Assembly Standing Committee on Elections

Good afternoon and welcome to this informational hearing of the Assembly Actions Committee on the topic of Voter Participation and Engagement, strategies for bridging gaps and ensuring accurate registration. Before we get into the substance of this hearing, I have a few housekeeping announcements to make. In order to facilitate the goal of hearing as much from the public within our time limits, we will not tolerate conduct that disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of the committee's proceedings.

Please be aware that violation of these rules may subject you to removal or other enforcement actions. We have a number of excellent witnesses on today's agenda, and after the committee hears from these witnesses, there will be time for public testimony. In order to ensure that the committee is able to complete our business in the allocated time and to hear from as many people as possible, public testimony will be limited as follows.

We have set aside 30 minutes for public comment, starting with the Members of the public who are here in the room. Each person will have 1 minute to make your remarks and if your point has already been made by another speaker, please just state your name, organization, and a me too. Members of the public are also encouraged to submit written testimony to the Committee, and this written testimony will become part of the official record of this hearing.

For those who are watching this hearing remotely and who wish to call in to speak during the public testimony portion of the hearing, the call in number is 877-692-8957 and the access code is 131-5437 you can also find this number on the Committee's website as well as on your TV or computer screen. I will repeat this call in information once we get to the public testimony portion of the hearing.

And if you're having problems with the moderated phone service, you can always call the Assembly Elections Committee at 916-319-2094 and my coworkers will be there to try to help. Thank you for bearing with us as we implement methods to continue to serve the people of California. With all these announcements out of the way, let's move on to the topic of today's hearing.

Over the last decade, California has taken numerous steps to try to improve voter registration and participation rates and to build an electorate that better reflects the diversity of the state's eligible voters. And while officials in other states have gone out of their way to make it more difficult for people to vote, the California Legislature has been leading the way in adopting proposals designed to remove barriers to participation.

There is evidence that some of the state's recent electoral reforms have improved voter turnout and reduced participation disparities but elections in California nonetheless continue to have significant voter participation gaps. In particular, communities of color, immigrants, people with disabilities, young individuals, and lower income communities tend to be significantly underrepresented in the electorate. We are fortunate to have dozens of organizations that are doing amazing work in California to educate and mobilize voters and to try to close these participation gaps.

And while we don't have time to hear from all of them today, I'm excited that the agenda for today's hearing includes representatives from many of those organizations, along with elections officials who are dedicated to improving our elections and expanding voter participation. Today's hearing is not the start of the conversation about how California can sure robust and representative voter participation, nor will it be the end of that conversation.

Instead, it is part of a broader, ongoing conversation about how the state can continue its work to build a more inclusive democracy. So I encourage everyone who is dedicated to that work, including those who are unable to participate in today's hearing, to share your ideas about how California can continue to improve and refine its electoral process. I want to thank the witnesses that are participating in today's hearing. Also, thank you to the Members of the Committee who are supposed to be here today.

We're going to have a couple, I think, and I know those who cannot attend today's hearing. Join us in our desire to develop strategies for bridging these gaps and ensuring accurate voter registration roles. Finally, a huge thank you to the incredible elections committee staff, Ethan Jones, Nicole Becker, who's with us today, and Lori Barber for coordinating this amazing hearing today. And thank you to my coworker, Rhiannon Mulligan, my legislative aide who monitors elections issues for my office.

They were responsible for producing that amazing briefing of this hearing that captures all the election laws we've done over the last 11 years. And so since no other Members are present right now, should they come in, we might interrupt the hearing to see if they have some remarks. So we will move on to our hearing. So let's get started with our first panel. And our first panel is perspectives of current and former California elections officials.

And with us today is we have Lakenia Jordan, who's Deputy Secretary of State. Go ahead and come on forward. Office of Policy and Planning and Implementation of the Voters Choice Act. For our California Secretary of State, Dr. Shirley Weber. We have James Schwab, who's the state Director for United States Senator Alex Padilla, and former California Secretary of State.

We have Dean Logan, who's our Los Angeles County Registrar, recorder and county Clerk, and Kathy Darling Allen Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters, you each have five minutes to share your comments. Thank you for being here.

Good afternoon. Wonderful. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and Members of the Assembly Elections Committee. My name is Lakenya Jordan and I serve as Deputy Secretary of State for Policy, Planning and Implementation and the Voters' Choice Act. I am here to deliver remarks on behalf of California Secretary of State's Office and our Secretary of State, Shelby M. Weber, PhD, who is California's first African American elected Secretary of State in its 170 year history.

As the fourth largest economy in the world, the most diverse state in the nation, and the largest voting system in the country, and under the leadership of Dr. Shirley M. Weber, PhD, a leader who has always stood for everyone, for equality and everyone having a voice, California is uniquely positioned to strengthen its voting environment.

As we build upon the hard won past efforts of Secretary Padilla, our counties, the VCA task force Members and other advocates, the Secretary of State has developed a strategic vision on focusing on how to strengthen California's voting environment. Our goals are to increase voter participation to ensure safe elections, access to all eligible voters in the state, including our most hard to reach populations as defined by the US Census, and our historically disenfranchised populations.

As of now, California has 82.91% of its eligible voters registered to vote, so we are focused on ensuring access to the process through voter education outreach and supporting our diverse communities around the state. The California Voters Choice act enables counties to deliver elections in a manner that allows voters to have more days and more ways to vote. It also requires extensive voter education and engagement of the community in the development of the voter education and outreach plans and leading up to an election.

Unfortunately, despite the requirement in VCA counties to conduct education outreach, there is no sustained state level funding in the upcoming election. When it was first enacted in California, VCA only encompassed five counties. It grew to 15 counties in 2020, and when Secretary Weber took office in 2021, we had 12 additional counties join that effort. Dr. Weber has now seen that program to grow to 29 counties, which encompasses half the state and 76% of all registered voters.

So it underscores how important it is that we have these education and outreach goals, but yet no funding to support it. But, upon taking office in 2021, Secretary Weber immediately began working with the Legislature to authorize funding for VCA counties in support of education outreach requirements for VCA. In addition, Secretary Weber successfully negotiated funding for VCA education outreach for the 2021 recall election and in both the primary 2022 election and General 2022 election.

She also successfully secured additional staffing to assist with the components of research, policy, oversight, education and outreach. So VCA counties, it should be understood that they have a high level of education and outreach requirements.

Among those are to deliver two direct mailers to all 17 million of our registered voters at the cost to the county, to deliver two public service announcements and to secure 11 day vote centers and on top and probably most importantly, to engage the public in the development of their county outreach and education plans. So what's the future of VCA?

While VCA is not a panacea, the data does show that voter turnout and registration is slightly higher in VCA counties across all demographics, and voters are using VBM vote by mail as the most preferred method, whether using in a VCA County or in a traditional polling place, county and voters are increasingly using more and more the ballot dropboxes.

But still amidst of all the recent changes to voter participation laws, we can all agree that closing voter participation gaps for hard to reach communities and historically disenfranchised voters remains one of our most important and greatest challenges. These challenges existed prior to VCA and the future of whether voter participation improves for our historically disenfranchised communities and on our hard to reach communities around the state, largely depends on providing voter engagement strategies and funding for education and outreach.

The SOS has successfully worked to create partnerships through one of our new programs called the Ambassador Program, and we are working with nonpartisan organizations such as Nileo, YMCA, United Way and Altimet universities and colleges throughout the state during the 2022 election cycle. Secretary of State's office also made extensive efforts to include our hard to reach communities in the electoral process. Our office engaged in over 91 voter education and outreach events statewide.

Secretary Webb herself directly participated in 37 events and forums within communities and regions around the state, and over 9 million voters received educational emails from our communications team. We also were able to register 18,000 college students through our ballot bowl and 2000 new citizens and through our official citizens ceremony. As we previously stated, much funding is still needed for education and outreach in terms of strengthening our California's voting environment.

We will need to also include other education that includes other aspects of SOS, including our business filings, our archives and while we have some small staffing, additional staffing is needed to continue to partner throughout the state. So that being said, we also want to talk about our VCA reports and some of the advances we made that we think will also be inclusive in advancing how we include our hard to reach communities.

The University of California's Voting Rights Project has provided analysis through recent studies that now brings the visibility to historically disenfranchised communities of color, including African American populations, Native American populations, and then also white voters. But in addition to that, we have disaggregated AAPI populations now visible.

30 more seconds. Sorry.

Thank you. Well, let me close with the task force. I'll close with that. So the Secretary of State's office is currently working on administratively establishing the Task force again, which will include county election officials, language advocates, advocates from the disability community, and others. We believe the task force can assist with key areas such as making recommendations to file to our voter file and helping us overcome challenges such as those engaging the hard to reach populations around the state. And I think I'll end there.

But thank you for your time.

Thank you so much for being here. We do have our Vice Chair, Assembly Member Lackey, who came in. I want to give him a couple of minutes to say a few words as well.

Sure.

I don't even think it'll take a couple of minutes. Just want to say when we're not in session, there's a lot of demand on legislators time. And so I know we don't have a full Committee here because there's just a lot of decisions that have to be made, and prioritizing is part of our responsibility. But I will tell you that there are very few things in our process, in our governance process that are more critical than elections.

And hopefully, that's the reflection of the voice of the people. That's the design of our system. And so I consider this not only a privilege, but a responsibility to do everything in my power to make sure that these elections reflect the will of the people. That's the intention, and that's what makes our governance system more successful than many of the other governance systems around the world. So very, very thankful for this privilege.

I consider it a responsibility that I do take very serious, and I'm very thankful to be here. And sorry I was a few minutes late.

Thank you so much for being here today. We'll go to our next speaker. Did you pick out an order, James?

Okay.

All right.

Here we go.

Thank you, Chair Pellerin and Vice Chair Lackey, for the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm James Schwab, state Director for us, Senator Alex Padilla, and have been with the Senator since his State Senate days and have led his voting rights agenda since 2012. During our time, we've had a simple premise. Our democracy is strongest when the most people participate. Participation is more than just voting. It's writing your elected officials.

It's attending school Board Meetings, volunteering in your community, and it's running for office or applying for boards and commissions. But underlying all that is our fundamental right to vote, the foundation of our democracy. Which is why it is so important that we, as stewards of our democracy, do all we can to encourage participation in voting. In 2014, the year Senator Padilla was elected Secretary of State, voter turnout was at its lowest since World War II.

At that time, California was far behind in adopting nationally recognized voting reforms. Even the Pew Center's Election Performance Index indicated that California ranked near the bottom for a variety of measures, including voter registration and turnout. The silver lining to 2014 is that it shone a light on the need for reform, and California rose to the occasion and adopted nearly every nationally recognized voting reform. And many of the smaller ones, even ballot selfies were legalized. But from automatic voter registration vote centers, universal vote by mail.

We've adopted many, many of the forms. But I also want to underscore and point out that all this was possible because of a collaborative approach made possible by an organization called the Future of California Elections, FOS, which is comprised of election officials, civil rights organizations and community groups. FOS was able to bring down long standing barriers, not just between election officials and advocates, but between election officials and between advocates.

Not everyone agreed on what was the right approach and how to do it right, especially among the 58 counties and especially among civil rights groups and community organizations. But FOS was able to bring those down, find common ground, find common understanding of what voters and election officials needed, and address that. So again, collaboration is key success in addressing the voting gap. It's one thing to pass a law requiring same day registration.

It's another one to figure out how each of California's unique counties will implement it and how 25 million eligible voters will interact with it. Collaborative implementation of our election laws was tough, oftentimes frustrating, but in the end, was worth it to ensure the best possible voting experience for Californians. This approach to voting reforms had two themes running through them. One was to modernize election laws to fit today's society, and two, meet voters where they're at. I'll give one example.

One of our early conversations was with Orange County Registrar Neil Kelly. And if you know Neil, he was a big data geek, and he had been tracking changes to voter behavior to better understand how to best utilize the limited resources to best serve his voters. County election officials are often the last to be funded with local, state and federal funding.

Neil saw that more and more voters were choosing to vote by mail and choosing to drop off their vote by mail ballot at polling places close to their work, close to their kids'school, or where they shopped. And voters who were casting ballots in person were more and more likely to choose any polling place that was close to where they happened to be, leading to an increase in provisional ballots. The voters were telling Neil that through their behavior, that that voting system wasn't working for them.

And that was one of the big reasons, one big data points. We used to push for forms like the Voters' Choice Act. So these reforms were adopted not only to empower voters, but to ensure election officials could effectively use their limited resources to serve voters. I believe California has succeeded in bringing down many of the legal barriers to voting.

I think a few of the big ones I'll highlight very quickly that could continue to be worked on is expanding automatic voter registration to more NVRA agencies, expanding mobile voting, whose success has been demonstrated by Elliott County and Dean Logan, expanding the use of ballot tracks, and, as mentioned by La Kenya, ongoing funding for voter education. Despite all our successes in bringing down legal barriers over the past decade, California has yet to address the other reasons eligible voters don't vote.

The reasons behind voter turnout are complex and difficult to understand. If any of us truly understood how to turn out voters, we'd be making a fortune as campaign consultants. Let's look at the 2020 presidential election. That year, we saw the highest voter turnout in any presidential election in terms of sheer numbers, and the highest percentage since 1960. California, for the first time in 25 years, beat the national average in turnout, which also happened to coincide with the same year.

We spent $35 million educating voters about how and when to vote. We can guess why there was such a spike, the amount of media and social media attention, the money spent by campaigns engaging voters, and the energy both candidates brought to their supporters. The 2020 election was also the most expensive election in terms of candidate spending, $14 billion. But despite the successive turnout, despite all the money spent, despite the energy and motivation of so many voters, 80 million eligible Americans did not vote.

80 million, including 7 million Californians. Let's celebrate our achievement, but recognize there's still much work to be done.

30 seconds.

30 seconds. So what are the voters telling us now? If you look at surveys of people who don't vote, there's kind of two buckets. There's, I'll say, the legal reasons, they're not registered to vote. They didn't know where to vote. And then there's what I'll call motivational reasons. Right? And one of the surveys done after the 2020 election about one third of voters cited a legal reason. Two thirds of voters cited a motivational reason. They weren't interested. They didn't like the candidates.

They didn't think their vote made a difference. So the voters are telling us that something is wrong, something is broken, and so mores need to be done. This is the next chapter in expanding the electorate and encouraging voting. Research, discussion and collaboration must go into identifying policies and efforts to reach our citizens who are not participating. Maybe it's civic education, social media, or more engagement in our communities to turn out and close those gaps.

If we can put the same effort into resource and resources into modernizing our elections and how they're run, we can surely solve the problem of disengagement from voting. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Dean Logan next. Thank you.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Chair Pellerin and Vice Chair Lackey. It's good to be here. Thank you for holding this hearing today on such a timely and important topic. I am Dean Logan. I'm the Registrar Recorder County Clerk for Los Angeles County.

As articulated in your hearing overview and in the opening testimony this afternoon, California has established a strong foundation to support free and fair elections, to encourage and facilitate voter registration and participation, and to support a voter centered approach to when, where and how elections are administered. We know, and the data shows, that structure and policy alone will not bridge the gaps being discussed today. Voter participation stems from intrinsic motivation influenced by more than the time, place and equipment used for voting.

It relies on civic education, trusted messengers, partnerships with advocacy organizations, transparency and consistency. And it's eroded by cynicism, lack of access, confusion and controversy. Our role as election administrators is to ensure that once that motivation is achieved, there are no barriers to participation and that we deliver a voting experience that conveys the significance and the power of the vote.

As I'm sure you are aware, the nature, integrity and structure of our electoral process are under tremendous scrutiny as we navigate political discourse, respond to the continuing after effects of a global pandemic, secure against cyberattacks, respond to missed diss and mal information, and embrace the changing needs of our electorate. The role of election administrators and the expectations placed upon them are more visible, demanding and threatened than at any time in recent history.

That said, I believe it is the strength of the statutory foundation established by this legislative body that ensures our ability to respond and to focus efforts and resources on programs and activities that provide access to voter registration and voting for all who are eligible in California. Los Angeles County is the largest and most diverse election jurisdiction in the country, with over 10 million residents and 5.6 million registered voters from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures, and communities.

We serve an electorate with large populations of non or limited English speakers, voters with disabilities, and communities in large, dense urban centers, as well as those in rural, geographically isolated areas. Over a decade ago, we embarked on an unprecedented effort to design, engineer, manufacture, and implement the first publicly owned voting system in the United States, an initiative we identified as voting solutions for all people.

Through that effort, we reimagined the voting experience, transformed the commercial voting systems marketplace, and stretched the reins of our regulatory environment by setting a new standard for voting system design that prioritizes usability, security, and accessibility. Most voters in Los Angeles County today use a vote by mail ballot, but how they interact with that resource differs across demographics, so the need for options and customization are critically important. The availability of secure dropboxes, ballot tracking tools, and signature verification applications are examples.

We offer vote centers where any voter in the county can vote in person for up to 10 days at any location and where voters can access a broad range of accessible services that offer an independent, secure, and private voting experience and that provide customizable language assistance through our audio ballot and multilingual ballot display options. We also operate mobile vote centers and flex vote centers to complement traditional voting locations.

Mobile vote centers are deployed in high trafficked areas such as sporting events, community events, college campuses, and employment centers. Flex Vote centers are similar but smaller, and they're used to bring voting services directly to historically vulnerable communities such as language, minorities, justice, involved individuals, seniors, people experiencing homelessness, voters with disabilities, and geographically isolated voters. Our mobile and Flex Vote centers rely on the community partners to identify and serve their communities.

