A heads-up for Sonoma County voters making plans to cast their ballots this election season: the drive-through drop box at the Registrar of Voters office has been removed. Because it connected directly to the office, that receptacle was deemed a security risk.
No great loss, really. Navigating the narrow lane off Fiscal Drive was always a tight squeeze, especially for pickups and larger SUVs. Long lines of vehicles would form on Election Days.
“In 2022, we managed to back up the entire campus,” recalled Deva Proto, the county’s registrar of voters. The closed drop box is being replaced by one mere feet away, although voters will need to park their cars and take a few steps to reach it.
Another drive-through drop box sits on nearby Administration Drive. On Election Day — Tuesday, Nov. 5 — and the day before, voters can also take advantage of a staffed drive-through area on Fiscal Drive to drop off vote-by-mail ballots.
Those upgrades only scratch the surface of the ways Proto and her Napa County counterpart, John Tuteur, have worked to ensure this upcoming election runs smoothly, all the while taking steps to bolster public confidence in the process.
Such reassurance is in order, as election deniers led by Donald Trump work to sow doubt and mistrust in the results of the upcoming election. “If Jesus Christ came down and was the vote counter,” Trump recently told Dr. Phil, “I would win California, OK?”
Trump lost the Golden State by 4.2 million votes in 2016 and by 5.1 million votes in 2020.
False claims, conspiracy theories
By spreading fictional accounts of rigged voting machines, and masses of noncitizens casting ballots, Trump is “setting the stage for claiming the election was stolen afterward,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, in an interview with PBS.
Those and other false claims and conspiracy theories have resulted in a wave of threats to elections officials around the country, including California.
Shasta County, some 230 miles north of Santa Rosa, is “one of the hotbeds for these sorts of conspiracy theories,” said Justin Grimmer, a Stanford University political scientist who keeps track of election conspiracy theorists, and maintains a website, electioninsights.org, that refutes specific claims that U.S. elections are manipulated.
Making Shasta County exceptional, said Grimmer, “is that there’s a majority on the Board [of Supervisors] sympathetic to these ideas, and willing to enact policies in response to these incorrect assessments of the validity of the election.”
Proto and Tuteur have been spared such extremism, which is not to say they don’t frequently hear from critics, some of them aggressive. Proto, for her part, “got hung up on the other day and called a liar,” she recalled, “by a man who “wouldn’t let me finish a sentence, took everything I said and twisted it. He was just spoiling for a fight.”
Committed to transparency
By every objective measure, the operation she runs is a model of integrity. In June, following a lengthy, in-depth investigation, a Sonoma County Civil grand jury turned in a glowing report on the work done by the Registrar of Voters Office.
Proto and her staff recently received measured praise from Debbie LeBoy, election integrity chair of the Sonoma County Republican Party, of which she is vice chair.
“Deva has done a great job making the election process as transparent as possible,” wrote LeBoy in an email, citing the open houses the office has held for the public, and its openness to allowing observers to watch their work during elections — in person, and on the half-dozen security cameras Proto has installed in rooms where ballots are handled.
Proto is a fan of transparency. But some rooms and corners of the Registrar of Voters’ undersized, outdated offices offer very little public viewing. Her solution: install cameras, and livestream the proceedings on YouTube.
Folks want to know what’s going on in the office, said Proto, “but a lot of people can’t physically come down here, or don’t have the time. But they’re curious.”
She knows they’re watching those live feeds, especially on election night. “I’ll get texts from people saying, ‘Looks like we just got another batch [of votes] in. Will there be an update soon?”
LeBoy would like to see the county “verify signatures with in-person voting,” and speed up its “counting process.”
She had more pointed criticism for officials at the state level, arguing that California shouldn’t mail a ballot “to every voter in the state whether they asked for it or not.” LeBoy also called for Voter ID, and fewer days of voting —“to save on costs to the taxpayer.”
Source link : https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/election-integrity-sonoma-county-napa/
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Publish date : 2024-09-07 03:15:00
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