San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Trump’s lie about voting alive, spreading in state
Californians shouldn’t look at voter suppression as something happening only in faraway states, like Georgia, Texas and Florida. A more subtle, insidious form of the fallout from Donald Trump’s big lie about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential race is permeating California.
The lie is gaining enough traction to alarm voting officials, starting with California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. She’s met with nearly every county registrar of voters since taking office in February, and many told her that rightwing agitators are making their job
more difficult.
“They’re attacking almost every registrar of voters that I have in the state of California who is trying to do their job,” Weber told the Black Caucus at the California Democratic Party convention recently.
Look no farther than San Luis Obispo County, where last week conservative activists pressured the GOPled Board of Supervisors to make it harder to vote there. Last year the county recorded its highest ever turnout — 88% of registered voters — the fourthhighest turnout in the state.
“It was a highly successful election in San Luis Obispo County,” county ClerkRecorder Tommy Gong told me.
But that meant little to the San Luis Obispo County GOP. For the past couple of months, it has bought local radio ads that drop numerous innuendos about “election integrity” but don’t contain many facts.
“Did you vote in the 2020 election, and do you trust that your vote was counted?” the ad’s narrator asks.
“San Luis Obispo County uses the same type of voting machines that produced anomalies in battleground states. It’s every citizen’s right to insist that our elections are fair and honest,” she continues. “Election integrity is under attack in the U.S., including right here in SLO County, but our elected clerkrecorder, Tommy Gong, is not concerned. Make your voice heard. Tell Tommy that SLO County voters demand constitutional and transparent elections, using voting systems that we can trust.”
Yes, election integrity is “under attack” — never mind that no court or state, even ones led by Republicans, has found widespread evidence of voter fraud.
Nevertheless, dozens of messages expressing concern about voter integrity flooded the San Luis Obispo County supervisors’ meeting last week during the public comment period. One accused Gong, a thirdgeneration Californian, of being a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
Members of the county board apologized to Gong for the slur. But, ultimately, they buckled to conservative activists in a 32 partyline vote.
The result: Starting next year, the county will revert to its previous voting rules — those used before it had that record turnout. That means if voters want to cast their ballot in person, they may vote only on election day at one of 76 polling places, instead of over four days at one of four voting centers.
Gong told me he will implement the board’s orders but that the change will confuse voters. One election they’re supposed to vote at the local firehouse on election day. The next one they have four days to a go to a voting center. And the election after that they’re back at the firehouse.
Is that voter suppression? “It certainly can be viewed that way,” said Gong, vice president of the California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials. “The flipflopping is what causes voter confusion.”
Gail Pellerin, who as Santa Cruz County clerk supervised many elections, said these changes are a form of voter suppression.
She had often heard people complaining about rigged voting systems during her decades as an election official, particularly from the losing candidate or their supporters. But they have never been as numerous or loud or insistent as they have been since Trump began talking about voter fraud soon after he took office.
“The easiest way to keep people from voting is make them not trust the system,” said Pellerin, a former president of the statewide election officials organization. “You sow those seeds of doubt and misinformation, and you make them scared to death that something would happen to their vote — and so they stay home.”
Part of the strategy to sow doubt in the system is to attack the messenger.
Pellerin is one of eight county election leaders who have left their positions since the November election — she was already planning to retire after 27 years on the job.
Donna Johnston, the Sutter County registrar of voters and current president of the statewide election officials organization, told me she didn’t know of any registrar who had left because of attacks on voting. She said she found Weber’s comments surprising and had not heard of complaints of attacks toward election officials, “certainly not to the level that she’s describing.”
But the abuse of election officials is “an unseen problem,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Federation, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to improve the election process. It plans to publish a national report on such attacks later this spring.
Many election officials “are in a position where they want to project strength,” Alexander said, noting that it is their job to declare the winners and losers of an election. “They don’t want to highlight these attacks, because it might show that it’s getting the best of them.”
Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen said, “I was called a liar in the eight to 10 days around the (November) election more times that I have at any time in my entire life.”
Allen invited concerned voters to walk their ballot into the county voting office and watch it being scanned and tabulated.
“And some people still don’t believe it,” she said.
It’s a sign that Trump’s big lie is alive and well in California.