Los Angeles County also supports a comprehensive voter education and outreach campaign to accommodate and engage voters in their preferred language. Our voter education and outreach campaigns are designed with a commitment to in language support. The Department crafts and implements an inclusive program built on maximizing every dollar spent and utilizing impact tactics through paid advertising, community based outreach, and partnerships with hyperlocal and ethnic news media.

Today, our voting systems in Los Angeles County are comprehensive, scalable, and component based, covering all elements of the voting and vote counting process, but maintaining those systems and supporting the associated services requires consistent, ongoing, and reliable funding.

Efficiencies gained in automating the voter registration process in California have allowed us to redirect resources previously used to manually process voter registration applications and to use those for enhanced voter outreach and education programs, and the infusion of state and federal funding in 2000 and 2022 helped significantly with visibility, accessibility, and security. The loss of that funding leading into the 2024 election cycle puts at risk the successes achieved by the policy and structural foundation that was established by this legislative body.

As a field of professionals in elections Administration, we are entrusted to facilitate voters access and ability to cast a vote and to have a confidence in that vote's impact. But the process, the outcomes and the legitimacy of elections do not belong to us. Rather, they belong to the voters whom those systems give voice, influence and power. We must never lose sight of that.

30 seconds.

Thank you again for holding this hearing and for raising awareness around the complexity and importance of voter participation and sustainable support for election Administration in California.

Thank you, Mr. Logan. That was great. And we'll now turn to our registrar voters in Shasta County, Kathy Darling thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, Honorable Assembly Members and voters. My name is Kathy Darling Allen. I am the five times elected County Clerk and Registrar of Voters in Shasta County, California. I'm also the chair of the board for the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit that has worked on behalf of all California voters for over 25 years here in Sacramento. It is my great honor to serve the voters of the great State of California, my community, and to be with you all here today.

Unlike other testimony you may hear today, my perspective is not focused on closing the gaps in participation based on demographic information, but rather on the expanding gap in participation that can be directly tied to myths and disinformation which is interfering with the rights of voters in California to both register and cast votes. This is a significant problem that I see in my community, and I believe it is occurring in other rural counties in California.

Chester County has been in the news quite a lot this year, mainly due to a series of ill advised decisions made by our Board of Supervisors. In January, they voted to terminate the voting system contract held by the county. Soon after, they began to advocate for a hand count scheme that they stated would address the concerns they had.

Later this year, they made decisions questionable enough in other sectors that a Sacramento B editorial recently called for the state to take over governance of the county in order to protect the citizens. There are ongoing active efforts in our county that have the effect of discouraging voters from showing up.

These efforts come from Members of the community, but unfortunately they are also coming from inside our county administration and they involve chaotic Board Meetings and multiple statements by the chair of our Board of Supervisors directly to the media. Most recently, he told a national media outlet that fraud has been present in Shasta county elections for decades. This is, of course, a categorically false allegation but unfortunately, he is hardly alone in advancing this false narrative.

I believe it is a coordinated attack to continue the very effective, relentless negative messaging that continues to undermine every voter's confidence in the process across the nation. I believe that deliberately spreading false information about elections and how they are conducted in California is a dangerous and destructive effort to dissuade all voters from having their voices heard. Voters are hearing this message from candidates and elected officials at all level in California's rural communities, from presidential candidates all the way down to school board.

It is past time that California's elected officials stand up and call out these efforts in a nonpartisan and measured way so that all voters can cast their vote with confidence. Armed with the knowledge that local election officials around California and the country are ready to facilitate and administer elections during the 24 cycle, we are ready to do so with staffs of amazing public servants behind us who are ready and willing to defend the process and every vote cast.

Most importantly, they stand at the ready to serve every voter in California. We also need the help and the support of the Legislature to continue to do this work, especially in the increasingly dangerous environment we are working in. Late last week, I had line staff ordering and researching how to use Narcan in order to safely process potentially contaminated mail that contain ballots. We are squarely in harm's way without reasonable compensation, time to complete effective training or experience to support our staff.

My office has been fighting this fight for the past three years, since 2020 and the false allegations of a rigged General election in November of that year. More recently, we have been accused of lying, committing fraud, and assorted other crimes by other elected leaders within the community. Just as we see at the federal level, there is no truth to these allegations, no criminal charges, no data, no proof is presented.

But the tactic of repeating the same false information seems to be working and dissuading voters from showing up to vote. The goal seems to be to dissuade voters from casting their ballots, their trust in the results, and their trust in democracy. Either way, governance and my constituents suffer another contributing factor that results in reduced voter participation is the overly complex nature of election Administration in California.

This makes it harder to talk about and makes it harder for new voters to know all the nuances and layers of requirements involved in casting a ballot. We try to facilitate this for voters by mailing each one a ballot. But voters have a lot of questions, and even if the detail they are wondering about is included in the Voter information Guide we send to voters, they may not find it.

I do not pretend to have an answer for this dilemma, but failing to understand how everything works can be a barrier to participation for all California voters. While we've been going through a challenging period in Shasta County, we have felt very helpful support from within the election community. A letter was sent to our board from a group of advocate organizations, many of whom are represented here today by folks on the agenda. We are so grateful for their attention and advocacy.

The separate letter and support from Secretary of State Dr. Shirley Weber was so very helpful and appreciated as well. Sometimes it feels like we are alone on an island protecting the voters in Shasta County. It is always a good day when we are reminded that we are not alone in that effort. Whatever the reason, rural counties seem to be seeing a larger prevalence of this kind of manipulation of the public and discouragement of voter participation.

The size of these counties also means we need more support and resources. We just don't have the depth of staff and experience that larger counties may have. Voters in every county in California need the support of the Legislature, and I'm extremely grateful that our voters are protected by AB 969. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm just really grateful for your work and being on the front lines of this war on democracy. So thank you so much for your time and your comments today. I think we're going to move on to our next panel. So our next panel is understanding California's voter participation gap and recent research that has been done. And we have with us today Mindy Romero, who is the founder and Director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California.

Where shall I sit? Right there, front and center. zero, do you have the screen that you're okay? Do I have a clicker? That's a good question. Okay, I'll just ask you to click. Okay. All right. This is going to be challenging for my eyes, but I can do. It's.

Okay, great. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. Chair, Assembly Member Pellerin, Committee Members. Nicole, thank you very much for having me here today. I will go ahead and jump in because I have a lot to cover in a small amount of time. So as you know, of course, we are here today to talk about voter participation, nation gaps, and I'm going to specifically focus in on the research, the data, what we know from a data perspective and what we don't know from a data perspective.

Next slide. So, spoiler alert, no surprise to anybody in this room, but the essential punchline, right, bottom line of my talk today is that we don't have a representative voting electorate in California. And here I mean specifically numerically represented.

So the pie of actual voters, those casting a ballot at any given election, whether it's high turnout, low turnout, midterm, general primary, we know that the demographic makeup of that pie of voters does not look like the demographic makeup of the State of California, total population or its eligible voter population. It is always older, wealthier, whiter. Next slide. Okay, so what I'm going to talk about here first is a little bit about data challenges.

So there are limitations in the data sources that we have available to us in our state, and very much so impact just what we fully understand. We do not have a fully inclusive understanding of just how deep the disparities are in participation because we don't have everyone's data represented.

So I'll talk a little bit about that and then I'll talk about, from what we do know in terms of research and data, the current registration and turnout disparities in the state, and then a little bit about actual voter representation, that comparison of share to population. Next, please. Might slow me down a little bit here without the clicker. So just focusing in on race ethnicity, largely just because of time today. So a multiracial democracy, a representative democracy, or voting electorate requires inclusive and reliable data.

So data sources, as I mentioned, are limited. Two main data sources that we use that are available to anyone is the current population survey, which is a product of the US Census. It's a November supplement. It is, though, as it says, it's a survey. So it's limited in terms of its sample size. So we cannot use it essentially, for the most part, below a state level.

So if you want to do analysis at a county level, a precinct level, a jurisdiction level, you're not able to use the current population survey data. And at whatever level, it has significant methodological challenges in identifying voters of color in California and across the nation. It is a viable, well used source for kind of consistently applied methods over time to compare California data to other states, for instance. But it has challenges in terms of voters of color.

And certainly, again, if you want to do anything with sub-state, what do you use? Most researchers will use the California voter file, and that's a 22 million or so registered voter file that we're familiar with. We are able to do a substate analysis, but identifying race ethnicity in the California voter file is challenging. And that means that we have a limited set of research. Right. Available data.

And research that's available to it is not only can we use it at a substate level, because it's the actual voter file. Right, people down to the individual level, but it's the only data source that provides a person's voting behavior, their history, their ballot type, whether they're a ballot, whether they cast a vote by mail or in person, if it was rejected, for what reason? So there's a rich amount of data that we need the voter file for.

And as I mentioned, the race ethnicity, though, is difficult. So why is that so? Californians are not required to submit their race or ethnicity when they register to vote. We are a voluntary state. They can volunteer that information. Only about 28% of our voter file in California has a record that somebody has volunteered in terms of their race ethnicity. It used to be a lot less. Now it's 28%, but it's nowhere near what we need it to be. And that 28%.

And there's reasons why we've increased over recent years. But largely that 28% is not representative. It's not a representative sample, for instance. And there are differences in that population compared to everyone else. So, for instance, voter turnout rates are a little bit different. That population skews younger. It's overwhelmingly registered through online voter registration. So for a variety of reasons I won't get into fully today, that population is not enough to be able to speak about the rest of the population in California.

So researchers have to go through other methods. The most common methods that we use to identify race ethnicity is that we're using imputation. It's essentially statistically guessing. A researcher will tell you this. We are trying to, with probabilities, estimate the likelihood of somebody's race or ethnicity, right. And assign it to them in the voter file. Next, please. How do we do that? We do that through Bayesian, generally speaking, through Bayesian methods, different tweaks on that BISG and so forth. But essentially, we're using two main forms.

One is or two main steps. One is to identify through surname matching, and the other is to use census population data down to the census track or census block level. So the proportion of ethnicity in a given population. So this is pretty reliable for Latinos, a little less reliable for Asian Americans, but commonly used. It is incredibly challenging for Black voters, for Asian American subgroups and other groups in California. And why Black voters?

Black voters are a very large number, about 1.8 million eligible voters, but proportionally small, only about six and a half percent of the population and very distributed. So out of our 9000 census tracks, only about 45 of them actually have a majority black population. So it's difficult to use surname matching, for the most part for the black population.

If you use some form of geocoding, by saysing and modeling predictions, you are then now using census data where you have an overwhelmingly situation where if you try to predict based on the population distribution, you're going to probably have a lot of misallocation. Right. So that's why we don't see a lot of data for black voters.

It is possible in some areas in the state where the population is higher, it is possible to identify black voters depending on, and use it comfortably and confidently, depending on what you're trying to do research wise or campaign wise. But for a lot of research questions, we want to hopefully do no harm as researchers, and we don't want to misidentify, if that makes sense. Same thing for Asian American subgroups. And then I was talking about an inclusive electorate.

So basically all other smaller size, if you will, population groups. Incredibly challenging. Right. To identify. Next. Okay, so that being said, let's talk about some of the data that we do have and what we know. So registration rates here. I'm going to use the voter file, California voter file. Okay, so what was the registration rate? I'll ask the Committee here in California's 2022 General election and registration rate is, of course, the percent of those who are eligible to register, adult citizens who are actually registered.

I see you looking ahead on your notes. Anyone for time? I'll cut to it. 83.0. You got it? Yeah, exactly 83.3%. Very similar to the rate today. Right, next slide. But we'll look at rates of the city. Just breaking it down right here with the data that we do have. You can't see in the back, so it'll slow me down a little bit. I apologize. But the blue bar is Asian American, the red bar is Latino. Blue Bar says 71, almost 72% registration rate.

And Latino is about 71% registration rate. So significantly lower than the 83% for everybody else. We have seen increased registration rates in the last decade in California. Right. Good news. Much celebrated. Everyone has increased. Again, for the data that we have, the populations that we know of, everyone's increased in terms of their registration rates, but the gaps, the disparities across groups have remained largely the same. Very close, very similar. So everyone's increased, but the gaps are staying about the same. Does that make sense?

I hope so. Next slide, please. By age, the exception is for young voters. For age 18 to 24 year old voters, they have gained on older voters a little bit. So it's still much lower. You can't see in the back, but that's about 69%. I can't see my own eyes, but much lower. The blue bar is much lower. Each of those bars represents an age group. The gap has narrowed a little bit between old and young over the last decade.

That's good news, but still quite significantly lower. Next, please. Okay, now we're going to talk about turnout. So there are two ways to measure turnout. How you define it really matters. So there's registered voter turnout, and then there's eligible voter turnout. Registered voter turnout is the percent of those who are registered to vote who actually turned out to vote in a given election. Eligible voter turnout is a different denominator.

It's the percent of those who are eligible to vote, adult citizens largely, who turned out to vote, whether they're registered or not. Registered voter turnout. You'll see, of course, election officials report that a lot. Media will report that a lot. But because of those. Well, for many reasons, but probably first among them because of those registration disparities that I just talked about. We really urge people to use, wherever possible, eligible voter turnout.

If you're interested in representation, if you're interested in gaps right across groups, for example, you could have a high registered voter turnout rate by a particular group in a given community, but their registration rate was really Low. So actually not that many high registered voter turnout rate, but the registration is really low. So actually not that many people are voting. So if you really want to understand kind of capacity and how many people are engaged and involved, you look at eligible voter turnout.

Okay, here's some turnout numbers, and I'm calling them preliminary just because we're still waiting on some additional population, updated population data, but they're going to stay very similar. Next, please. Sorry, I feel so rude just pointing at you. You'll forgive me. What was the eligible voter turnout again? That's a percent in California's 2022 General election. Anyone? You can cheat? 42.3%?

Yes. Excellent. Please. She beats you. Okay, so 42.3%. Now, what I'm showing you is just over time. So on the far right is that same number. That's a 2022. In the Green. In the Green Bar, 2022 General election, 42.3%. What I want to show you is in the General has already been mentioned, we had the highest turnout in the 2020 General election that we saw in decades in this state. Right. For all the reasons that Director Schwab mentioned.

But we want to compare comparable elections, midterms to midterms, presidentials to presidentials. Midterms are always lower than presidentials. And you can see quite a good size drop off from the 2018 midterm, from 47, almost 48%, if you can't see in the back, of course, down to 42.3%. Next, please. Now we're going to focus. Stay now back on the 2022 General election. On the far right, is that 42.3% that I mentioned in gold now, and let's look at what it is for Asian American and Latino.

Much lower. So we're looking at 33, 23%, right. That's the blue and the red, much lower. So 10 to 20 percentage points lower than the overall turnout rate, eligible voter turnout rate. And if I broke that out for everybody who was non Latino, non Asian, which in our state is largely white, it's much higher. It's usually at least 10 percentage points higher. Next, please. Okay, now, I was going to tell you, don't look at the numbers too closely, but you can't see them anyway.

Their point of this slide is to give you a sense of just going back a few elections, of the disparity story. So bear with me. On the right are the numbers I just showed you, 2022 General election. The blue, the red, and the gold highlighted there for consistency is the 42.3%. Right. What I'm showing you left of that are the same numbers for Latino, Asian American and the total population. But for 20, 16, 20, 18, 20, 20.

And what you'll see is, even though the numbers differ some, the disparity story is very similar. It is entrenched. I could go back 20 years. I could go back 30 years if I had the data, 40 years and so forth. Latino, Asian American. We know other groups as well, but consistently with this data, we can show much lower turnout, regardless of the type of election. Next, please.

And four time, just really quickly, this is really to have in your packets, Committee Members, is just to emphasize, these are state level numbers. But again, variation across the state, much lower turnout. This is for the total population. Eligible voter turnout in the 2022 General election, same election we've been looking at. Much lower turnout in that orange in the Central Valley and southern parts of the state, some northern parts of the state, the same scale. Next one, please. The lowest turnout category for Latinos.

This is a Latino eligible turnout rate in each county across the state. It's all red. That's the lowest category. Again, if you could see this, it was bigger. Next, please, for time. Same thing for Asian American. Eligible voter turnout rate. Again, the lowest or the second lowest category. Right. Next, please. Okay, now let's talk about black voter turnout as we have it from the current population survey. So I talked about the challenges identifying black voters for research purposes.

Some of it is certainly appropriate for some research questions, some of the types of analysis that is done for outreach and mobilization, campaign work. But for research purposes, it's really challenging. Right. To reliably identify black voters out of the voter file. I want to make sure that distinction is clear, but we can use the current population survey data from the census that I mentioned at the outset. That's the one that if it's a survey, the sample size isn't big enough for a substate analysis.

But at least we have California. We can compare California across the country, but it has methodological issues. And so we always caution people when you look at it, to know that the numbers might not be quite right for voters of color. But it's still data that we can talk about and compare. Next, please. So here, just to emphasize the turnout gap, using this data source, again, very commonly used, the turnout gap is significant between black and white voters. It's been widening in California.

So according to the CPS current Population survey data, in the 2020 General election, 64% of black eligible voters, again, that's adult citizens, cast a ballot, 64%, but their number for white voters was 74.5%. So that's a 10.5 percentage point difference between white and black in the 2020 General election and again, increased over the last few elections. This chart here is just visualizing what I showed you. So the green is white. That's at 74.5%. This is the 2020 General election.

The light blue at the end on the far left is black. 64. So again, 10 percentage point gap. And then to show you by this measure, Latino and Asian American, also lower. Next, please. And then 2022. Again, similar story in the sense that the gap between white and black. And here. Sorry. The colors, I think, might change a little bit.

