving and forgetting to change their registrations, duplicate registrations, fictitious registrations and registrations by non-citizens as reasons for Los Angeles County reporting 144 percent of its residents as registered voters, which he sees as one of the state’s largest election problems.
“There are multiple ways someone can get onto voter rolls, but it’s the responsibility of the secretary of state to remove ineligible people from those rolls,” Meuser said.
Meuser said Padilla’s California Motor Voter program, which automatically registers people to vote when applying for a driver’s license unless they check a box to opt out, resulted in approximately 77,000 Californians having their party preference changed without their consent or creating a duplicate registration.
“(Padilla) tried to rush the roll-out, and he did it at the worst possible time, right in the middle of a (primary) election,” Meuser said. “If you’re going to do this, it should be done at the beginning of the year where there’s time for counties to work out the bugs.”
Los Angeles County had approximately 118,000 people removed from its voter rolls, Meuser said, just one example of problems he felt could have been avoided had the Motor Voter program been implemented earlier.
“They blamed it on a printer error, but it happened in more than one county. It seems to be a software problem, not a printer problem,” Meuser said.
Meuser was also critical of other aspects of his opponent’s time in office during his speech at the luncheon, he said.
“What I basically said is that Alex Padilla is more concerned with tweeting at President Trump about issues that have nothing to do with the Office of Secretary of State than he is with running fair and honest elections in the State of California,” Meuser said.
Voter registration, administering elections, counting ballots and auditing the elections are four duties Meuser would oversee if elected, he said, with fixing voter registration taking top priority.
“We also need to make sure proper audits are done so that people can feel like their elections were properly counted,” Meuser said. “Alex Padilla and the Democratic legislature seem to be focused on passing laws that actually decrease the number of ballots that must be audited by the counties.”
Meuser cited a group in San Diego who, believing Senator Bernie Sanders won the California presidential primary election in 2016, have been trying ever since to access the ballots and count them for themselves with little success.
“I believe they should have that right. If they’re willing to pay the bill, they should be able to manually look at those ballots to make sure a proper count was done,” Meuser said.
Meuser also discussed a growing dissatisfaction California Democrats have been feeling with their party, especially with the state’s most recent gas tax, saying that a large enough Republican turnout in November could result in his victory.
“Basically, there was no ‘Blue Wave’ which, with the repeal of the gas tax on the November ballot, is why I’m so optimistic for November 2018,” Meuser said.