{"id":1968,"date":"2025-10-13T17:58:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T17:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/1968\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T17:58:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T17:58:08","slug":"registrar-of-voters-changes-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/1968\/","title":{"rendered":"Registrar of Voters Changes Course"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post first appeared in the Politics Report. That\u2019s our member-exclusive newsletter. Get it in your inbox by becoming a member today. <\/a><\/p>\n

Michelle Dykstra hasn\u2019t lived in her La Jolla home that long. When she signed a petition seeking to make La Jolla its own city, she wrote her street, Loreta Street, incorrectly. She wrote \u201cLoretta.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s slightly embarrassed about that. She got a call a few weeks later saying that the County Registrar of Voters invalidated her signature in its review of the petition. The Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, contracts with the Registrar of Voters to do that kind of work, as do most cities.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t understand. I\u2019m a registered voter. I live in La Jolla. I pride myself in doing everything I can to always vote. I have my guide out now for the proposition. I made a silly mistake but I don\u2019t understand why it didn\u2019t count,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

LAFCO, though, did something cities have been unwilling to do before: The agency overruled the registrar on several signatures, like Dykstra\u2019s. It\u2019s executive officer, Keene Simonds, decided the petition had enough signatures even though the registrar thought it had come in short.<\/p>\n

When Simonds and his team starting going through the hundreds of signatures the registrar had thrown out, he easily found the few needed to qualify the petition within the first batches he checked. There were so many petty mistakes like Dykstra\u2019s, there were more than enough.<\/p>\n

Now, after decades of imposing a strict, unforgiving interpretation of compliance with petitions like La Jolla\u2019s, the Registrar of Voters has quietly updated its guidance to employees reviewing signatures after a\u00a0court ruling<\/a>\u00a0on a different petition in May. The Court of Appeal had heard a case from the Library Foundation, Parks Foundation and Municipal Employees\u2019 Association which tried to advance an initiative to raise a parcel tax to support libraries and parks within the city of San Diego.<\/p>\n

They had come close but came up short in part because signature gatherers had screwed up the dates they put on petitions. But the Registrar of Voters had also disqualified signatures for very minor mistakes by the people signing. The court hit the registrar hard.<\/p>\n

\u201cElection officials, however, acted arbitrarily in rejecting signatures due to some misspellings, illegibility, or nonstandard abbreviations,\u201d the court opined.<\/p>\n

The county said in May it would comply with the ruling but now we know it has dramatically changed how it reviews petitions. Now they have and if the policy had been in place as it is now for the last two decades, it\u2019s possible several high-profile petitions that failed may have been closer to qualifying.<\/p>\n

\u201cROV has reviewed the appellate court decision and applied updates to our processes as it relates to illegible and\/or misspelled addresses, including dedicating more staff time to research the voter file in an effort to resolve missing or illegible information on the petition,\u201d wrote county spokesperson Sarah Sweeney in a statement.<\/p>\n

I followed up asking if mistakes like Dykstra\u2019s \u2013 simple misspellings or different abbreviations of streets would be accepted now.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the ROV can verify an illegible or misspelled address, the signature can move forward to the signature verification process; provided, however, that all requirements under state law and regulations must be met in order to verify it,\u201d Sweeney wrote.<\/p>\n

This is a significant change. The city of San Diego is right now suing LAFCO for overruling the registrar and imposing this standard \u2013 the standard that is now the Registrar of Voters\u2019 standard. The Association for the City of La Jolla filed an anti-SLAPP motion arguing the city was trying to suppress their freedom of speech with a frivolous lawsuit that is unlikely to prevail. There\u2019s a hearing on that Oct. 24.<\/p>\n

The city is floundering on this point. And Michael Zucchet, the general manager of the largest union of city employees, MEA, has lost patience. He thinks the city should not have fought his and the library and parks\u2019 supporters\u2019 initiative to raise the parcel tax. The city could have done exactly what LAFCO did and overruled the registrar on its petty invalidation of the misspellings.<\/p>\n

And he remains disappointed in the Registrar of Voters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s amazing to me that the court had to tell them this,\u201d he said. He described how, when their initiative\u2019s signatures were disqualified, the registrar\u2019s staff very helpfully went through each signature that it threw out.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone\u00a0 in room had our mouths on the floor about what they were doing on this issue,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were looking at someone\u2019s registration, knowing exactly who they are and knowing the spirit of law, which is simply \u2018Is there enough there to determine if this is a registered voter?\u2019 Yet they would say no we can\u2019t do approve this one because two letters are reversed.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said they begged the city clerk and city attorney to see the logic and to not disenfranchise those voters and they would not contradict the registrar.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe obvious will of the voters took a back seat to a hyper, hyper technical, almost OCD interpretation of the rules,\u201d Zucchet said.<\/p>\n

Why it matters: It\u2019s a significant change that will make initiatives easier to qualify. However, it\u2019s also now unclear how many of the high profile signature catastrophes over the last 20 years may have happened not just because of the signature-gathering incompetence of supporters and their hired contractors but because voter will took a back seat.<\/p>\n

Remember in August 2018 when, after a frenzied effort to raise money and collect signatures for the Convention Center expansion and a hotel-room tax increase, the Registrar of Voters informed supporters that they had come up short. Would that have been different?<\/p>\n

In 2010, the City Councilmember Carl DeMaio came up short on signatures to facilitate outsourcing city services. Earlier, an effort to redesign the governance of the San Diego Unified School District came up short. For years, it seemed like San Diegans were uniquely terrible at qualifying ballot measures.<\/p>\n

Or maybe, the registrar was uniquely strict. And now it has changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This post first appeared in the Politics Report. That\u2019s our member-exclusive newsletter. Get it in your inbox by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[13,2807,74,76,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-1968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-politics","9":"tag-public-matters","10":"tag-san-diego","11":"tag-san-diego-headlines","12":"tag-san-diego-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}