But black is red, white is green, and for the 2022, a midterm year, 43 to 62, still almost a 20 percentage point gap there in a midterm. What I want to show you is the difference between Asian American, black, and Latino. They're very similar here for a midterm. Right. And whenever you look at data, when we do have data for black voters, it is really important to understand the differences across election type. So sometimes black voters can have higher turnout, the gaps can be smaller sometimes.

I'm very over generalizing right now in a presidential General election, but the gaps will be larger in a midterm election or a primary or a special election. So if you're looking and trying to understand trends in turnout for black voters, the type of election matters even more. Does that make sense? Hopefully that makes sense. Next, please. Okay.

For time, I won't cover this, but we did put out a report last year looking, using the voter file and looking at black communities because we felt, with the data there, again, higher population, more reliable. Right. In identifying black voters through those Bayesian modeling. And it highlights some of those distinctions that we talked about in terms of differences in black communities having higher turnout in some cases, than white voters and so forth.

So I won't talk about it now, but if you're interested, go to our website again, details really matter here. The next one, please, because I know I'm taking longer than I'm supposed to. Next, please. Okay. Voter representation. So just really quickly talking about the pie of actual voters versus the pie of the population. Next, please. On the left, just looking for Latino, Asian American. Really quickly. On the left, we have numbers for Asian American.

The blue bar says that 13.7% in the 2022 General election, 13.7% of the eligible voter adult citizen population was Asian American. But because of those disparities in turnout that I discussed, right. It means that you have gaps in turnout, means that you have gaps in representation in actual share of the. Of the vote versus share of the population. So in this case, 13.7% of the eligible voter population is Asian American.

But only 10.5% of the actual voters casting a ballot in the 2022 General election is Asian. Sorry? Is Asian American. So there's a gap there, right? Numerically represented, it should be about the same. Some people might want to see it higher, but it should be about the same to be numerically represented. We have a gap for Latinos even larger. 31% of the eligible voter population in the state was Latino in that election 2022, but only 17% of actual voters casting a ballot. Right.

So a significant disparity story, a significant representation difference. Right. Next, please. So why solo? I know there's going to be panels later today to talk about this. I'm just going to plate some bullet points and then be done. And you can't read them anyway. So again, for time, just disparities in registration, as I've already mentioned, disparities and significant disparities in outreach and mobilization that are present. We have lots of data that tells us that voters of color, young voters, voters that have lower turnout rates. Right.

Historically, are much less likely to get contacted by a campaign or a candidate or even election officials. Right. For a variety of reasons, historic and current disconnection from the political process, demographics, we often see a compounding where we see groups that are in, voters of color, for instance, can find themselves in multiple categories that predict lower turnout. Right. Lower income of color and so forth, renters. And you have a compounding effect. It can make it even more challenging. And, of course, turnout is lower in primaries.

But what I want to emphasize here, James put it really well earlier, is we have to still make it even easier for people to vote, but we also have to make people want to vote. It's the motivation question. But what I really want to emphasize, if I may, is when we say motivation, it almost sounds like people not caring. Right. Like apathy when we talk about these numbers. Or if you look at these numbers later, please know this is not about right.

These historic entrenchment of disparities isn't a story of groups being apathetic or not caring. It's a story, of course, of our electoral system, historically and currently today, that has not supported these groups right. And made it harder to vote and also make it harder to sell the importance of voting, including it right. Not getting the outreach and mobilization right that helps make that connection. So it's not about apathy, and it really is both elements. Right.

In supporting voters to change some of these numbers, to really eventually, hopefully see a representative electorate. And there. So I don't know how much time I have left in the Q A portion, but I thank you.

This was amazing. And your PowerPoint has a lot of great data. And I just asked Nicole if we're going to make sure we'll post that on the Elections website as well. Elections Committee. So, yes, I do have a question. So, our recent policy changes here in California have greatly transformed California's elections and how people participate.

But it's hard to measure the effects of these policy changes and I'm just wondering, based on your research, are there any recent reforms that have had a measurable effect on participation overall, on the participation gaps?

Yeah. Vote by mail. Some research that we've done through my center, and then also in partnership with Eric Mckee over at the Public Policy Institute of California, we've identified in California and nationwide, California's version, universal vote by mail, by automatically mailing everybody a vote by mail ballot. We found, at least in 2020 for sure, that three percentage point increase, that may not sound like a lot, but in research on voter turnout, three percentage points is actually quite substantial. Yeah.

Do you have any questions for the speaker, Mr. Lucky?

I don't have any questions, but I just have some perspective that I think it's worthy of thought that the reason people vote on issues and the reason they don't vote on issues is often hard to determine. And I think that data is valuable, but it can also be misleading. So it depends on what we do with that data and how we interpret the data.

Absolutely.

I think that your perspective is well taken, but I think that there may be some seasoning in there and some debatable conclusions that were drawn, is all I have to say.

Well, and I'm giving you 10 minutes, of course. And the nuance does matter, very much so. But the nuance typically, though, just helps us a more complete conversation, a more complete study. Those sorts of things allow us to better understand why these numbers are as Low as they are, why disparities are entrenched. But today was obviously a quick, and I appreciate it. Yeah.

Thank you so much for your time today. And you have a great website as well that has all the data you've collected and all the research you've done over the years, right?

Yes. And since you're asking, we also have a data tool on our website that we've mapped every inch of California, every county, down to the precinct census track level. You can look at turnout, you can look at vote by mail rates, you can look at population information, limited English proficiency, disability population, all sorts of data to help with understanding communities, understanding past trends and history, hopefully used for nonpartisan outreach and mobilization efforts by election officials as well as community groups.

And it also gives suggestions on equitable siding of voting locations. Great.

And I believe that's in our hearing overview that was prepared and is posted on our website.

I don't know if that link is there, but I'm happy to provide promoting the site.

Mindy Romero was so helpful to have a slide on questions because I forgot that part in our last panel. So I'm going to bring them back up to ask a few questions of rusty. So we're going to bring James Schwab, Lakenya Jordan, Dean Logan, and Kathy Darling Allen back to the microphones. We have a few questions for you.

I almost made it.

I know you. Almost. Yeah, you know me. So let me start with La Kenya. So with the 2024 election cycle fast approaching, what are the Secretary's statewide strategies for addressing our voter participation gaps?

I'm so glad you asked, Chairman Pellerin. So the Secretary of State's office, as I alluded to earlier, has engaged in a multipronged approach. First, we have begun to form community partnerships through our ambassador program and trying to connect, as you heard James say earlier, our communIties, those who reach them and talk to them every single day through the CBOs and community based partners with our county partners.

So we've begun to create those partnerships in terms of amplifying messages around the options for voting and having them volunteer with counties to come and support the county outreach efforts. Again, the idea is to connect the communities with the county election officials and those who are doing the work.

Another important piece, as you heard Kathy Darling say earlier about messaging against misinformation and disinformation, Joe Kasurik, I think he stepped out, but he's our communication specialist, and we have a robust misinformation and disinformation and misinformation communication program going on right now.

On top of that, our Chief of Outreach and Education is Janelle Jackson, and she's engaged in a multipronged approach for partnering with community organizations to put on events around the state, to encourage education around ballot measures, how to vote, and then to also help us with our social media toolkits to get those out to counties and to voters and to volunteers. All of this is being done without funding. So as you heard me say earlier, with funding, we could do so much more.

Our counties are in particular need of trying to get funding to partner with community based organizations. Now, I do want to highlight to one really important factor. There are several counties around the state, Napa County, Orange County, San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, who are showing us that when you partner with community based organizations to do the outreach, you actually are reaching those communities far better than the county could do on its own. I think it's a model worth.

Yeah. Okay.

So it's just some of the things we're doing. I could go on more, but we have a full on plan that we actually, as a strategic planner, as a policy person, we would never put out a plan without first consulting with the public. So we are engaged right now in stakeholder meetings on our plan to make sure that we are encompassing and thinking about all the needs of our communities around the state. So you'll see that come out a little more towards the end of December.

But right now we're having stakeholder engagement meetings to discuss what those strategies are and how we can make them better.

Fabulous. Thank you.

Sure.

And then, Mr. Schwab, the state has occasionally provided funding for voter education outreach activities, particularly when there have been concerns that changes to electoral processes could negatively affect voter participation. Can you talk about the effectiveness of the funding from your experience in working in the Secretary of State's office?

Yeah, I touched upon a little bit in my talking points was in 2020, we faced the pandemic, and going into November, a lot of us were very, very concerned that how we were going to run our elections and how we would make sure voters would have fair and equal access during a pandemic.

And one of the consensus ideas that came out of the collaborative approach of working with election officials, staff in the Legislature, community organizations, was the need to make some important changes, but also to then educate the public about those changes. And so the Legislature, going into November, appropriated $35 million for voter education and outreach. And it was nonpartisan. It was just straight how, when and where to vote.

Right.

All the new options that were available to you going into this pandemic election, and lo and behold, it was one of the highest, the highest turnout in California, and we beat the national average for the first time in 25 years. I think that nonpartisan public education campaign had a lot to do with that. It was in language. I forget how many languages we did it in, but it was in language.

We partnered with election officials, we partnered with in language organizations to make sure we had the translations right, to make sure we were culturally appropriate messaging. And I think you can see the effects of that given November 2020 could have been a disaster in terms of turnout, given the pandemic, given the loss of polling places, given the loss of election workers. But it ended up being a positive.

And I think that's a testament to what you can do with smartly appropriated and smartly used public education funding.

I could not agree more. I was county Clerk in Santa Cruz County during that year and was thrilled to get money so I could purchase a votemobile. And providing that mobile voting really was a game changer, especially in 2020. But people love it. So thank you for that. So then, a question for Dean Logan and Kathy Darling. Allen, what programs does your office have in place for conducting voter outreach and encouraging greater voter participation, and how do you quantify the success of those programs?

Sorry, my answer is really brief. We really have a very limited outreach program because we don't have dedicated funding to outreach. I'll never forget having a conversation with Elaine Ganold from Marin County, who is long retired, and she shared with me that they had a line item in their budget that was $10,000 for outreach. And I said, what's that? Not something I had not heard of.

This was many years ago, but we were thrilled in 2020 to be able to put get out the vote messagings in bus shelters and in all kinds of other venues that we had never been able to afford to do that kind of support for voters before. And so I would definitely love to hear more about the intra. Dean has a very robust program that's ongoing, but it's not something a smaller county like Shasta has the extra money for.

So a county like yours? 112,000 registered voters.

112,000 registered voters.

And what would you anticipate a voter education program would cost your county?

Well, we could do a lot with $50,000 a year. We could do a whole lot with $250,000 a year. We have not had an off year or a year without an election since 2000. And I think 13, 2019, for example, we had four special elections, so it's not an off year kind of a situation for our county and I think most counties in California anymore.

And would you agree that having ongoing voter education outreach is essential, not just when there's a big election?

So I think that sustainable maintenance funding that is dependable is essential. The grants in 2020 were wonderful, but they were absolutely a one off. And we understood that with regular maintenance funding, we could do something like buy a boatmobile. We don't have a vehicle to pull a boatmobile, so we wouldn't ever purchase one today. But if we knew that we had grant money coming year after year, larger purchases like that would be something that we could build into our budget and plan for.

Great.

Thank you. Okay, Dean, your turn.

Yeah, thanks for the question. And I think that we are fortunate in LA County and that we do have resources dedicated to this. I think that's because of the size and diversity of our electorate, that we simply could not even meet the minimum compliance requirements with things like the Voting Rights Act for Language Access and accessibility without that. But I will also point out that that is, even with the funding that we have, it's proportional with 5.6 million registered voters spread over a large county.

That money alone won't do the job. We have to rely on community partnerships, our advisory committees. We don't have enough eyes and ears and feet on the ground to do that without those partnerships. I'll highlight a couple of things that we're doing in 2024 that expand on things that we did in 2000 and 22,022.

We have a free the Vote program, which is a multidisciplinary group that works with justice agencies to ensure that justice involved individuals know their rights as voters and that they can get registered and participate for the first time in 2024. We will have in person vote centers at every one of our county jail facilities in partnership with the sheriff and the probation Department. We piloted that in the last two years, and this time we'll be at every one of the facilities.

We are participating in a vet the vote program where we're reaching out to veterans, and that's to encourage them to continue their service as election workers. But it's also built around a narrative that there is a high level of public trust and confidence in veterans and that their presence in a vote center conveys the legitimacy and the integrity of the process. And then finally, I'll just expand a little bit on our mobile and flex Vote center programs. That's a relatively new program we started in 2020.

It expanded in 2022. I think over time, what we're seeing is that is starting to make a dent in those underrepresented populations, not by huge proportions, but what we are seeing is that when we meet people, where they're at, when we go out to a geographically isolated location in the northern part of the county that otherwise would not be able to easily access an in person vote center, people show up and vote.

When we do a partnership with Ultimate Medical centers and we have seniors who are there taking care of their physical health, and then they can go out into the parking lot and exercise their civic health, they do that right, because it's there, and it wasn't necessarily even part of their plan for the day. But the fact that it's there, invisible, encourages that level of participation. So I think those are the things that will begin to bridge these gaps and do that from the structural side.

And as I said earlier, we need to meet that with the intrinsic motivational side as well.

Okay, we are now going to move on to our next panel, which is ensuring complete and accurate voter registration rolls. And we're going to be talking about California's experience with automatic voter registration and perspectives of the California's new motor voter task force. So on this panel, we have Susan Lapsley, who's the deputy Secretary of State. Help America Vote act Director and counsel for California Secretary of State, Shirley N. Webbert. And we have Brittany Stone Cipher, I just know you as Brittany.

Brittany Stonesifer, Staff Attorney for the Democracy and Civic Engagement Program, ACLU of Northern California. Roslyn Gold, our chief public policy officer with NALEO Educational Fund, and Neil Urbiani, Policy and Research Director, Institute for Responsive Government. So have you picked an order of... Should we do rock, paper, scissors? Yeah, that could work.

I'll go first.

You'll go first. I have you listed first. We'll start with Susan Lapsley.

Thank you. It must be my hands, right? I look tough, right? So thank you, Madam Chair and Member Lackey, when he comes back and joins us again, life happens to us, right? We have a child that turns 18, we have a loved one that passes away. We take a new job in a different city, in a different part of the state, or we have an aging parent that moves in with us. Life happens. But all of those are instances that affect voter registration.

And in California, with over 22 million registered voters, it happens a lot. So having an accurate and list maintenance program and list to ensure that all of those life events when life happens, are tracked and changes are able to be made as essential. In California, across the nation, there's really two leading acts and legislation on the federal level that really affect this. One is the National Voter Registration act of 1993. I'm going to take that second.

The second one is the Help America Vote act of 2002, which, Madam Chair, you were very aware of, and we're on the ground floor of implementing that. But I'm going to take HAVA first. So for those who don't know, help America Vote act of 2002, or HAVA, we refer to it. It had sweeping changes on the election process throughout the country. There was also funding that went with it, which was the first time ever.

There was never money that went with the National Voter Registration act of 1993, but there was with HAVA. But it required sweeping changes to voting technology, accessibility, list maintenance and voter registration. So part of that, and a key component of it when we talk about list maintenance, is the requirement to have a statewide voter registration database. At the time in California, we had one, but all the counties weren't connected.

It wasn't in real time, and it didn't meet the requirements of HAVA and the intent of HAVA. So the state worked diligently on it. And in 2016, we implemented VoCal, which is the state compliant statewide voter registration database. So I'll refer to vocal when we talk about list maintenance through this process. So, as you know, the way that vocal is implemented, it is actually our statewide list. It is the official list for the state for all elections. However, the counties are the boots on the ground.

The counties are the ones that are doing all the legwork. They really are the ones that are doing the work, period. So they are the ones that are accepting and making these changes. They're the ones that are reviewing the records. And we pass data from the counties up to us and us down to the counties. We receive data from other agencies. You very rarely say this, right? But when Congress passed HAVA, in their wisdom, they actually left a lot of discretion to the states.

They realized, zero, gosh, we have 50 states and 50 different ways of having state agencies and record flow and that kind of thing. So they left the discretion to the states. And in California, when we implemented vocal, we did a lot of great things, which is a system that is in near real time, and we connected with several different agencies.

So at the state level, every new and updated registration is checked against a myriad of different data points, including death records from the California Department of Public Health, records from the Department of Motor Vehicles, records from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, as well as change of address changes. So CDCR, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, they send their felon list to us and we check every new and updated registration against the felon list, CDPH. Likewise, we get death records on any decedent.

Let's see if I can say this right. Any decedent 16 years of age or older that have died in California as well as outside of California going back to 1970. So it is an extensive database of death. We jokingly call it the database of death for that aspect, but every new and updated registration is run against that to look for matches. Likewise, DMV ID verification, that happens again with every new and updated registration. We send the information over to DMV.

DMV does an ID verification of it. In some instances, they will send it to the Social Security Administration if needed. If they don't have enough information on their side and with the implementation of Real ID, those instances, to my knowledge, have gone down dramatically because of real ID. EDD. This one's a little odd because everyone thinks, well, EDD what does that have to do with voter registration?

EDD is actually the contracted agency within the state, and there's only one for each state to get national change of address information. So we share information. And again, for any new and updated registration, we check against EDD to see if there are change of address records on file. And then the last one is the DMV change of address. So obviously there's change of address notifications that happen through DMV. Those still happen through DMV as well. On a daily basis, that flow of information is about 30,000.

We call them messages between our office and the counties. And backup, again, the way that it works for any new and updated registration, they're run through all those databases. And if there's a match, then we send it to the county and say, hey, county. When Gail was there. Hey, Gail. And your staff needs to take a look at this record. From our perspective of the state, it looks like it's a match.

So then the county will look at it and say, yes it is or no it's not. So again, when I say that the counties do the bulk load of work, they really are doing that work.

