More voters report being unregistered
At least nine other residents have reported being dropped from the voter rolls without their knowledge
Since Santa Clara County elections officials last week admitted accidentally deleting a voter’s registration, several other residents have reported that they too were quietly dropped from the voter rolls without their knowledge.
Santa Clara County elections officials could not say Tuesday what happened in those other cases, but they and officials in other counties urged voters who haven’t received a mail-in ballot or voter guide to not despair. Even though the deadline to register for the June 5 primary was Monday, elections officials said voters may still be able to vote provisionally if their registration was canceled by mistake.
“Our office is here to assist voters so we ask those with questions to please contact us,” said Eric Kurhi, a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.
The county registrar’s office last week acknowledged that an employee erroneously deleted San Jose resident Nancy Kops’ voter registration as part of a statewide effort to clean up the voter rolls by eliminating old records for people who moved to another address.
Kops, who complained after noticing friends had received their elec-
tion materials and mailin ballots while she had not, has since been re-registered. But after the Mercury News reported on her ordeal earlier this week, several other county residents called the news organization to report similar experiences, and some remain unsure of their registration status.
Emily Khasin said Tuesday she has received ballots at her San Jose home for the last five years, but began to worry this year after her husband received his election material and ballot and she didn’t. County officials could not explain what happened and she has yet to receive a ballot.
“I waited and waited and finally went online to check my voter status,” Khasin said. “It had me listed at a Gilroy address I have never been associated with… When I contacted them they couldn’t explain what happened.”
At least eight other Santa Clara County residents gave similar accounts after reading about Kops. Most said they too noticed they weren’t receiving election materials and that after complaining they managed to get their registration corrected.
Kurhi said the office was looking into other reports of voters being taken off the rolls without their knowledge. He said in the case of another San Jose voter, Margaret Ma, the Secretary of State’s office told Santa Clara County that her record was canceled by Solano County, but he did not know why.
California in 2016 launched a $98 million centralized statewide online voter database, VoteCal, that had been more than a decade in the making to comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The error involving Kops’ registration occurred as part of a statewide effort to clean up the centralized voter rolls by eliminating duplicate registrations.
The Secretary of State’s office said that as part of its implementation, the state has notified counties of cases where there appear to be duplicate voter records on file and asked them to verify the correct one.
But Sam Mahood, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, said VoteCal “does not unilaterally cancel voters.” Mahood said he needed to research what happened in Ma’s case. Voters, he said, may check their registration status online with the My Voter Status tool: voterstatus.sos.ca.gov.
Dean Logan, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said he was not aware of “any widespread issues regarding erroneous cancellations of voter registrations based on the statewide database duplicate matching and cleanup protocols.”
“The statewide system does require local review and verification of actions on a voter record,” Logan added, “so there are safeguards intended to prevent such an error.”
Logan noted that California election law is written “to ensure that no voters are denied a voting opportunity due to an administrative error.” He said voters who discover problems with their registration can obtain provisional ballots and conditional voter registration to vote.
Officials in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Cruz county election offices were unaware of any similar registration errors there this year. But Santa Cruz County Clerk Gail Pellerin said mistakes occasionally happen and shouldn’t prevent an eligible voter from casting a ballot.
“There are clerical errors sometimes, it does happen,” Pellerin said. She added that while the VoteCal transition may have some “growing pains,” the new centralized system “is better than the alternative before we had it.”
Anyone with questions about voter registration may call:
Santa Clara County (408) 299-8683 (VOTE)
Alameda County (510) 272-6973
Contra Costa County (925) 335-7800
San Mateo County (800) 345-8683 (VOTE)
San Francisco (415) 5544375
Santa Cruz County (831) 454-2060