Earning a vote of confidence
As California political offices go, secretary of state is unglamorous enough that Alex Padilla was suspected of seeking it mainly to bide his time until he could run for something more prominent.
Four years later, when Padilla is not explaining how he plans to prevent a foreign attack on the next election, the president of the United States is falsely accusing him of allowing 3 million illegal votes in the last one.
Secretary of state is not the obscure post it used to be. Nor has Padilla, a Democratic former state senator and Los Angeles City Council president, treated it as a sinecure. Even before President Trump and Vladimir Putin helped raise his profile, the state’s top elections official was working to modernize neglected and outdated systems, expand voter registration and participation, and make campaign finances more transparent.
The state’s voter registration stands at nearly 19 million, about 1.3 million more than at the same point in the last gubernatorial election cycle. That figure is expected to rise further under a
law Padilla sponsored to automatically register eligible voters who obtain a driver’s license or state identification. And the secretary recently announced the encouraging news that more than 100,000 16- and 17year-olds have preregistered to vote as soon as they turn 18.
Californians should find it easier not just to register, but also to vote under another measure backed by Padilla. Once it’s phased in, all active registered voters will automatically receive ballots that can be returned by mail or dropped off at designated locations, and new voting centers will allow countywide registration up to the day of an election and in-person voting up to 10 days beforehand. Those votes will also be more likely to make an impact in 2020 under a Padilla-sponsored measure that moves California’s presidential primary from June to March.
An MIT mechanical engineering graduate, Padilla is well-versed in the latest threats to election security. He says the state’s system is well positioned to withstand hacking attempts thanks to precautions that include verifiable paper trails, sample hand counts, and a policy of keeping voting equipment unconnected to the Internet.
The secretary has also modernized the office’s less familiar but nonetheless important functions. He improved public and press access to information about political money and lobbying by making it easier to search the state’s online data, and he enabled online filing of some business forms, with further upgrades in the works.
Padilla’s most active Republican challenger, Walnut Creek attorney Mark Meuser, certainly offers voters an alternative. While the incumbent has focused on expanding registration and participation, Meuser is preoccupied with paring back the rolls. He argues that inactive registrations, often of voters who have moved or died, constitute an invitation to fraud and a threat to public confidence in the integrity of elections.
Meuser isn’t alone or wrong in drawing attention to the need to clean up California’s voter rolls, but Padilla has instituted a statewide database that should help. Moreover, inactive voters do not receive election materials and must cast provisional ballots if they show up at the polls, so their mere presence is a long way from evidence of widespread fraud, which every careful analysis has failed to find.
In a state that lagged in participation and other measures when he took office, Padilla’s focus on expanding voting and registration is the right one, and his success so far in doing so has earned him another term.