And 30 seconds. Sorry.

Shoot. I didn't even get to the new motor voter question. Then the other piece is duplication, right? So if there's a duplicate voter registration that is also checked. The other piece of legislation is the National Voter Registration act that put parameters around registration. But California went a step farther, as we all know and did the new Motor Voter Act. And that I'm sure that ladies up here will talk extensively about the impact that that has had on California and the accuracy of our roles.

Just by way of note, over 46 million transactions have happened since we implemented new motor voter. That means more accurate roles because those changes are being made in real time when life happens, rather than two months, three months, four months, six months after those life events happen. So thank you very much. Happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Who's next? Roslyn?

Hi. Good afternoon, Chair Pellerin. And again, when Vice Chair Lackey joins us, first of all, thank you so much for this opportunity to testify. Also, I just want to say thank you so much for all of the committed Members of the public who are joining us for this hearing today. I'm Roslyn Gold. I'm chief public policy officer of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, the NALEO Educational Fund.

We're a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we have more than three decades of experience with working directly with the Latino community in California on civic engagement work, whether it's nonpartisan voter engagement, mobilizing Latinos to participate in the census naturalization, as well as policy, research and policy development efforts to really mobilize Latinos to become full participants in the American political process. And so if we think about voter registration, we think about the Latino population.

I think a good starting point is first, just to take a minute to realize that Latinos are California's largest population group, 40% of Californians are Latino. So if you do not have full and proportionate participation by Latinos in the electoral process, you do not have a truly responsive and inclusive democracy.

Now, if you look at data about the participation gap, and by the way, Dr. Romero, I know that you said there are limitations on current population survey CPS data, but the numbers may be different from what I'm going to talk about from what you get from the voter file, but it tells the same story.

So this is a story that it tells about the Latino community, which is that if you look at November 2020 and you look at the voter registration rate, the rate of Latino citizen voting age population that were, in other words, eligible voters that were registered, 60% of the Latino citizen voting age population was registered, compared to 78.2% of the non Hispanic white population. That is a significant registration gap.

If you look at turnout rates of registered Latinos and Non Hispanic whites, of those who are actually registered, the gaps are much smaller. And generally what we see, generally, the lack of full voter registration in the Latino community is a crucial and major element for why you do not have Latino participation in the state's democracy. So our organization was involved in the dialogues that led to the adoption of the new Motor Voter act, as well as the implementation.

And also, I am a Member of the Secretary of State's Motor Voter Task Force, and so we are very pleased to see data from the Center for Inclusive Democracy that shows the role of our new motor voter, I'm going to call it CNMV, in addressing the participation gap. According to a study from CID, basically, CNMV was the single most common method of voter registration since it was adopted. About 43.5% of new registrants did it through the CNMV, with 58.7% of re registrants.

And this is particularly the case that it has become the single most common method of registration for people of color, particularly Latinos, as well as 18 to 24 year olds. And the CID research actually suggests that it is possible that CNMV is contributing to increasing voter registration rates.

So another piece of data is that, again, if we look at the Latino population that you had, snapshot from 2020, you had about 24% of Latinos register through CNMV, compared to before CNMV, where people would register at the DMV. Only 1% of Latinos registered at the DMV. So you can see how this is contributing to closing the participation rates.

Now, one of my colleagues is going to be talking about some things that can be done to improve CNMV, ways it can be expanded, and some questions we need to answer. And I think these are all important. But I just would want to say that the theme that you're hearing from other people I would like to echo, because CNMV is a crucial element, but it cannot close the gap alone. Okay.

We need in this state, a significant investment in voter education, nonpartisan voter mobilization for underrepresented communities in all Californians to get to a truly representative democracy. That program and that investment has to be a partnership between the Secretary of State, election officials, community based organizations, the media and other partners. Right. We have heard a lot of people talk about motivation to vote. Right.

Well, our research with the Latino population indicates that there's a large segment of Latinos who do not vote because either they lack basic information. That's what our calls to our hotline show, that there's just big information gap. But there's also a group of Latinos who feel that voting won't change anything in their communities. Voting won't affect what kind of traffic control they have or whether they get better sewage and sewer infrastructure in their communities. It won't change the education for their kids.

So any seconds going to end here? Until we can have voter. Sorry. Until we can have voter mobilization partnerships and investments that help reach the most disengaged Members of all of our underrepresented populations will not be able to close the participation gap. Those kinds of campaigns can take that energy and translate it to registration at CNMV and help us a more truly representative democracy in California. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Are we going with Brittany next? Okay.

Thank you. Good afternoon again. Brittany Stonesifer ACLU of Northern California. I'm going to go as fast as I can. ACLU Norcal has a long history of working on voter registration implementation at the DMV, going back 30 years to the National Voter Registration Act.

I'm going to skip the quote that Roslyn already highlighted, but another important number that I want to highlight is 4.6 million, which, according to the Secretary of State is about the number of people who are eligible but unregistered in California as of last month, which is about one in six Californians. And as we've heard that a disproportionate number of those individuals are BIPOC, lower income youth, people with disabilities, and or have limited English proficiency. So we can and must do better to close these gaps.

And AVR automatic voter registration can be a powerful tool in our toolbox to do that. So I'm going to walk us through a few ways that we can improve and expand our existing AVR program, and then also try to bring it to additional social services agencies so we can reach more underrepresented voters. Next slide, please.

So first, let's look at who the current AVR system is working for, and I'll describe this a little bit because I know you can't see it and where there are still potential opportunities so this slide shows data from the recently released 2022 Annual report of the new Motor Voter Task force.

It shows that in 2022, 53% that's the teal segment on the right of eligible individuals who completed a covered transaction, ended up registering or updating their registration, which amounted to almost 4 million registrations or updates in 2022. It also shows the green Wedge, that of eligible individuals who opted out. About two thirds of them already had a current voter registration record, meaning that they opted out because they didn't need to use the program.

Only about 14% of eligible individuals who completed a covered DMV transaction in 2022 opted out despite being unregistered or having outdated registration. And that's the Red Wedge. Yet despite the fact that the program essentially had an 86% success rate last year, we're obviously still missing folks because of the scale of our DMV. That 14% still translates to over a million missed DMV transactions in 2022 alone.

And when we zoom in even further, just to look at the relatively small number of eligible but unregistered individuals who are still using the DMV, we find that about half of them are opting out. Next slide, please. So the big question, which you can't see any of these words probably, but the big question is who are these potential voters that are opting out under the current AVR system, and why?

So frustratingly here, we just don't have enough data for anyone to know for sure, but we can make some educated guesses. The most common feedback that we hear about the current system is that the language of the opt out screen, which is only shown to eligible voters is confusing. I'll show you the language on the next screen, and I'll describe it so you can know what it says.

Another reason may be that DMV customers may mistakenly think that they're registered or have an updated registration when they do not. Another reason is that we have to be aware that some people who are eligible actively do not want to register to vote because they're religiously or politically opposed. For instance, some Mormons, Mennonites, and Quakers do not vote. Personally, I have a family Member who abstains from voting as a form of protest despite my best efforts.

And finally, of course, there are obviously going to be eligible voters who simply do not register and they opt out because they're busy or distracted and want to get the DMV visit over with as soon as possible. So there are steps that we can take right now to dramatically reduce opt outs for the first two reasons, and that's where I think we should focus our attention. First, things can get a lot more complicated when we start with the last two reasons on that list.

But before I talk about solutions to improve and expand our AVR model, first, it's important to have some context. Number one, any successful AVR implementation is about details. Which state and which agency are really critical questions. In California, an important consideration is the number of non citizens served at the DMV and ensuring that we don't put these Californians in a position where an agency might accidentally register them to vote.

Also, we should consider whether we should concentrate our future focus on the DMV compared to other public agencies when about 10% of drivers don't have licenses. And we know that Californians who don't have licenses are statistically more likely to be the underrepresented voters that we're most trying to reach. Next slide, please. So, with all that background, here are two major ways that we can reduce the number of eligible but unregistered people who are inadvertently opting out of the DMV's current system.

First, we can improve the readability of the forms, especially the opt out screen. So what these opt out screens show is on the left side we have the current language which says which best describes you and then has three kind of existential answers I want to register to vote. I'm registered and I want to update my registration. Two separate options that require you to know whether you're registered but lead to the same outcome or I don't want to register or update my registration.

This trips people up. It's unnecessarily long, and so we're consolidating it to two answers and making the prompt easier to understand. The prompt will be, we will use your information to register you to vote or update your registration, and then, yes, do that, or, no, don't do that. So this is something that civic design experts have recommended for a long time, and so switching from the clunky language to the more streamlined language should be in place in 2024.

And we're really excited to see what kind of change this can make. Second, we can address some of the problem of voters opting out when they mistakenly think they have a current registration by building a widget into the current AVR system that shows DMV users their current registration status. More transparency is always good when we're talking about democracy. Next slide, please.

30 seconds.

Okay, so, finally, just to wrap this up, we should also think about how we can bring the successes of the current AVR program at the DMV to social services agencies that we know are specifically designed to reach underrepresented and Low income people. So the prime candidate for this is Covered California and medical, which are agencies that are already serving millions of underrepresented individuals. And we could easily integrate the question into their existing forms.

Massachusetts has a similar system at their mass health, and they've seen an over 500% voter registration increase through that agency implementing this kind of AVR model. So, just to sum it up, I thrown a lot at you, but I'm going to close with a balance of optimism and caution that AVR is wonderful. But again, the devil's in the details. So we can have different approaches to the different perspectives on the right approach. And reasonable minds may differ.

But the potential effectiveness of these models requires a close, context specific look at the details. So, with that, anyone please feel to reach out to me for data. Thank you so much.

Good job. Thank you. We'll now move on to Neil. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Pellerin and Members of the Committee. My name is Neal Ubriani. I'm the policy and Research Director at the Institute for Responsive Government. We're a nonpartisan organization that supports state efforts to improve government accessibility and efficiency. One of our core areas work is automatic voter registration. I've personally been involved in the development and implementation of AVR in 16 states, and I've seen firsthand the features that make an AVR system maximally accessible, efficient, and secure.

Notably, California was the second state to adopt AVR in 2015, and since then, 21 more states in Washington, DC have followed this model and adopted AVR each making improvements along the way. While California's AVR system has made great strides, incorporating improvements from other states can make California's system even more effective. The first area where other states have improved is protections for non citizens. Unlike most AVR states, California does not automatically filter out clear non citizens like green card holders.

Even if a non citizen provides clear proof of ineligibility as part of their license transaction, they're still offered the motor voter opportunity. The onus is on non citizens to affirmatively indicate non citizenship and opt out of motor voter. Under this system, a non citizen who is momentarily confused can unintentionally indicate citizenship and register to vote. This mistake carries serious consequences under federal law and can result in denial of a naturalization application or even deportation. Such errors by noncitizens are, unfortunately, not just hypothetical press reports.

Community groups and immigration lawyers have all flagged noncitizens who've made exactly this mistake. Recognizing this risk, other states have fixed this issue. In the majority of AVR states, if a licensed applicant provides clear proof of ineligibility, like a green card, the system is hard coded to automatically filter them out of any registration opportunity. This filtering significantly improves the safety of AVR systems and protects noncitizens from an unintentional claim of citizenship. Second, data from other states shows that California's AVR system could be registering more eligible people.

As Ms. Stone Cipher mentioned, currently 55% of unregistered eligible people opt out of voter registration during the motor voter transaction. The opt out rate is similarly high for young voters getting their first license. 46% of 16 and 17 year olds decline preregistration at the DMV. These declination rates are surprisingly high, but the reasons behind them are not.

Behavioral science research finds that many people unnecessarily decline registration because they're in a rush to finish the DMV form, or because they incorrectly believe that they're already registered to vote, or because they have a past felony conviction and they're unsure of their eligibility. Or, frankly, because they believe they'll get jury duty if they register to vote, which is not true. They'll get jury duty if they're getting a driver's license.

The net result, as we've talked about, is 4.6 million eligible unregistered people in California, or one in six eligible Californians not registered to vote. A lot of these people are DMV customers. Roughly 1.2 million eligible people decline registration each year at the California DMV. Millions more people could be registered to vote through the DMV, but due to the ease of opting out under the current system, they aren't to register more people through AVR.

Nine states in Washington, DC have made voter registration the strong default for clearly eligible people. In these states. When a DMV customer provides proof of eligibility, including citizenship, as part of their license transaction, they just get automatically registered to vote. Election officials send them a letter informing them of their registration and providing a prepaid mailer that they can use to decline if they wish. These systems have declination rates below 5% in these states.

Only the people who truly do not want to be registered to vote, like Ms. Stone Cipher's relative, take the extra step of returning that mailer and saying affirmatively, remove me. All other clearly eligible DMV customers are registered to vote. By contrast, California's AVR system leaves out millions of clearly eligible people who could be registered through a more streamlined process. Finally, other states have shown that California's AVR system could be updating more voter registration records.

Under California's system, 2.7 million registered voters a year decline the option to update their voter record at the DMV. While many of these voters don't need an address update, many obviously do. It's not hard to believe people decline the option to update because they incorrectly believe that their registration is current or because they're simply in a rush. A Stanford University study of Colorado found that one in three registered voters who declined an update at the DMV actually had an out of date voter registration record.

Applying that data to California means that voter voter could be missing 900,000 additional address updates each year. Recognizing the opportunity to increase the accuracy of voter rolls, nine states have adopted a fully automatic update process where the address a registered voter provides for a license is automatically used to update their voter record. Election officials Mail voters Notice of the update, along with a prepaid mailer that can be used for any corrections.

This system ensures that as much information as possible from DMV records promptly reaches the voter file, maximizing the accuracy of voter rolls. As any election official will tell you and I'm sure Shane Hamlin from Eric will emphasize in his testimony, better address data just makes elections run better. More ballots reach voters at the right address, there are fewer issues at the polls, and voter confidence and satisfaction increase. California pioneered AVR in 2015, but since then, other states have improved on this model.

By incorporating best practices developed by other states, California can increase registration rates significantly, improve the accuracy of voter rolls, and better protect noncitizens. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. My colleague, Assembly Member Bennett, gets a round of applause for entering the room. I know you just walked in, but would you like to say a few words or just walk in, catch your breath? Okay, so we're on. zero, thank you. Yeah.

Okay, perfect. So let's see a few questions here. Based on your experience with the new motor voter, are there ways in which the state can build or improve upon the new motor voter program?

You're looking right at me. So I assume that question is directed to me.

Madam, you're a good start. For sure.

Know, I think that what we heard are some improvements. The language is one that we've been working on. The language has changed, I think probably four times we implement it right. And language is always tough. But the task force has worked on, as Ms. Stonesifer said, that there is some language that we've all agreed on and that I think, given best practices, will make a real good change at the DMV that'll make it more clear.

I know I have children, and I know when they went to pre register, they looked at and they go, I don't even know what that means, Mom. So it's confusing. And if they're confused, many other people are confused. So I think that'll go a long ways.

The plain language. Sure. Yes. Does someone else have something to add?

I was just going to add, I don't know that this will make the process more streamlined. But to Mindy's points earlier, there are other sources of registration in California that give people the opportunity to provide race and ethnicity data, like cover. That question is not built into the new motor voter questions right now. So the task force has been having conversations about whether to include that and balancing the data collection versus making the forms as streamlined as possible.

But I think that would be really helpful data to have. The more data, the better. I mentioned that we don't really have any good data about why people are opting out. That's really hard information to gather. But to the degree that we can do more research on that area, that would be extremely helpful.

And I realize this isn't directly related to the CNMV, but if we're talking about opportunities to reach people who are motivated to register to vote, I think one of the other things we need to look at is when people become U. S. Citizens, when they naturalize, making sure that there is robust voter registration opportunities, whether they naturalize and it's done in a court ceremony, or whether they naturalize at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Administrative ceremonies that right after that, there are opportunities for them to register.

Now there are USCIS. The Citizenship and Immigration Services has policies that it has set forth to try to encourage this. But we feel that California could do some nudging of the agency and say, hey, are you making this happen at every naturalization ceremony? And talk to the courts, the federal courts, as, hey, you know, again, you talk about when people really want to get registered after you get sworn. And as a new citizen, you really have that feeling of wanting to participate.

I've attended many of those ceremonies myself, doing voter registration, and it's a great time to get people engaged. So thank you. I had another question for...

Can I just say for the record that we are not going to endorse or support the VD? I can't even say it. Rosalind. The acronym. C-A-N-M-M-V-D for the acronym for California.

Too many letters.

Rosalind, I have to put our foot down. We're not saying not endorse that acronym.

We're going to fight over acronyms. I know.

What acronym do you endorse?

AVR. AVR. AVR is what I use. It just comes off easier. Okay. Yeah.

Can I blame the Center for Inclusive? Can I lay responsibility on the Center for Inclusive Democracy just because that was the term that was in their report?

I'm sorry, Madam Chair.

I wanted. Was giving data from the report. But we can agree we're talking about the same thing, the same journey and the same goal.

Yeah. I have a no acronym rule of my office. I spend so much time figuring out what they're trying to say. So I have a question for Neal Ubriani. So you said that nine states plus DC have the back end automatic voter registration. I'm curious how that's translated into turnout.

So there's a couple of studies on turnout, one actually by Professor Romero and Eric Mcgee and Charlotte Hill, that finds that states that have sort of this backend system where people who are clearly eligible are just sort of automatically registered and sent a letter. And I believe that the finding from that is that there's double the turnout effect in terms of the eligible voter population from a backend system versus a front end system.

