Councilwoman is accused of voting in California, Oregon

Allegation comes amid climate of election insecurity

Authorities are looking into accusations that a Monte Sereno city councilwoman illegally voted twice in California and Oregon for years, raising the question of how could someone repeatedly cast ballots in two states?

The alleged fraud comes to light during a year where election integrity already is under scrutiny. President Donald Trump has been criticized for suggesting without evidence that mailin ballots used across the country as the coronavirus pandemic rages are vulnerable to such fraud.

But while election experts acknowledge that policing the one-person, onevote principle across state lines is difficult, they say violations are rare.

“Is it happening frequently? No, I don’t think so,” said Kim Alexander,

founder and president of the California Voter Foundation, a Sacramento nonprofit dedicated to improving the voting process. “This is definitely a situation where voters are policing themselves. The burden is on the voter to adhere to the law and the penalty to not adhere to the law is a felony. I think that does effectively deter pretty much most people.”

In Monte Sereno, the double-voting allegations against Rowena C. Turner, 71, came as the former teacher and marketing manager for several Silicon Valley technology companies seeks reelection to the City Council she joined in 2016. She has lived in the small, upscale residential community in the South Bay since 1986.

Records from the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters office show she has been a registered voter in the county since at least 1990, when she changed her party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, and cast mail or absentee ballots in elections from 1992 through the upcoming Nov. 3 election.

However, in Josephine County, Oregon, where Turner in 1999 bought property in Grants Pass, elections records show she also registered to vote there that year, again as a Republican, as the state became the first in the country to conduct elections entirely by mail. She voted in more than a dozen Oregon elections from 2004 through the 2020 primary held there May 19.

The records from the two counties indicate Turner cast ballots in both states in five general and two primary elections in both places: The 2010, 2012 and 2014 general elections, the 2016 primary and general elections, the 2018 general and 2020 primary.

The allegations against Turner came to a head at last week’s Monte Sereno council meeting, at the insistence of a councilman who supports her reelection opponents in a fourway race for two seats.

“Those are issues the council member should answer,” Councilman Javed I. Ellahie said. “We should not be burying them under the rug.”

Turner said at the meeting that she has retained a lawyer “and cannot make any public statements.” She did not respond to requests for comment from the Bay Area News Group.

The offices of both the Santa Clara County District Attorney and the California Secretary of State, which oversees elections, confirmed they are looking into the matter.

But while state and federal laws generally prohibit voting twice in the same election, bringing charges becomes complicated, as the federal and state governments define it differently, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

It’s not illegal to be registered to vote in two states, say after a move. But states have difficulty tracking new registrations across state lines to eliminate old ones. The Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that aims to make that easier, has 30 member states, including Oregon, but not California.

A Washington Post analysis in June found that with the center’s help, election officials in the vote-by-mail states of Oregon, Washington and Colorado identified only 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of dead people out of about 14.6 million votes cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections.

The federal Voting Rights Act prohibits “voting more than once,” but the conference of state legislatures said it “has been unable to find a prosecution of any person under that statute for voting in multiple states at the same time.”

California and 30 other states prohibit voting twice in the same election, while Oregon and 10 others explicitly ban voting in more than one state. Seven other states prohibit voting twice within the state for the same office.

The state legislatures conference said the differences in state laws create possibilities for double voting that would not necessarily be illegal. It cited a 2015 case in Arizona in which a woman was charged with casting an in-person vote in that state and an absentee vote in Colorado during a midterm election. She was charged in Arizona and convicted of illegally voting twice, but an appeals court overturned the conviction.

The court ruled that because different senators and members of the U.S. House of Representatives were up for election in each state, the elections were unique and the voter had not voted twice. Arizona has since amended its law to clarify that it would be illegal to vote for federal offices in different states on the same day.

“It is not always clear when double voting has happened across state lines, given the variation between states’ policies,” the state legislatures conference said. “Although statistics show it to be rare, it is also difficult to identify and difficult to prosecute when it does occur.”