From an email just now:
Please attend the OC Board of Supervisors Meeting Tuesday, September 19 at 9:30. We need to demonstrate to the Supervisors that a fair and impartial Registrar is of the upmost importance to us. If you cannot attend, please at least send an email voicing your opinion. You do not need to speak at the meeting - just your presence will make a statement!
Board meetings are held at 10 Civic Center Plaza on the corner of Broadway and Santa Ana Blvd. in Santa Ana.
For telephone directions to finding Civic Center locations, please call 714.834.5400.
Bill Campbell (Chairman): (714) 834-3330 bill.campbell@ocgov.com
Jim Silva: (714) 834-3220 district.two@ocgov.com
Lou Correa: (714) 834-3110 lou.correa@ocgov.com
Chris Norby: (714) 834-3440 chris.norby@ocgov.com
Tom Wilson: (714) 834-3550 thomas.wilson@ocgov.com
County CEO Thomas Mauk: (714) 834-2345 thomas.mauk@ocgov.com
Monday, September 18, 2006
Today's Register editorial: Report makes excuses for registrar
Irregularities in handling Capo recall petitions are still not satisfactorily explained
The Orange County Board of Supervisors has seemed reluctant to tackle a potentially serious problem in one of the most important offices in the county: the Registrar of Voters. If the registrar is not operating efficiently or fairly, the public could start to question the validity of the entire election process. It would be troubling to head down that road.
Current registrar Neal Kelley has come under fire after the Register reported on mistakes and even a possible illegality in how he handled a recent failed attempt to put a recall election on the ballot. The matter concerned signatures handed in by supporters of a recall of the Capistrano Unified School Board and has been unusually contentious largely because of the sense that the registrar didn't handle the election professionally.
Rather than deal with the problem directly, the Board of Supervisors hired former Sacramento County Registrar of Voters Ernest Hawkins and former San Bernardino County Registrar Ingrid Gonzales, of the Houston-based Elections Center, to review the specific allegations regarding the Orange County registrar's behavior in the Capo recall fracas.
The Elections Center is a trade group that represents registrars and election workers. Its Web site is filled with information about how hard they work, etc., so the skeptic in us thought it unlikely that the center would be too harsh with one of its own. We weren't surprised, then, by the tone or conclusions of the investigation. It confirmed problems that have been printed in the newspapers, but excused Mr. Kelley's behavior: Yes, he made mistakes, but he didn't mean to.
For instance, the possibly illegal action involved showing signed petitions, including names and addresses of the signers, to the Capo district. The registrar also incorrectly told the district that the recall election would cost the school district $600,000, when in reality the county pays for such elections. This mattered because the district then used that information as a prime part of its campaign against the recall. The report said Mr. Kelley learned about his mistake in December but didn't disclose that information for another month, according to published reports.
The Elections Center concluded that Mr. Kelley misread the law, although it says "he might have been too hasty in providing an answer to the district and could have researched the law more thoroughly." It concluded that "there is no impropriety involved in providing approximate election costs to school districts."
David Smollar, the former district spokesman who blew the whistle on the wrongdoing, told the Register that he was told by an elections official and by a colleague in his district that Mr. Kelley was bending the rules to allow them to see the petitions. Yet Mr. Smollar said that the Elections Center never tried to contact him, despite claims by the center that it did leave messages.
Recall supporters say that an elections official told them that it was OK to fill in the addresses of those who signed the petitions but didn't want to fill out all their information on seven different forms (seven board members were the recall targets). Mr. Kelley rejected thousands of petitions for that reason. He denies that anyone in his office gave that misinformation, and the report found no evidence to support that allegation. The report did offer a range of banal, but useful suggestions. For instance, it recommended that written procedures should be developed to handle recalls and that user-friendly handouts should be available for petitioners.
We find it odd that all of the registrar's mistakes leaned in one direction, especially in light of Mr. Smollar's accusations. The Board of Supervisors is left in the same place it was before it spent $25,000 on this report: There is still debate over the competence and fairness of how the registrar's office is being run. The board needs to decide – publicly, we prefer, and after hearing from Messrs. Smollar and Kelley – if this is the way they want elections handled in Orange County.
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