There's also a paper by Ellen Seljon and Paul Gronky, who are academics at Lewis and Clark College and Reed College in Oregon, and they find a similar double effect of turnout on eligible voters. Eligible turnout effect from a back end system versus sort of an opt out system at the point of the transaction. And that makes sense when you register more people to vote, that makes it easier for campaigns, for election officials to do the kind of outreach.

It's a lot easier to turn somebody out who's already on the rolls, as opposed to sort of turning somebody out who's not on the rolls, who has to be registered and then turn out.

And there would be a way for someone to. Well, I'm just. So, so they would actually have to take an action after their visit to DMV to say, no, do not register.

Me to decline registration.

They could do that at the time of being at DMV.

No, they would get a letter in the mail with sort of extra prepaid mailer that could be used to decline.

Okay. Assembly Member Bennett, do you have any questions? Okay, yeah.

Just to briefly respond to that, I said in my comments that reasonable minds may differ about this. This is an area where there is conflicting data. I just want to address the article that Neal mentioned that has Mindy on it. It has draft on it. It's not formally published. And my understanding is that that wasn't a formally published piece of research, and it's still ongoing. So I think that we should be careful about which data we're citing and really digging deep.

There's a Brennan center study that was the only published multi state study looking at different models, and it found that there was no notable difference when looking at all the different models. And we often talk about it like there is one backend and there was one front end. It's a big constellation of different models. So Colorado is often used as a comparison because it's the only state that switched from front end to backend.

But that state did not implement front end remotely in the same way as California and implemented it in a rolled out location by location, incrementally different transactions, had its very different language and different orders. So I think we just had to look, as I said before, really closely at the details and really closely at the data. And again, this was said before, we can read different things from the data, but I think it's important to have a big picture and a cohesive image of what's available.

Yeah, I imagine California is very different than the other states have implemented this, and plus, we have our no party preference crossover in presidential primaries. That further complicate things as. Yeah, okay. And anything else from any of you.

Here, I would just add that the paper by Ellen Seljun and Paul Gronky is published that shows double the turnout effect. And there's a separate study. There's two studies, actually. One by academics at Stanford and another by the Next Gen Policy Institute. That shows the increase in registration that occurred in Colorado when they switched from sort of a front end system to a back end system.

But I want to note that the ideas that Ms. Stonesifer mentioned in terms of that widget that sort of sorts registered and unregistered people into different workflows at the time of their transaction is also a good idea that we would support as well.

And I just want to clarify, that wasn't my suggestion. My suggestion was simply to provide information to people about their voter registration status, not to sort them into different categories. I think that is important to leave that choice to the voter.

I can imagine that voters willingness and wanting to vote really hinges on their agreeing to participate in our system. So we really want to motivate them and give them good reasons why it's so critically important that they do have a voice. So thank you all. Okay, thanks. We'll move on to our next panel. And that one would be additional tools for managing California's voter registration roles. And we have with us today Shane Hamlin, who's the Executive Director of the Electronic Registration Information Center.

Thank you for being here. And you may begin.

Good afternoon, Chair Pellerin, Member of the Committee. Assembly Member Bennett, thank you for the invitation to participate in this discussion today. Thank you for your ongoing support. Chair of ERIC, being a passionate advocate for ERIC, and for your sponsorship of Assembly Bill 126 last session. My name is Shane Hamlin. I'm the Executive Director of ERIC, another acronym that means the Electronic Registration Information Center.

Not entirely clear in that name what we do, but I will explain that. ERIC is a five and 101 C, three nonprofit membership organization comprised of state election officials from 24 states and the District of Columbia. Our mission is to help election officials maintain more accurate voter rolls, as well as to provide voter registration information to all eligible citizens. That is a balanced mission that focuses both on accuracy and access as we've talked about today.

We are a member-led organization funded and governed by our Members through the payment of annual dues. I think Susan framed it quite nicely in terms of this part of the discussion today. Life happens. People move for all kinds of reasons. Updating their registration is usually not even on their list. Sometimes it is, but it's at the bottom of the list.

People die, people become of age, and all of those things make it difficult to maintain and keep up to date, accurate voter rolls. That is why ERIC was created by election officials with help from the Pew Charitable Trust over 10 years ago. Accurate voter rolls, though, have other benefits, and they were alluded to here today. They improve the voting experience, especially for new voters.

If you don't get your ballot because the election official has the wrong address and you have to chase down your ballot, you might not be as likely to participate again in the next election. That's also wasted money for the county election official. And the last time I checked, it costed between $1.50 and $1.75 to mail a ballot.

And since 88% of the voters in California vote by mail, there are some significant achievements, or, excuse me, efficiencies to be achieved by ensuring accurate and complete and up to date voter rolls. Also, accurate voter rolls are important in terms of demonstrating to the public that you, as an Elections Administration community, are doing all you can to protect the integrity and accuracy of the process. Voters care about the process being fair and accurate. They care about integrity.

And when you can demonstrate that you're using all the tools available to you to keep those records up to date and ensure security and integrity in the process, you can help convey that message that you are in fact, protecting the process. And then thirdly, accurate rolls help with enfranchisement. Again, it's very similar to having a good positive experience with the voting process, but also just ensuring through all available means and tools that your voters records are up to date.

You're helping to ensure they can participate in the process. So since 2012, ERIC has identified 40 million out of date or inaccurate records for our members and these stats are on our website. That's 12.5 million voters who've moved from one ERIC member state to another, about 26 million voters who've moved within an ERIC state, and a little over a million duplicate registrations and about 600,000 deceased voters. On the access side, we've identified over 60 million individuals who are not registered but appeared to be eligible.

So how does all this work? Our members securely submit voter registration and motor vehicle data to ERIC. We also are certified to receive official death data from the United States Social Security Administration, and we subscribe to official change of address data from the Postal Service. Using these four data sets, we provide our members with reports that identify inaccurate notodate voter registration records in state and cross state move addresses, deceased voters, and individuals who appear to be eligible but are not yet registered.

We can also identify cases of possible illegal voting through one of our special reports. In compliance with federal and state laws, our members use these reports to contact voters for the purposes of updating their record to remove ineligible voters and deceased voters from the rolls. And they are also required to contact likely eligible but not yet registered individuals providing information on how to register as well as the eligibility requirements.

If California were to join ERIC, based on the experience of our current Members, we estimate your first reports would identify about 2 million out of date records, including the largest number, 1.3 million voters who have a more recent address in the DMV than what's on their voter file. So these are in state updates, and I know we've heard a lot of data on your AVR and I do think that that will play into.

As I said, these are estimates, but I do think Eric complements AVR systems. We have, I think nine or 10 of our members are AVR states, and we continue to identify people who have moved that were not caught in AVR.

Now, our data tends to be depending on when the state requests a report behind the AVR process, but we are still identifying gaps. Where we really add value for states that have AVR and have robust list maintenance programs like the ones that Susan described and you've heard from others today is in the cross state moves because we have driver's licensing data from 25 other states and that is the primary source that identifies an individual who's moved. That coupled with a new voter registration in that state.

And of course we have NCOA data. And NCOA data is great, you already use it. But I contend, and I would love to see research on this, that over time the utility of NCOA data is going to go down as fewer people file a change of address with the Postal Service and instead they just go online and directly update their address with their creditors and of course, their friends and family through text.

I do think if California joined, ERIC would be a secure, cost effective resource for the Secretary of State and the 58 county election offices to use to improve the accuracy of California's voter rolls and provide voter registration information to that 4.6 million estimated 4.6 million unregistered individuals. ERIC would build on the progress that your state has made over the last 10 plus years to improve the state elections ecosystem, improve participation.

And while it is very elusive to improve that voter participation and turnout, ERIC membership can help in the foundation of Elections Administration and provide another set of tools in the toolbox to both improve participation through the eligible but unregistered mailing, but also the accuracy of the voter rolls. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

You have a question? Absolutely.

Thank you very much. What does it cost to join ERIC? What would it cost the State of California?

So ERIC has a one time membership fee of 25,000. And then our dues are calculated based on the number of states in ERIC and the citizen voting age population. And when I was here before this Committee and before the public or the Consumer affairs and Privacy Committee in the spring, and we had a different membership number, that estimate was for the annual dues was around 200,000.

And what can you tell me?

A year. Sorry.

What can you tell me about the recent. We have a number of states pulling out of ERIC, and it strikes me that it's mostly people that are under pressure from people who are concerned about our election integrity. But actually it feels backwards to pull out of ERIC if you're concerned about the accuracy of your rolls. But how many states have gotten out and how many states are in now? And are there major states that aren't in besides California?

Sure. So I'll work through those backwards, I think. So we've lost nine states this year, all states led by Republican chief election officials. The two largest states that we lost were Texas and Florida. And I think that you sort of answered the first question in the way that you asked it as to why they left.

I mean I can talk about the process and I can talk about the requests that were made of the membership and the process we followed to review and analyze the request for reforms to our fundamental membership agreement requirements around reports and so on. And I think there were some states that wanted more flexibility, particularly on that eligible, but unregistered mailing. But I also think there were other forces and factors at play.

How many states are in the system?

We have 25 members, 24 states and the District of Columbia, all of California's neighbors are in ERIC.

So we had 33 before.

Yeah. At a peak we had actually 34. Yeah.

And then we've lost nine. Great. Thank you very much.

We are actively recruiting still, and I think my perspective is time helps. And those states that left, in a couple of years, the dynamics on the ground are going to be different, and I will be happy to talk to those states at any time about coming back into.

Thank you. So, as you said, many states are a part of ERIC. And do you believe that ERIC has been a successful tool to ensure those voter rolls are accurate?

I do, and I can speak to, since we're talking about research today a little bit, I can point to two older studies, although again, new research is needed. First on the list maintenance side, in 2014, after the first round of list maintenance reports with the first early member states of ERIC, there was independent research that done that did demonstrate that ERIC appeared to have increased the accuracy of voter rolls. And I can actually provide staff with the link to that paper from the Research Triangle Institute.

And then more recently on the outreach side. In 2016, Dr. Lisa Bryan up at California State Fresno and Dr. Michael Hanner at University of Maryland believe did a project with Pennsylvania to analyze their 2016 eligible but unregistered mailing. And that published paper found a statistical significant increase in voter registration. Those who received the postcard registered at higher rates than those who did not. And then I believe it has a follow up component on turnout. But I'm not sure. It's been a while since I've looked at it.

Do you have any data around reducing the voter participation gaps?

We don't, except. Unless of course, it is in that paper that I just mentioned. It's a hard one to analyze. We can look at how we, meaning ERIC staff who are not experts in this. None of us are researchers, the three of us that work at ERIC, but we can help our states sort of figure out what's their response rate. And that paper by Bryant has some of that as well as some other.

There has been other research on the eligible unregistered mailing that I can share. We know from our sort of back of the envelope, poor man analysis, non academic analysis, that the response rate to the EBU varies between seven and 14%. And I don't know why it varies so much that we would love to dig into that. But some states get a 7% response rate and others have seen as high as a 14% response rate to that eligible but unregistered mailing.

And just one more question. Can you talk about the benefits that California's participation in ERIC would have for elections nationwide?

Sure. I don't think this is a big secret that California, you have 22 million registered voters. I keep hearing the stat that I think, what is it, one in 34 or maybe even smaller number drivers are in California.

No doubt that California's voter records and DMV records, if used in a collaborative, cooperative, secure manner like ERIC, would be tremendously beneficial to the other states that are in ERIC. But I also think it would be beneficial to California again, because, as I mentioned, that cross state movers report that uses DMV data to identify people who have moved is valuable to California, too. And obviously it would be more so if we were at 34 members and included Florida and Texas.

But we are, I think, going to continue to grow again. So there's value for California, but certainly, yes, value to the other members because so many people are here in California.

Thank you so much for your participation today.

Thank you.

We'll now move on to our next panel, and that's strategies for closing voter participation gaps. And we're going to hear from county elections officials, civic education programs. We're going to have Jesse Salinas with Yolo County Assessor, Clerk Recorder, Chief Election Official. Ryan Ronco, I saw you out in the hall. There you are. Placer County Clerk, Recorder, Registrar of Voters, so many titles. And Evelyn Mendez, Public and Legislative Affairs Manager for the County of Santa Clara office of the Registrar of Voters.

So if you could come on up and let's say, if you can keep your comments to about four to five minutes.

Hello, Chair Pellerin and Committee Members Jesse Salinas. I'm Yolo County's Registrar of Voters. Wear a few other hats, but I'm here as a Registrar of Voters today, and just I want to be able to provide you a brief overview about the genesis of our work, the strategies we've applied in Yolo County, and kind of the outcomes that we've had to date and what we anticipate as next steps. So, first of all, when I was sworn into office in 2016, I was very data driven.

I always have been. And I heard some of the presentations, and in fact, Dr. Mindy Romero has talked about in terms of those 18 to 24 year olds and how they are just simply not turning out in the way that we had hoped and continued to struggle. And we, of course, also know that the presidential high watermark is always a high watermark and that we drop off after that. And of course, the down ballot issue.

So there were multiple items that we wanted to be able to tackle in Yolo County. So we did a two-phased approach and strategy. The first was to engage UC Davis. And I met with Chancellor May. And I said, Chancellor May, can we do a video together to promote registration and voting? He said, absolutely. And the result of that was we did a video and it went really well. The students said, that's great, but we can do better.

So in 2020, they led the charge and made their video much better than ours. And so what are the results of that? So as a result of that engagement at UC Davis, the UC Davis won a national award, competing against three other hundred universities as having the highest voter increase turnout between 2016 and 2020. So number one, check mark, we did that. And we continue to do that. Wonderful relationship with UC Davis.

We also decided that more needed to be done in the high schools because we realized our democracy is at threat and if we don't really engage our young people in a positive way, we're going to start to lose them. So we started saying, okay, what can we do? First, we ran some mock elections, and that was a tremendous hit at the high schools. But we also established something known as a Youth Empowerment Summit.

And that Youth Empowerment Summit brings high school students from across the county to engage with elected officials. We do a mock election. We teach them about local government, and we allow them to talk about issues they care about. And the students love it. It's 100 students we bring across the county and they meet with over 20 local elected officials. And while we partnering, we've just got an official partner with UC Davis.

So we're now going taking students to campus and getting the schools, actually busing the students there, which is fantastic. Our goal is to go from 100 to 200 in the next session. And what we did is we won a National Association of Elections Official award in 2019 called the Guardian Award. So another home run. And one of the things we do in Yolo County is we always do pre and post surveys. And I have data that shows kind of before and after.

And I can answer some questions on that, the kind of results we're already seeing just based on that. And then the next step, though, is I said, okay, I'm only touching 100 students. How do I impact every single high school student? And the idea was to develop a curriculum, how do we do it that we really teach about local government, because most folks don't understand what local government is and how to utilize it.

We also aren't teaching about the importance of voting and how we can engage them. Plus, we need media literacy, a lot of misinformation out there, so how can we do that? So I brought together partners with the County Office of Education, UC Davis, and their curriculum experts that the U.S. History and Social Science group, and they brought together some other folks. And what we did is we developed a prototype curriculum.

And that prototype curriculum, thanks to funding from the James B. McClatchy Foundation, was able to help us create three modules, one for local government that was designed and worked on by a teacher locally at West Sacramento with the UC Davis curriculum experts. And the other one was on civic engagement and voting. And that was done with UC Riverside in partnership with UC Riverside. The third module was media literacy, and that was to help young people understand there's a lot of misinformation.

How do you cross reference it? And that was done in partnership with UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz. So you talk about a real coalition and collaborative effort. This is really reflective of that. So what's been the difference? So what we did is we piloted this past September. I had all the students and I said, let's test out one of the units. And it was a unit on tribal governance. You ask most people, what is the heck is tribal sovereignty governance? They have no idea.

Most of the general public has no idea. So we actually had a session, and it was a five to 10 minute session. We did a pre and post questionnaire of that. The difference between the pre and the post was a 40x increase of understanding. We then had a discussion about the agreement between Yolo County and the tribe there. And we went through this agreement. We had a discussion at the table, the difference pre and post, 35x understanding.

And we had a PhD student actually go through and grade these results. So it's actually an educator that's going through and saying, these are passing results. Huge. Probably even more importantly is at the end of the discussion, we had to actually cut it off because we just gave 40 minutes for this discussion. It went on for an extra 10 minutes, and I had to shut it down because we had to move on in our agenda. Students were so engaged.

And I share with you because that is the secret formula. We need our young people to be engaged about issues they care about and give them a voice. So that's the first part. The second part is, overall, are we having a difference? Yes, we are. If I look at the Election Insights website, and actually, I was having a conversation with Professor, his name is Justin Grimmer over at Stanford University at the Hoover Institute, and I was sharing with him some of the things we're doing locally.

And he goes, oh, that makes sense. And I go, what are you talking about? He goes, well, take a look at my website, and it shows all of the data between 2016 and 2020. And he plots out all the turnout, and he does it by age group. So if you look at the 18 to 25 year olds, we are off the charts. We are high above the statewide average. And he goes, so with all the stuff you're doing is starting to add up.

And it gave me a chill because I had no idea that that data existed and to get some verification. So this multipronged approach is working. So what are the next steps? So, for us, we have three steps. One is we want to continue the development and testing of the curriculum in Yolo County. Our goal is to test it out in 2024. The next step would be in 2025, with the aid of the Legislature to find some counties that would be interested in piloting it.

I've shared the curriculum, just the piece that we have currently, and I have a number of registrars that said I'd like to try that, and there's a lot of interest to be able to do that. So hopefully, with the aid of the Legislature, we can start to pilot this in 2025 and start to look at it and give an example of.

20 seconds.

Great. And then if it were successful, then take it to the rest of the state. My hope is this will be a national model, and I really want to make sure that we are promoting our democracy to our young people so they feel engaged and ready to participate with that. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

Thank you. Are we going to move on to Evelyn?

