Disturbed
by low and declining voter participation rates in California, Alex Padilla, the
state’s Secretary of State and thus its chief election officer, has launched a
campaign to make voting easier and more convenient, in hopes that California
can reproduce the higher voting rates in Colorado, which recently instituted
reforms similar to those being proposed for California by the Secretary of
State.
Padilla is
pursuing this goal by means of SB 450, a bill he is sponsoring in the
California legislature. This bill is
authored by Ben Allen from Santa Monica (co-authored by California State Senator Robert M. Hertzberg), and includes provisions replacing
traditional polling places with “vote centers” throughout each county, where
voters could go to cast their ballots.
It would expand early voting to the ten days prior to the
election.
The
Secretary of State is also a sponsor of AB 1461, a bill from Assemblymember
Lorena Gonzalez that would replace the current “opt-in” voting system with an “opt-out”
one that would involve the transmission of driver license information from the
Department of Motor Vehicles to the Office of the Secretary of State, which
would mail postcards to unregistered voters, giving them the chance to opt-out
of automatically being registered to vote.
If they don’t reply to this notice within 21 days, they will be
automatically registered, as the default result.
Padilla is
not a sponsor of a separate-but-related bill, SB 163, authored by California
State Senator Robert M. Hertzberg, which recently was passed by the California
State Senate and would require providing all registered California voters in
Los Angeles County with mail-in/absentee ballots.
Sam
Mahood, press spokesperson for Secretary of State Padilla, told Etopia News that
there shouldn’t be any problems caused by the intersection of SB 163 and SB
450, since by the time they would go into effect election officials will be
able to prevent double voting by people by mail and also in-person because the
long-awaited VoteCal real-time voter registration and voting system will make
that impossible.
Asked if things had gotten so desperate in terms of trying to find ways to increase voter turnout that there had been discussion of allowing remote Internet voting in California, Mr. Mahood replied tersely, "not in this office."
Asked if things had gotten so desperate in terms of trying to find ways to increase voter turnout that there had been discussion of allowing remote Internet voting in California, Mr. Mahood replied tersely, "not in this office."
1 comment:
well said.
hope it goes through!
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