Okay.

Does that sound good?

Yeah. I'm Evelyn Mendez. I'm the public and legislative affairs manager at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. I've been working there for four years now, but before that I worked at the Secretary of State's office, so I have close to 30 years of elections experience. I love that you got the group of us at the end, because this is the enthusiastic group that wants to share all of the exciting things. I don't know how five minutes is going to be enough, but we'll try.

But I like that Jesse talked about 18 to 24 year olds, because for our county, that's who we want involved in helping us get the word out. And we don't use the 18-24 year olds just to say, you guys are the ones that aren't registering to vote. You guys are the ones that aren't voting. In our office, we use them to help us promote. So I talk to every single one of them that works in our office, and they give us the ideas.

They tell us why people aren't listening. They tell us what will work. They tell us every social media platform that people are looking at and not looking at. So in our office, we have Stanford and San Jose State and a lot of community colleges. We have a very good partnership with both of those organizations. Stanford votes, San Jose State votes, SJSU votes.

Every single one of them, as soon as we have an event, wants to participate in anything that we're doing. Right now, we have a partnership with them to build, they have a class that they're trying to do to figure out ways that they can help the elections community. And I know there are a lot of neighboring counties that go to Stanford. Including you. No, a lot of neighboring counties that go to get information from them.

But even their media group, they're constantly wanting to see elections and see how they can contribute to getting the word out. Their camera crew was at our special election all day on Tuesday, just trying to get the inside scoop on how the process works and to watch everything behind the scenes. Speaking of partnerships, we do have a lot of partnerships with all the local, the 49ers or any of the organizations in our area. Awesome way to get the word out.

Those are people that want to be part of voting. They want to say, hey, we're a vote center. You can use this as a vote center, even if it's during a football season. So we like to use partnerships like that. And I know a lot of people talked about funding, but we are very creative with using. I think the Secretary of State mentioned it, that we will figure it out, funding or not. We will find students that want internships for free because they want experience.

We will find libraries that need a bookmark, so we'll make a bookmark. We'll find different ways to reach out into the community. I mean, funding or not, we have a million voters. Of course we're trying to reach every single one of them. But whenever we have partnerships, we give them every opportunity to be a part of it. Our LAAC and VAAC Committee, we invite them to our outreach events so they can help us recruit members, so they can help get the word out.

Voting Accessibility Advisory Committee. Language Access Advisory Committees.

Yes, sorry about that. I know there's Fred's here, and he's on our LAAC and VAAC. And we also have a Voter Education Outreach Coalition, our VEOC, and it is made up of community partners that get together and contribute to the different ways that we can get out in the community. In our county, we like to say we used planes, trains, and automobiles to get the word out because we were like, let's wrap a train. Let's get an airplane floating over all the counties.

We even used shopping carts. So we had advertisements on shopping carts. During COVID, we said, what are people still doing? They're still getting gas and they're still going to grocery stores. So we got advertisements on the gas station media, TV, on the gas station ads. They were still going to the stores. They had to buy food, so we were getting them on the grocery carts.

The great opportunity that we have in our office is that we have members, I mean, staff in our office that speak languages, all the different languages. We have 14 different languages in our county, and we have on staff to help us translate every single thing that we have out there. We have how-to videos subtitled in all of the languages. We did flyers in Braille to reach those voters that are unable to see. And then we also have our how-to videos are also in ASL.

So any opportunity that we can, even for our media day, we invited them to do ASL during the presentation. So people were understanding how to use the equipment, even during our media. I mean, during our media day, we had our vote center equipment so people could try it. The members of the disability community came out and helped us. Our LAAC and VAAC members were there to help demonstrate how easy the equipment was to use.

So, I mean, just using all the community partners any way that we can to help get the word out helps us a lot. We have digital billboards.

We did a local voter registration act which reached out, like Jesse said, to the young voters that we need to get pre-registered to vote, to the voters that are unhoused, that don't know you could still register to vote if you're unhoused, and then to our voters that were formally incarcerated, just so they know where to get the resources, so they could still register to vote and they can know their voting options. So a lot of good ideas coming from our office. A lot of them.

They do come from our young 18 to 24 year olds that work in our office. They're very active on our social media.

30 seconds.

Okay. We have a lot to say here. It's okay. No, but just using every partnership that we can to get the word out. One of the most important partnerships, I think we used in the last election, we worked with the Second Harvest Food Bank. This is a food bank, and they're wanting to get the word out about registering to vote to their communities that are. We put a flyer together that was in Spanish and English.

We partnered with all the counties around us, over 120,000 mailers that went out to them. They invited us to go help people register to vote and to help at the food bank in the areas that we know that we need to target. So that was a really good partnership that we did with them and San Mateo. But thank you.

Fabulous. I love your enthusiasm. Okay, well, next here from Ryan Ronco. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. Chair Pellerin, Assembly Member Bennett. Thanks for this invitation. Ryan Ronco, Placer County Clerk Recorder, Registrar of Voters. You're right, it's a mouthful. We love to brag about our numbers, right? So let me brag a little bit. Placer county currently ranks first among counties in the state for the percentage of eligible voters who are registered to vote.

So while it's not a competition in any way, we are proud to report that 94.2% of our eligible voters are registered, according to the figures that were just published by the Secretary of State's office. When we're not first in the state, we're often second. And it's quite an accomplishment for a county that's growing as fast as Placer is. Placer is also blessed with an active electorate. In the November 2020 presidential General election, Placer's turnout was 88.3%, and that number is not an outlier.

We are historically 10 to 15 percentage points above the statewide average. So what are we doing, then that's translating into all of this civic engagement, and I can't point to one thing, unfortunately, but because of time, I'm going to narrow it down to, again, this idea about youth and talk a little bit about our high school outreach program. First off, I don't care about voter registration programs, and I don't really like voter registration programs, that the sole purpose is just to register voters.

I think it's counterproductive. I think it's incredibly expensive to have people who never plan to vote on the voter rolls, especially when we must now send them vote by mail ballots, voter information guides, and other mandatory mailings demanded by a very well meaning Legislature. Of course. But in order to promote lifelong participation, we invest our time in a significant portion of our county budget in a robust high school voter outreach program.

If I had to choose one thing that I would say that makes Placer counties different, our participation and our engagement, it would be this program. While many counties have school outreach programs, what makes this program unique is we visit every public high school in our county, all 25 of them, including the continuation high schools. We speak to every senior class in the classroom level and not in assemblies.

And while we register, or we re-register or we pre-register the youth to vote, we also concentrate on what it means to be an active, informed voter. We explain when they will get their voter information guides and what those are used for. We teach them that voting is like studying for a test and not to guess, but to skip races or even whole elections if you didn't do your homework.

We bring political party representatives to the class to explain what it means to belong to a party. While they've certainly heard of what a Republican is or what a Democrat is, maybe they've never really talked to one. And they certainly likely have not spoken to a Member of the Libertarian Party or the Peace and Freedom Party. So having that opportunity expands their minds and plants seeds.

Finally, when my predecessor started this program back in 1995, he found the number one reason youth did not vote was that they didn't know how and they didn't want to be embarrassed to have to ask for help. So we bring our voting equipment and blank mock ballots with us so that it will demystify the voting process. What makes this program different and successful is that we concentrate our message on why voting is relevant in their lives and it produces results.

The last meaningful report I saw on this kind of county-level youth participation was Dr. Romero's report when she was the founder and project Director of the California Civic Engagement Project back in 2013. She analyzed the youth turnout in the 2012 election, and in that report it showed that Placer County's 18 to 24 year olds were actually participating in voting somewhere in the 40% to 57% range. She didn't actually name counties specifically in that report.

Since my time is short, let me also mention we do have other outreach programs. We obviously spend a lot of time with senior outreach. I'm the County Recorder, so I send notices with property deeds when people are moving into the county to let them know it's time to register. And we take the time to explain voting safeguards to people who have election integrity questions. And there are many in Placer County that do.

And finally, I want to give a shout out to Placer County's amazing active local political parties. Our Democratic Party and our Republican Party are the real heavy lifters when it comes to registering voters in our area. They go to the shopping malls, they go to the festivals and fairs. They knock door to door, and they're registering people all the time. They deserve a lot of that credit for our participation, the civic participation we have.

So in closing, if you're looking for more civic participation in California, I would encourage you to fund counties with outreach money for robust high school outreach programs. It's been said that where your money is, your heart will be also. If that's the case, I implore the state to invest in our youth so they learn how to be engaged, informed, and lifelong voters. If we plant those seeds at a young age, they will bear fruit, I promise you. And thank you so much for this opportunity.

Fabulous. Thank you so much. Do you have any questions?

I'd like to make one comment? And that is, it makes common sense to me that reaching out to young people, high school students, early college students, is the best opportunity we have. I just think of somebody who's 40 years old. The idea of actually getting a mindset change for them is just much more difficult than somebody when they're in that formation stage, and particularly when this is their first opportunities to start.

Vote. So I think you guys are on to something. And it was, for me, uplifting to hear the successes that you're having. So, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Yeah, I would echo that, and I'm super excited about the work you're doing and the fact that you're not just doing it 30 days before an election, you're doing it year-round. And having some sustainable, ongoing funding to do this in important work is critically important. And it was interesting as far as you telling the kids that.

Think of it as studying for a test, because if our turnout were a grade on a test, we'd be at a solid B in some elections, and in some elections, we'd be failing. So increasing turnout is just imperative. So I really admire the work you do and utilizing all the different venues that you have. I want to put a call out to Taylor Swift, because if you can get out here promoting the vote, I think that might be our answer to increased turnout.

Just a thought. Yeah, we have a few more minutes here, so I just want to just talk a little bit more about the direct efforts to bridge that gap and programs specifically tied to that. And I know planting those seeds early is super important, but do you have any other kinds of programs to help with that? Bridging that voter participation gap we're hearing about?

You're turning to me.

I'm looking at you.

Yeah, we definitely do. Like I mentioned, we have a senior outreach program, and it's very important not to lose the seniors as well. Senior citizens tend to move quite a bit, and especially in Placer County, we have a very high senior population. It's very large because we have two Sun City retirement communities and a lot of great weather year round in placer, very similar to the high school outreach program.

We go to the communities and talk about the importance of being a registered voter, make sure that their information is up to date. But a lot of times, these seniors don't know that they can skip a race. They don't know that if they don't vote, that they're not going to be removed from the rolls. So that education piece is still critically important, even at that age.

I was going to say, so we are actually embarking with the Haas Jr. Fund to have some additional funding, and I've got the county to match the dollar for dollar on that. So we're going to pilot some work in the March election with the hope of going for a part two for the General election.

And the way we've done it is I've brought in our GIS mapping, folks so we can start to identify, I refer to them as cold spots in terms of not only registration, but voter turnout. So we have those data points to be able to identify those neighborhoods, and we cross reference that with census information so we can know these are communities that we need to do a more focused outreach effort on and working with the nonprofits.

So it's nonprofits that we're looking at to help us get the word out and encourage voter turnout. The focus is voter turnout because we want to see those numbers increase over time. So we're excited about that project, and we want to see how it goes in March with the idea of doing even more come November. And so I'm appreciative of the Board willing to do that match for that initial set. And then Haas has already put some additional funds out there.

So if we'd show that track record, we can go back to the board and say, look at what we were able to do. But it's looking at the data, right? Looking to see where are those cold spots, as I called them. And it was funny, we had a conversation, and people referred to it as cold spots. And I'm like, okay, that's my terminology. So it's not really a technical term, per se, but it is where you see people that aren't turning out the way they should.

So we're doing some aggressive work with the local community and nonprofits on that.

And one of the things I wanted to touch on is, you said, bridging the gaps in our county, especially, there are a lot of voters that don't feel comfortable and don't know and don't want to speak out because English isn't their first language. Our voter language workshops are amazing, and people actually come to them and listen and tune in because they want to hear the materials in the language that they're familiar with or in Tagalog.

They want to hear someone speaking to it, and they want to know the people that are talking are the people that work in our office. So if you have a question, you come to our office, you could speak to them in that language. So our voter language workshops work very well in that way, and we do Facebook live in that language. So that also helps get the voter feeling more comfortable if English isn't their first language.

Well, thank you all for being here today. I really am very excited about the programs you're doing and follow you all on social media just to learn. So thanks again for being here. Okay, our next panel, we are going to be moving to improving language access. And we have two people here today, Deanna Kitamura, who's the program manager and senior Staff Attorney for Voting Rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Asian law. And we have Pedro Hernandez, Legal and Policy Director, California Common Cause.

So great to see you both here, and we're going to have five minutes each, please.

Good afternoon again. I'm Deanna Kitamura, and I lead the Voting Rights Project at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Asian Law Caucus. Asian Law Caucus is the nation's first Asian American legal and civil rights organization. Pedro Hernandez and I are part of a statewide coalition called the California Language Access Work Group. We recently released a report that includes a roadmap for language access in California, and we have copies for you. Now, I want to focus on a handful of points today.

The first is the need for language assistance for many Asian American voters. Asian Americans make up nearly 14% of adult citizens in California. We are the fastest growing racial group in the state. Among US citizens in California, about 32% of Asian Americans speak English less than very well. Now, that number varies when you look at the different Asian ethnic groups. The highest limited English proficiency rate is among Vietnamese Americans at 52%. Cambodian, Chinese, Korean and Mong limited English proficiency rates range between 37 and 40%.

There's clearly a need for language assistance. Currently, there are federal and state requirements to provide language assistance when language groups hit different population thresholds. Under federal law, when a community reaches what is a relatively high county threshold, the county is obligated to provide comprehensive language assistance. That means they need to provide translated election materials, they need to have bilingual poll workers, and they need to do in language outreach.

Now, under state law, we have a much lower threshold that's targeted at the precinct level, but it is not comprehensive in terms of the assistance that it's provided. Voters get a translated sample ballot. It is not votable. It's just a reference. Some counties do an excellent job going beyond what's required by law. They either do this by voluntarily covering additional languages or providing votable translated ballots. For example, L.A. County, we heard from Dean Logan. L.A. County provides additional languages.

They provide votable ballots for all their covered languages, and they have them available for all their voters. In other words, the access to the translated ballots is not limited to voters living in a specific precinct. And that makes sense because vote centers are not precinct based. Now, you may be wondering, how does language access relate to today's topic of voter turnout and participation?

When San Diego started providing comprehensive language services under the federal law, voter registration rose by more than 20% for Filipino Americans and by almost 40% for Vietnamese Americans. And the benefits have been confirmed by a national study.

In 2015, professors Fraga and Merset published a study, and I'm not going to go into the details, but the bottom line is that where they have comprehensive language assistance, they saw voter registration increase in the Latino community by 15% and voter turnout increased by about 15% to 18% in Asian American communities. So there is a link between language assistance and higher turnout.

We're co sponsors of AB 884, authored by Assembly Members Low and Cervantes, and if it passes, it would provide comprehensive language assistance in more languages for the large language groups in California, and translated votable ballots for smaller groups. We believe this will improve turnout and the voting experience. Now, the last point I want to make is a point that others have made, and that is the need for outreach and education. And what I want to stress is that outreach and education should be in languages used by voters.

My organization has a sister affiliate in Los Angeles, and I worked at that affiliate for almost a decade. And I had colleagues at that time that ran a Get Out the Vote project that was targeting Asian American low-propensity voters. My colleagues partnered with community-based organizations and volunteers, and they made calls in over a dozen languages. And sometimes the voters would say that was the very first time anyone ever reached out to them regarding any election issue.

And my colleague, I don't remember the statistics, but my colleagues would tell me that they did see an increase in voter turnout among the people that they reached out to. So the lesson is that when campaigns are only reaching out to high propensity voters and only in English, it's really up to the counties and up to community groups to do the outreach to others.

The California Language Access Workgroup that I mentioned held listening sessions in six languages, and we heard from participants a real desire for more information in terms of the voting process and what was on the ballots. And so I'm going to end by just saying that counties and community groups need funding to be able to conduct robust outreach to disenfranchised groups, including in language outreach to voters who speak other languages. It makes a difference when we reach voters where they're at.

Thank you so much, Pedro. Please.

Thank you, Deanna. And thank you, Chair Pellerin, for the opportunity here to engage with organizations like us on this important voter issue. My name is Pether Hernandez. I am the Legal and Policy Director at California Common Cause. Currently I serve on the State Language Access Advisory Committee. And since 2001, I have been part of the California Language Access Workgroup, which is a collaboration of 12 civil rights and community-based organizations.

I want to highlight, I guess, another fact to add to the list of facts today, which is according to the U.S. Census Bureau, California is home to 6.5 million individuals over the age of five who are limited to English proficient. Language barriers are a key factor to driving these disparities. According to a 2020 Census survey on voting and registration, Latinos and Asian Americans are more likely than all other voters to cite difficulty with English as a main reason for not registering to vote.

In September of this year, our group, the California Access Workgroup, published a roadmap highlighting a path for ensuring that all voters, regardless of their English language proficiency, can vote fairly and equally. And the roadmap provides four overarching goals. They're not overreaching, they're overarching for California.

We believe that you should consider in your deliberation in notes that California should first build the nation's first multilingual election system by translating all election materials and expand the languages that receive assistance to serve more voters, set statewide standards to improve and expand the decimation of in language resources, third, allocate public and private funding to community based organizations and local election offices so they can effectively and consistently help all Californians cast a ballot, and fourth, mandate reporting on county language access services and work with state officials to develop and implement language access law enforcement mechanisms.

Due to the time, I will focus my comments on the first three. However, we brought, as Deanna said, copies of our report for you to have, and the public can access the report via a bit.ly link. So it's bit.ly/calaballotreport first which is the most pressing and within reach, I think for the state is to modernize the language services the state provides.

What is important to understand is that the Voting Rights Act, which is a federal law, only applies to Spanish, Asian languages, Native American and Native Alaskan languages. In 2019, an appellate court limited California statute to the same languages categories as federal law. This means that growing immigrant and refugee communities in California that speak Arabic, Armenian, Somali, Ukrainian and a whole host of other languages do not have access to languages assistance under federal state law.

A handful of counties voluntarily provide language assistance in additional languages, but it's not required under state law. Currently, the state leads the country with the largest Middle East and North American populations. Yet other states are moving ahead of California by including languages not covered by federal law. Oregon offers translated materials in Arabic and Somali, but also in French and Ukrainian.

Washington state has begun to offer in-language votable ballots in Somali Michigan offers registration forms in votable ballots in Arabic, and these in-language ballots that are offered in Michigan are offered on the same voting equipment currently in use in California. Notably, other California agencies, including the Employment Development Department, provide more language services than our elected officials in terms of the number of languages they serve. To address these concerns, the state language access law should reflect the diversity of the state.

I'll move on to my next point here, which is there needs to be statewide standards for the dissemination of in-language information. Unfortunately, access to accurate information remains in crisis. A 2020 Lieben Lab report suggested that Spanish language media offered little or no response to misinformation, which allows conspiracy theories to spread. And according to a report by the Pai Yabbao, a Chinese fact checking site, there is also increasing election fraud, misinformation, and disinformation among Chinese Americans, who are the largest Asian community in the country.

To address this, election officials, we want to see better design of election communications and services with limited English proficient voters in mind, including prominently flagging in language information at all touch points between election offices and voters publicizing in language services, making it easier for voters to request translated materials, and partnering with community-based organizations to help inform and share this.

We also, Deanna noted, Our listening sessions and what we also learned from those listening sessions is that many limited English proficient voters cannot access assistance when they need to cast a ballot. And this is kind of one thing that I think is important to note, is that many residents in the state live in what are considered linguistically isolated households. These are households that have no individuals 14 years age of older who speak English very well.

The state's own California EnviroScreen report highlighted linguistic isolation as a factor in increasing vulnerability to pollutants, but also noted that this is also impacting people's ability to participate civically and access information and services.

20 seconds. Yeah. 20 more seconds, please.

Okay, so I'll wrap it up. I also want to know that there are opportunities to kind of further strengthen the Language Access Advisory committees, both at the state and local level. I think California has paved the way for the nation, and I think we need to have the state hold this truth to power and ensure that language access is a priority for the state. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Do you know if all counties have a Language Access Advisory Committee now?

If they're a Voter Choice Act county.

Then that's a requirement.

Yeah, but there are a number of counties that have voluntarily or had a preexisting LAAC as well.

Okay, so what do you think are the main things that a county elections official can do to ensure people have access? Because I know, like you said, that Los Angeles provides votable ballots in how many different languages now? 19. Yeah. And I know Santa Clara County also has like 15 plus languages that you're doing and providing staff and people who are on staff who speak all those languages. What other tools and things can people do, especially if you're at a county that's smaller like Shasta?

Well, having an outreach person is really a fantastic idea, but we understand that some place like Shasta might not be able to do that, but they can partner with organizations to understand where communities live, where they go, how they can do outreach to them. And that's one of the purposes of the LAAC, is to be able to provide that kind of resource to the county officials.

Yeah. We've seen other local government kind of do intergovernmental surveys to find out what are the touch points in what communities that have been interfacing and which language needs they've been identifying as well. So there are ways to kind of assess which languages. But the state does provide a list of languages. How can we bring more people in?

I think that really comes down to having trusted voices, and having these trusted voices also help inform the information that is passed along to the community as well, meaning it would be more culturally sensitive as well.

I appreciate your time today. I wish we had more, but we're going to move on to our last panel. So thank you so much.

Thank you. How many should I leave?

Yeah, well, we'll take some here and then you could put them somewhere where people can gather. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Okay. And we're now on to our last panel before public testimony, and that one is on engaging communities and improving participation perspectives of the community -organizations. So we have Kristen Nimmers, who's the policy and campaign manager for California Black Power Network. Fred Neeson, managing attorney for Voting Rights Practice group, Disability Rights California. Veronica Carizales. Thank you. Vice President of Policy and External Affairs, California Calls.

Good to see you again. And Alejandra Ramirez Zarate, board Member, League of Women Voters of California. Come on up.

I think both chairs can be moved. Please. This is okay. So thank you all for being here today. And we're going to allow four minutes each, if that's okay, and then we'll get into some questions. So, do you have an order you want to start with or just go with what we have on the agenda? Kristen. Start with Kristen.

Thank you for inviting me to this panel. Good afternoon. My name is Kristen Nimmers. I'm the Policy and Campaign Manager with the California Black Power Network. To give a little bit more background about our organization, we are a coalition of 35 Black-led, black-serving organizations throughout the state.

We represent 10 different counties across the Bay, Central Valley, Inland Empire, Los Angeles and San Diego, and we engage in policy advocacy as well as year-round voter engagement with significant focus on reaching the hardest-to-reach voters, including system-impacted voters, folks experiencing homelessness, young voters, low-income and Black immigrant communities. Our members run voter registration programs and we've contacted hundreds of thousands of voters and residents as a partner with the state doing census outreach and through our own year-round civic engagement programs.

So through this work on the ground with voter engagement and service-providing organizations, we've really gained a deep understanding of the barriers facing impacted voters. And in the overview that you provided for this hearing, we can see the many strides that California has made in improving our election voter registration processes. But to improve these voter gaps that still remain, we really have to move toward and push forward bills that have the most vulnerable populations in mind.

So some of the barriers that are still facing voters, and especially Black voters, are lack of understanding of the voting processes due to gaps in outreach, voter registration, distrust of some of the updated processes, and limited language access. So when it comes to voter education and outreach, more needs to be done to expand the outreach to hard-to-reach voters.

And for Black voters in particular, more needs to be done to improve voter data and the ability of organizations to find Black voters using outreach and turf-cutting tools like PDI. Black voters are the most impacted across issue areas, which makes our communities one of the hardest to reach. More than half of the Black population in California is experiencing poverty. We are a third of the House's population. We make up a significant percentage of those incarcerated or impacted by the legal system.

And as a state, we also have a significant population of black immigrants. All of these factors make us harder to locate and harder to reach because trusted messengers are needed, door-to-door contact is more impactful and there's greater distrust of certain systems as a result of historic racial discrimination and disenfranchisement. For example, Black voters prefer in-person voting to mail-in ballots because they feel it's more secure.

They also may be distrustful of using online registration systems or sharing personal information with folks holding registration drives. And so these factors also mean that traditional campaigns are not doing outreach to our communities because they're not considered likely voters.

With all of the changes that have been made to our voting systems in just the last few years, the onus is really on the state to truly invest in funding voter education and collaborating with CBOs, not only on the outreach itself, but also on the most effective messaging and campaign strategies to reach these impacted groups, like integrating some of this communication and registration strategy into service provision. This lack of understanding and hard-to-reach factors also impacts registration and the accuracy of the voter file information.

So many of these conditions have worsened since the pandemic. The housing crisis is growing. Black residents are facing gentrification and displacement and moving out of traditional Black neighborhoods in LA and the Bay into areas like the Central Valley and Inland Empire, and they aren't updating their registration, their numbers or other data that's necessary to reach them.

And these are also areas that don't necessarily have the same infrastructure as urban centers like the Bay or LA, where they don't have as many community groups doing this outreach, where the registrars are beginning to understand how to deal with greater populations. And again, when it comes to impact to community, they face significant barriers in registration as well. Houseless voters have to navigate registration without addresses, without consistent access to computers, phones or other technology needed to register.

In 2020, we reenfranchised thousands of voters through Prop 17, but many of those eligible voters are not sure of their rights and don't want to risk legal complications or ramifications for registering. Right now, less than one in four formally incarcerated people are registered to vote. And so we need policies that further automate our registration systems like SB 299, which removes confusion and the need for voters to take more steps to even get in the door of this process.

Lastly, there are also unmet language needs, especially for Black immigrant voters who speak languages that are not traditionally included in those that are translated, which I think was reflected in the last presentation as well. In 2019, 62% of black immigrants spoke a language other than English at home, and this amounts to thousands of voters across the state, but very rarely are voting materials offered in African languages.

Closing voter gaps really requires that we invest in education, that we support policies that make it easier for vulnerable communities like our houseless folks, our impacted folks, Black immigrants, formerly incarcerated folks to access these processes. While voters really want to be a part of these processes, there are barriers to those communities in terms of accessing this education, in terms of accessing the materials, in terms of even having the technology or things like that to respond. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Okay, we'll go ahead and move on to Fred Nisen and you also have a PowerPoint with what you're presenting today as well. Yes.

Thank you for your invitation and your leadership. My name is Fred Nisen, and I am the managing attorney for the Voting Rights Practice Group at Disability Rights California. As the statewide protection and advocacy organization for people with disabilities, DRC is dedicated to ensuring the rights and services of voters with disabilities throughout California. California has made great strides making elections more accessible. Bills like Assemblymember Low's AB 683 required the SOS to establish a Voting Accessibility Advisory Committee and Assemblymember Pellerin's AB 545 will bring us curbside voting at all voting locations. However, based on our work we know that many voters with disabilities do not know about these changes and the many ways they can vote privately and independently in California. Many voters don't know about RAVBM, how to use it, or whether it is accessible to them. Many voters don't even know that every voting location has BMDs.

One more minute.

A recent Rutgers University study showed that there was a 3.6% voter participation gap between voters with disabilities and voters without disabilities in 2022. Mail and print does not always reach voters with disabilities. For example, printed materials are not accessible to blind voters, and some voters with low vision. Also, voters with disabilities who are homeless may not have easy access to their mail. The VCA approach requiring all types of media and community input is a best practice, but needs more money. Thank you.

Thank you. And thanks for submitting your comments in writing. We'll have those posted on our website. Thank you. We'll now move on to Veronica.

Great. Thank you chair, Madame Chair, Pellerin for this opportunity to be here with you today. My name is Veronica Carrizales and I represent California Calls, which is a statewide alliance of community-based organizations doing outreach to new and low-propensity= voters, mostly low-income voters of color across the state. Right? So part of our goal is to increase voter participation of the communities most impacted so that they can have a say on policy issues affecting their communities.

Today, we've all heard about voting reforms that have been passed with the intent to make voting easier. But even with the voting reforms, we're still seeing voter participation gaps, right? We're still seeing voter participation gaps for low-income voters, for black voters, Latino voters, AAPI voters and voters with disabilities. Right, Fred? So not to mention the 4.6 million voters who are eligible to vote and not registered to vote. And these people are predominantly people of color, immigrants, renters and low-income.

Sometimes when we talk about low voter participation rates, I hear legislators and I even hear some advocates say, well we've done everything that we can do, we've made it easier for voters to vote. But they just don't want to vote. Voters don't care. I've even heard that it's voter's individual choice if they want to register to vote. So if they choose not to register, well, they made that choice.

I want to just raise some concerns with these arguments, because these arguments make it seem like the low participation that we see in our democracy is solely an individual choice. And they ignore some of the largely challenges that low-income communities face. Right. Low-income communities face issues related to poverty. Regions in Los Angeles and the Bay Area are facing eviction tsunamis. Right. Voters are moving from one region to another region, to the inland regions. They're moving in with family.

Voter information is not being updated because voters are just trying to survive. These statements ignore voters distrust of government. There's a lot of misinformation. I always worry when family members say, I got the information on TikTok, because I'm like, oh no, it was probably wrong. So there's a lot of misinformation and there's historic barriers, right, to civic participation, that has prevented some communities from voting. Voters are not understanding the election changes or their rights.

So similar to what Fred mentioned around the disability community, the community that's disabled, not understanding the changes. When we talk to voters on the doors, we're finding that voters don't understand how to vote. They don't understand the changes. They don't know where their polling locations are. The other challenge is civic deserts. Right. We have regions in the state where voters are not being contacted by major campaigns or where there's no movement infrastructure that can connect voters to the election process.

And I guess the final challenge that I have is the growing influence of corporate interest and corporate money in our elections. They're using the initiative process and they're using the referendum process to overturn laws that were intended to protect low-income communities. And they're using their money to misinform voters and attack our democracy. So the end result is that the people most impacted are less likely to have a say and less likely to be represented.

And this is important because more and more consequential policy issues are being determined on the ballot. Issues that voters care about, like funding for education, funding for affordable housing, expanding voting rights. All these issues are on the ballot, and these are issues that when we talk to voters, they care about. They want to have a say. So what are some of the solutions? So the first solution is creating a path to 100% voter registration. That's the first step.

Let's make it easier for people to participate by passing automatic voter registration. That's the first thing we can do. The next solution, partner with organizations in your region that do voter outreach. Right. Organizations like mine, California Calls, a Million Voters project. We've talked to 1.8 million individual low-propensity voters since 2016.

We've seen a 5 to 10% voter turnout increase for Black, Latino, API, and young voters. When we talk to them, because we're using trusted messengers and because the people that are doing the outreach, they know the terrain both physically and politically, and they're able to inform them on how to vote. And lastly, I think we want to see more funding for voter outreach, right? We need to sound the alarm on the crisis that we have on our democracy and treat the crisis the same way that we treated the pandemic. Right?

We invested millions of dollars and we did a massive get-out-the-vaccine effort. Let's do the same with voting. Let's recognize we have a crisis in our democracy, and let's invest so that we can have a truly authentic democracy in California. Thank you.

Thank you so much. And then our last but not least speaker, Alejandra Ramirez-Zarate.

Good afternoon and thank you Chair Pellerin. My name is Alejandra Ramirez-Zarate. She, hers, ella are my preferred pronouns. And I am a Board Member with the League of Women Voters of California. And the League of Women Voters provides resources to close the participation gap and ensure voter engagement is more informed and more representative of California's diversity. We're very appreciative for the opportunity to speak during this hearing and to discuss the voter participation gap.

And I wanted to share an anecdote from someone who's worked many years to close the participation gap and someone who sees myself and my family represented in the numbers we discussed today. I grew up undocumented in this country for over 25 years, working to close the voter participation gap. But I was never able to fully take advantage of being part of that democracy in a full way. And I was finally able to adjust my status and vote for the first time last year.

The 2024 presidential election will be the first time I get to vote for our President. So I wanted to thank all the folks in this room who are dedicated to doing that work. Thank you. And as other panelists have stated, despite significant progress, we know racial disparities continue to persist in voter registration and voting. We've heard it time and time again, 4.6 million eligible voters are missing from the rolls.

In 2020, voter turnout rates for eligible Asian American, Black, and Latino Californians were between 11 to 20 percentage points lower than those of white Californians. And we've all seen numbers, we all know the data. And as it has been discussed, also the many barriers low-income communities face. I wanted to double down on the systematic and intentional approach to leave our communities out of our democracy. It's not apathy. It's structural racism. I wanted to note the stigma that comes with being labeled a low-propensity voter.

Many folks don't vote because they don't care. They may not vote because they think their government doesn't care. We need to bridge and address that. And so with this in mind, the important work the league is doing to close the voter participation gap includes candidate forums and voter guides that provide substance coming from candidates to connect them to everyday communities, helping to reduce that distrust in government we talked about. Local leagues run these candidate forums across California to try to help make that connection.

The Easy Voter Guide that we've developed is a project that continues to produce that good, plain language-accessible messaging that goes out to voters. It's available in five languages, English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. We worked with trusted CBOs on the ground, community-based organizations, to disseminate that easy voter guide. And another great example of reaching voters is, as we all know, peer-to-peer networking. In 2020, the League ran a youth GOTV program and we reached 4 million.

Again, that word low-propensity, youth voters or folks who are less likely to participate. And although we've done a lot to close the voter participation gap, what we haven't tried to do is to consistently and actively fund these culturally linguistically competent education and outreach by these trusted messengers. So we saw that working well with the 2020 census, the state invested $187.2 million, and that was funding that was used by these community-based organizations.

California had an excellent response rate, including in many particularly hard-to-count census tracks. So we know we have to resource both election offices and the culturally competent community-based organizations to engage people and shrink that participation gap. In 2022, so just last year, our coalition made a voter education and outreach budget request, and this was championed by a group of legislators led by Assemblymember Aguiar-Curry. Although we weren't successful, we're starting to pave the path to be able to get these requests funded.

So we know the work is already happening. We just need to trust the folks who are already on the ground and fund them for their work. Lastly, the League has drafted a resolution to achieve our representative electorate. And this is a resolution we're trying to get introduced early next session to help with educating legislators and the public and set the stage for next steps. And we're going to continue, as always, advocating for resources needed to close the voter participation gap.

Again, the trusted messengers are already doing the work. We just need to fund their work, trust their voices and experience, and we're all in to expand democracy for all, particularly for historically disenfranchised communities. Thank you.

Thank you so much. That's incredible. All the work you guys are doing. Let's see. Just one question, then we're going to move to public testimony. Are there election reforms that have widened participation gaps for certain underrepresented communities?

Maybe I'll start. I think yes, I think allowing voters to vote on multiple days and to register to vote same day has made a significant difference, especially because we do need more investment in this outreach. Even if folks aren't registered, even if they're at a polling location that is new to them, then they have the ability to register.

And also just thinking about impacted communities that are like focused on to survival, it also helps them to be able to get childcare to be able to actually make the time to vote. So I think that those have been significant changes.

Your question was if there were reforms that widened voter participation gaps so made it worse?

Oh, I thought you meant close them.

Either way, I think we're probably more interested in reduced, sorry, reduce the voter. Are there reforms that you think really hit to reduce our voter participation gaps? And yes, same day vote registration is key.

Same day voter registration I think is good. Vote by mail, right? In 2020, we saw a big increase in voter participation because of vote by mail. So I think that was a good thing that we were able to do that. And then, Fred, were you going to share something as well?

I wanted to say the bill to make signature verification more easy to meet. But now we can ease their fears a little bit.

Yeah, the signature verification tools. We have to allow voters to cure that, either unsigned voter ballot envelope or a signature that doesn't. No, absolutely.

Chair Pellerin, if I may add, also wanted to highlight the partnerships that happen on the ground with local registrars. So wanted to shout out Dean Logan in L.A. in the rollout of the vote center models and partnering with, for example, the L.A. League of Women Voters and trusted CBOs to help inform the placement of the vote centers.

And as we have implemented that, from then on, being able to troubleshoot through any existing problems that may arise. So just the strength of those partnerships with the registrars.

Thank you all so much for your participation. I wish we could talk about this for days, but unfortunately we want to get to some public testimony. I did want to continue to allow 30 minutes for public testimony, so we will go a little bit beyond 05:00. Okay, and so where's my notes?

So as far as public testimonies to go, as a reminder, we got 30 minutes, starting with members of the public who are here in the room. Each person will have 1 minute. If you can make it shorter, please to make your remarks. If your point has already been made by another speaker, please just state your name, organization, and a me too.

Members of the public who are unable to participate during this portion of the agenda or have lengthier thoughts to share with the Committee are encouraged to submit written testimony which will become part of the official record of the hearing. And again, if you wish to testify by phone, the call in number is 877. Can we have it quiet, please? Here? Hash, please. Phone number is 877-692-8957 and the access code is 131-5437 again, we'll start with the folks here in the room. You may begin.

Good afternoon. My name is Samuel Troy, and I'm a policy fellow from Alliance San Diego. Our mission is to build collective power and to create an inclusive democracy. Organization is founded and led by an immigration lawyer, and we affirm the dignity and rights of immigrants and refugees across all of our programs and campaigns and have assisted thousands of eligible immigrants in their nationalization process in mobilizing them to exercise their newfound right as voters.

When we joined the California Grassroots Democracy Coalition, first question we looked into was how to upgrade to the safe, automatic voter registration, or SAVR system would impact non-citizens. What we found is that the current system creates more risk for non-citizens. Just during the most recent election cycle, we have identified over a dozen non-citizens being erroneously registered. We believe SAVR, as demonstrated in nine other states, better protects noncitizens from error and bridges the gap. We are proud of our democracy in California

Time.

And we can and must work towards 100% voter registration.

Time's up. Thank you so much.

Patricia Mondragon, regional policy manager for Alliance San Diego. We convene the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, a coalition of 50 organizations advocating and assisting immigrants and refugees in our region. We also convened the Southern Borders Community Coalition, have a legal rights Department that does naturalization services, and we ran, a COVID immigrant relief fund. We talk to and work with immigrants on a daily basis and actively encounter non citizens who check the wrong box by mistake.

Here's a statement of one of those naturalization clients. I went to the DMV to renew my California ID. As I was filling out the forms, I accidentally checked on the box that asked if you want to register to vote. I did not intend to do this. There was a lot of words in there, and I'm very limited in my English language, so I filled out the form entirely, thinking it was only to get my new ID.

I finished and submitted the forms, not knowing I accidentally had registered to vote. It was never my intention to register to vote.

Time.

It was an accident. Please support SB 299.

Next speaker.

Good afternoon, Chair Pellerin. It's been a lengthy hearing, but I appreciate your openness to hearing us out. So I'm Arjun Ayyappan. I'm the President of the Cypress College Associate Students, which is Cypress College student government.

I'm speaking here today to offer a student perspective on why secure automatic voter registration could help us all students across all California. My first time going to vote, I was turned down by poll workers because I hadn't registered to vote, despite thinking I already did. So my first year, I held a voter registration booth to ensure this wouldn't happen to others. I planned for weeks and drove for 2 hours there and back to the Orange County Registrar of Voters to get free registration supplies.

After 4 hours of holding a registration booth, we only registered 20 students. Fast forward to this year. When I was elected President of our student government, I was given the platform and funding to host another voter registration booth, but this time with much more success. In just 2 hours, we registered over 300 students. While this may seem like a massive step forward, it's a drop in the lake compared to what SB 299 could do for our students and the future of the state, by extension.

So, as a student, I humbly come here to ask for your support. How students can be more engaged in our politics. How can students be more engaged in our politics when they can't even vote or know if they are even registered?Thank you for supporting.

Thank you.

All right, good afternoon, Chair and Committee Members. I am Cassie Nguyen, Associated Student Senator, here to represent my peers in support of SB 299.

Throughout this hearing, I have denoted that many of you, such as Kathy, Bill Bennett, have realized the importance of youth organizations. This September, I noticed the introduction of Assembly Bill 610, which I also saw was also sponsored by Pellerin. So, AB 610 automatically registers students for free public transit. According to climate surveys, 50% of community college students face an insecurity with one of their basic needs. I have been a part of that statistic.

However, AB 610 immediately addresses those issues by making it so it automatically registers students to vote. Or not vote, sorry, public transit, but SB 299 serves that same purpose. But it gives the student the chance for automatic voter registration, and it gives them a better opportunity to vote. Through better access, students are the chance to change our future in legislation, and Senate Bill 299 provides that chance to be given. Again, I genuinely urge the Chair to support Senate Bill 299.

Time. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Jose Mendarez, and I'm formerly incarcerated. I spent last 16 years of my life behind bars for a crime that I was not guilty of. While in that time, I got to work with, ironically, with the ACLU of Southern California on Unlock the Vote, I worked with them in helping other incarcerated folks understand their rights and how they could vote. It was a nightmare.

And that's why I'm here in support of secure automatic register for voter registry, because for all incarcerated people and everyone, it got to a point where we had to smuggle forms in. There was a lot of misinformation going on about who could vote, who could not vote. The forms require that you use a blue or black ink to fill out and mail to the voters office. We didn't have that, not in my county. We had golf size pencils. So just being able to exercise something that is a human right.

Time. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

And this is not a hearing on SB 299, but yes, your comments are appreciated. Thank you. Next, speaker.

Good afternoon, Chair Pellerin. I'm Dora Rose with the League of Women Voters of California and the Deputy Director there. Closing the participation gap is simply one of the biggest democracy problems we've got in California today. We've passed a lot of laws designed to remove impediments and to increase turnout. Some impediments still exist.

For example, the Reparations Task Force specifically calls for increased efforts to restore the voting rights of people who are completing prison sentences and to provide better access to those who are currently incarcerated in jails or reentering the community.

And we can make progress on that by getting ACA 4 on the ballot, which would allow people who are currently incarcerated to vote by building voter registration into the Division of Adult Parole processes, and by making it easier for people in jails to exercise their right to register and to vote, as L.A. is doing with their mobile vote centers.

But even once we've removed all these impediments, it's critically important to resource culturally competent, community based organizations to engage people to recognize and use the power of their vote.

Time. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

You guys are good. Getting as much in there in a minute.

Good afternoon. Chair Pellerin. Alejandra Ramirez-Zarate providing public comment now, in my capacity as Policy Director for OC Action.

And OC Action is API Latinx Labor Environmental Justice Progressive Alliance in Orange County, responsible for collective community and power building in the region. And nearly to 20% of eligible voters in California are not registered, and they're largely people of color. And again, we made great strides towards making easier for people to vote, but we are missing nearly 4.7 million eligible voters. In Orange County, 60% of eligible voters are people of color, but only 43% of the electorate are people of color.

Across the county, more than 355,000 eligible voters are not registered to vote. Effectively excluding them from our democracy and secure AVR would help close that voter participation gap. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Maggie Tsai. I'm the state Political Director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, where we mobilize 30,000 Asian American voters statewide to fight for working class environmental justice communities of color most impacted by corporate polluters.

We are overwhelmingly part of the 4.7 million left out of elections that limits our participation in democracy to clean up our own neighborhoods. Our communities in the Bay Area and Southern California demand automatic access to their right to vote in order to elect lawmakers from our communities who can move environmental policies that ensure we live in neighborhoods free from toxic waste, chemicals and pollution.

I urge Assembly Elections Chair Pellerin and the state Legislature to support secure automatic voter registration, SB 299, and to reclaim our democracy. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Kayla Asato and I'm with Orange County Environmental Justice. So one of the orgs, that was mentioned earlier and the comment before that. As an EJ org, we tend to work with low-income immigrants of color since they're the people most impacted by environmental toxins and pollution.

They also tend to be a population that can vote but isn't registered to vote because they don't know that they're eligible. Passing SB 299 would help us increase voter participation and EJ action as a result, help my community by moving SB 299 forward. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Pellerin. My name is Laiseng Saechow, also with California Calls.

So we're here today to really urge the State of California to invest in recurring state funding for voter education and outreach and really to work with trusted messengers out in the field doing this work to be able to close the participation gap. While we tackle the participation gap, we really must work to remove other barriers to registration. Obviously, there are 4.6 million people in California who are eligible and unregistered, and we know that those are our most marginalized communities.

When poor and working class communities are struggling to pay rent, pay for gas, oftentimes we need to make it easier for them to participate. We need to make it easier for them to register, to vote, to participate in our electorate. And so bills like SB 299 would really help move us forward in that direction.

Good afternoon, Madam Pellerin and Members of the Elections Committee. My name is Andrew Baldwin from Cypress College, Associated Students representing OC Action.

Growing up in a Native American household, I witnessed firsthand the underrepresentation of Native American values in the government, often overlooking policy making. I saw the neglect of Native American values and priorities through the system built initially to oppress them. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 34% of all voting age Native Americans nationwide are not registered to vote, though through the passage of SB 299, California Native American voters will automatically have a voice and the opportunity to enact positive change for their communities.

I urge Assembly Elections Chair Pellerin and the State Legislature to support SB 299 and secure automatic voter registration to reclaim our democracy. Thank you.

Excuse me. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, and thank you to you and the rest of the Committee Members who opened this opportunity for a dialogue. My name is Sedalia King. I'm the associate Director of government Relations for Catalyst California, and Catalyst has a long fought to increase the political power of communities of color and their marginalized identities.

I also want to uplift again the notes that OC action and California Causes made, echoing the support of our partners and the rest of the community members here. And despite many of the steps that's taken to make voter registration simple and accessible, registration remains a critical barrier preventing millions of Californians from hearing their voices in our elections. So this conversation is very much needed. We look forward to continuing these conversations and pushing for SB 299.

As Catalyst is one of the supporters for that piece of legislation, but this upgrade will ultimately register more eligible Californians, update existing registrations, and better protect non.

Time. Thank you very much.

Registration. Thank you.

Hi, Assembly Member Pellerin. My name is Nina Long and I'm a policy coordinator with APIs for Civic Empowerment, or API FORCE. We work year round on the phones, knocking on doors with some of the lowest propensity API communities.

And what we're seeing out in the field reflects what we're seeing in Dr. Romero's data, that our current voter registration system is leaving Asian Americans behind. We can't abide by a status quo that sees our low-income communities of color most impacted by our policies, but having the least political power in this system. That's why I'm here, to support SB 299 or secure automatic voter registration.

There's nothing that we can do to supercharge our voter outreach efforts more than ensuring that every eligible voter is registered. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Brian Molina. I'm the Legislative Campaign Manager for California Calls. I care about upgrading California's voter registration system because I want the people who vote in California to look like the people who actually live in California. The 4.6 million eligible but unregistered voters are mainly people of color, and particularly those in the Latino community.

Folks from communities like mine live the life and death consequences of policies passed in this very building every day. We deal with the violence, the poverty, underfunded schools, clinics, lack of upward mobility, and housing. For far too long, voices from communities like mine have been silenced. SB 299 is an opportunity to give us that voice, and thank you.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair Members. Christopher Sanchez with the Western Center in Law and Poverty want to echo the comments of my colleagues who have discussed the secure automatic voter registration and offer our support in that, but also the unique perspective that the Western Center has as it relates to unhoused Californians. Unfortunately, we know that a lot of Californians are currently unstable, don't have a mailing address that's reliable, which would actually prevent them from being able to access or to be able to register to vote.

We think that the unhoused we've seen has increasingly wanted to participate in elections. We've seen that during the recall and other important elections, and we believe that this election is going to be critical because we've seen so many people be displaced, be unhoused and not have a reliable mailing address. And so therefore, we would just ask that funding also be looked into educating county registers and their volunteers on how to interact with individuals who are unhoused.

Hello, Brittany Stonesifer from ACLU of Northern California again. I just wanted to thank Chairwoman Pellerin for having this robust conversation and bringing in multiple different solutions. I know that we can disagree about whether front end or back end is the right approach, the safest approach. But I wanted to add one more potential solution that we haven't talked about today for closing registration gaps, which is enforcing NVRA in compliance and designations to its fullest extent. We have many NVRA agencies in California right now.

Not all of them are doing what they're supposed to do under the NVRA. There's also additional agencies, including criminal legal agencies like DAPO jails and probation apartments, which we could designate as NVRA agencies and require them to offer streamlined voter registration opportunities during existing covered transactions. And we can also fund NVRA agencies to do that work. Thank you.

Hi, I'm going to try and talk really slow because maybe you need a break. My name is Sharon Dolente.

I am a voting rights advocate in Michigan, but I moved to California two years ago. One, we passed AVR through a 2018 ballot initiative, and our declination rate is much lower than yours is right now. But in addition to that, we just sent to Governor Whitmer a saver Bill that will extend automatic voter registration to the Department of Corrections and Medicaid agencies. These were largely supported by all the same kinds of organizations and individuals and community groups that you see behind me.

So I hope you will jump on the bandwagon and follow with us on this journey. Thank you.

Hi, good afternoon. Tim Valderrama with the Weideman Group on behalf of NextGen California, I want to thank you for having the hearing today. I think it gets lost sometimes. People have talked about the 4.6 million eligible but unregistered voters. Just to put that into context, that's about the size of the State of Louisiana. Right? So we're talking about a lot of people. And this policy policies that we put forth today affect real lives.

I also want to just say that as Mr. Uberiani talked about, NextGen did do some policy research on this and looked at Colorado, wanted to really compare their front end system to the back end system, and they saw a 74% increase in registration in that state. So we look forward to working with you on policies that other states have pushed forward and hopefully we can come together with a reasonable solution. Thank you.

Greetings and good afternoon. My name is Victor Valladares. I am here with Resilience Orange County and OC Action and here in full support of Senate Bill 299 or secure automatic registration. This Bill is important one step in refining, enhancing the integrity of California's voter registration process. Resilience Orange County. It aligns with Resilience Orange County's mission and vision to ensure a fair and just society.

It will strengthen our democratic process by ensuring that voter registration is accurate and accessible to all, while maintaining the integrity of elections here in the State of California. Thank you.

They keep coming. Okay.

Good evening, Chair Pellerin. My name is Jesus Ramirez Jr., student trustee of Cypress College, here with associated Students of Cypress College, and as well here to represent OC Action. I'm just here to say a me too to my President Arjun Ayyappan, my Senator Cassie Nguyen, and my other Senator Andrew Baldwin. And I strongly urge that you please support Senator Bill 299. Thank you.

Thank you, Assembly Member Chair Pellerin, for hosting this informational hearing and for your graciousness for extending public comment.

My name is Jackie Wu and I'm a former election official from Orange County, the fifth largest voting jurisdiction in the country, under then Registrar Neil Kelly, who's been brought up during today's hearing. Specifically, I'd like to talk about. It's been wonderful that we've expanded on so many election reforms. Specifically, same day voter registration really changed the game. Instead of everyone coming to one elections office for same day voter registration, you could now go to any vote center if it was a VCA County.

However, after that transition, when we still had same day voter registration, we now saw long lines for same day voter registration, which caused hours and hours throughout the state and untold numbers of voters who saw the line and turned around instead of casting a ballot or registering to vote. What we have right now in California is

Time. Thank you.

Thank you.

I'll keep my comment brief. My name is Jonathan Paik most call me JP. I'm the Executive Director of Orange County Action and a Member of the California Grassroots Democracy Coalition, representing over 148 plus organizations in support of SB 299 secure automatic voter registration.

We have talked a lot today about what it means to be able to actually be able to trust and believe in the faith of trusted messengers across the State of California, to be able to best inform what it means to be able to best inform, to best strengthen the electorate and enfranchise our communities that are left out of our democracy. This trust and messenger.

Many folks flew early in the morning from 350 miles away, 400 miles away, to be able to be here, to be able to speak to that. So we ask that the Committee actually follows the same. Please support SB 299, especially as we go into the new year. Thank you.

So let me just now check with the moderator to see if there's anybody on our phone lines for any additional public testimony. We're checking.

And we have no one on the phone lines at this time.

See, everybody flew here. This is fabulous. Okay, so we're on time. So I just want to thank everyone who participated in today's hearing, including all of our expert witnesses, the members of the public who testified during our public comment period. And really thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to fly up to Sacramento and to have your voice be heard and the Members of the Committee who were able to participate. I hear the message.

We definitely want to meet voters where they are. We're looking for ongoing, sustainable funding. Trusted Messengers are key and building those partnerships with community-based organizations, county registrars of voters, absolutely imperative. Improvements are needed to ensure that we have this accurate voter file. And there's much still to be done to bridge the gap with the groups that are helping us to do that. Thanks to the Secretary of State for participating and thank you all for being here today. Have a great evening and with that we're adjourned. Thank you.