Senate Standing Committee on Elections and Constitutional Amendments

All right, good afternoon, everybody. The Senate Committee on Elections and constitutional amendments will come to order. Senate continues to welcome the public and has provided access to both in person and teleconference participation for public comment. For individuals wishing to provide public comment via the teleconference service, the participant toll-free number is 877-266-8216, it's on your screen, and the access code is 570096. We also have representatives who are participating remotely. For our remote participants, please mute your phone or computers. Select unmute before you begin speaking, when your panel is called.

Our IT personnel will put you back on mute when you are done. Once recognized to speak, please make sure you can be seen on the screen. State your name and then you are ready to address the Committee. For today's hearing, we'll be hearing all of the panel of witnesses on the agenda prior to taking public comment. Once we've heard from all the witnesses, we will have a public comment period for those who wish to comment on the topics on today's agenda.

This afternoon, we will be providing oversight to one of the most significant changes in California elections over the past decade. The California Voter Choice Act, authored by Senator Allen, changed how counties conduct elections and provided voters with additional options before voting.

Excuse me, when voting. Under the Voter Choice Act, voters are sent a vote by mail ballot and able to visit any vote center in the voters county prior to and on election day, both to return a ballot to fix an issue and to vote. The Voter Choice Act started with five counties and is now being used in 27 counties. Two additional counties, Placer and Humboldt, will be using this election model in 2024.

We've also seen a lot happen since that Senate Bill 450 by Senator Allen was signed into law. The Covid-19 pandemic required elections to be conducted differently. For example, prior to the pandemic, all active voters in vote center counties and in all mail ballot counties automatically received a vote by mail ballot. Voters in traditional polling place counties received a vote by mail ballot only if they requested one.

Legislation passed by Senator Umberg and Senator and, excuse me, Assemblymember Berman, during the pandemic required a vote by mail ballot to be sent to all active registered voters in California, regardless of the county elections selection, their model. This practice was made permanent in 2021. Counties also need to find venues for polling locations and polling workers to staff them. The pandemic created a situation where election officials needed to balance the safety of the public and election workers with voter access.

In the end, it required everybody to adapt to a changing environment and California's elections officials took on the task and conducted these elections very, very well. Now, this changing environment is what brings us here today. Our hearing will provide the Senate with information about the Voters Choice Act from those who have been involved in this process.

We will hear from the Secretary of State's office, from Dr. Mindy Romero, who has been studying the Voter Choice act, along with county election officials and community organizations, all of whom, I know have spent a considerable amount of time dedicated to helping the Voter Choice Act succeed. Now, this hearing is not simply a checking of the box. We want to hear what's working and what's not working, and most importantly, recommendations to improve the Voter Choice Act.

This is our opportunity to reflect on what we have accomplished as a state and for us to evaluate the current state of the Voter Choice Act and consider what changes, if any, need to be made. With that, I want to invite any of my colleagues on the dais here if they have any comments to make. I want to give them that opportunity. Senator Allen?

Well, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, let me thank you and the Committee staff for organizing this hearing and the authors of this report for the very, really excellent work diving into implementation of the Voter's Choice Act over the last few election cycles. This Bill was very much a product of this Committee. Your predecessor, Scott, Darren Chesson, and we worked really closely together, traveled to Colorado, learned about the model there.

We did this Bill back in 2016, and it was in response to the record low turnout numbers that we saw in the 2014 election. I think we're down at 31% of all eligible voters cast a ballot in the general election. And it's true that that was a low turnout election in general. But California was, I think, 43rd in the nation, even in that cycle. So it was a low interest election nationwide, but we were way on the low end nationally.

And so went to, we learned about, we were going to talk, the pro tem kind of tasked me as the chair and the Committee with really doing a deep dive into this issue. We learned about hybrid models. We learned about models from all over the country. As I said, traveled to Denver, went and saw the election process in play there.

And as has been mentioned, as we all know, we just tried to create a more flexible system, a way that is reflective of the realities of life today, where people aren't necessarily available at one place on one day, in one location to vote under one type of circumstance.

But we now created all this flexibility, allowing for vote by mail, of course, requiring VCA counties to send these vote by mail ballots to all voters and then switching from the traditional polling places to better equipped vote centers with 10 days of early voting, maximizing convenience so you could participate in person if you wanted to, or if you wanted to drop off a ballot at a vote center and allowing for also same day voter registration to reduce reliance on provisional ballots, which had become a major problem as well.

And I will say, reviewing the report, I'm pleased that in the end of the day, it seems pretty clear that the act has largely been successful in providing the intended flexibility to voters, in spite of all the challenges of the pandemic and all of that. The report talks about increased transparency. It talks about increased accountability in the VCA election process, allowing for community engagement with counties on voter outreach and vote center planning, more accessibility to voters with disabilities and language barriers.

Fewer issues that were being reported by voters that participated in person at the vote centers. One of the problems we always had in the old days was that there'd be these terrible problems that would pop up on election day in all these different sites, and there was so little time to fix the problem because you're literally on election day. And if there'd be a problem at a site all of a sudden, that could lead to a hang up.

And oftentimes that person's one opportunity to go vote. They made the plan to go vote on that one day and that problem couldn't get fixed. Whereas now you can get the bugs taken care of really early, you also have far fewer centers, so you're not reliant on such a massive workforce. You have people who can really get trained and can really be focused and really help to make the situation work better at those sites.

And you get those issues addressed early so that by election day you don't have as many problems. We also, you know, now see that provisional voting, which of course really delays a lot of things, has nearly vanished in counties that have adopted the VCA. Now, there certainly are some areas for improvement that the reports mentioned about resources, spending some time looking at how we can more efficiently and effectively reach historically marginalized voters.

I think increased involvement from the Secretary of State's office could be beneficial in maintaining statewide coordination and collaboration between counties and some of the voter advocacy organizations that I know we'll be hearing from today. So I'm really looking forward to the perspectives. One other thing that came up in the report, I know, was that you see a massive uptick in participation as we get closer to election day.

And one of the things I do remember, a lot of the county officials were concerned about the voter centers being open as long as we provided them to be open, and the report does. There are some data that suggests, how important is it that we have all these centers open 10 days in advance? I'm open to that conversation. In the end of the day, this is really about making it easier for people to vote in a safe, secure, and effective manner.

And that's why I just really appreciate the Committee's attention to this and this really important hearing today. And I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you, Senator Allen. Senator Umberg.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just some thank yous and kudos. First, let me start with Mr. Matsumoto. Thank you very much for your analysis both today and throughout the course of your time with Elections Committee. I know from personal experience how thoughtful and analytic and passionate you are about this subject. So thank you. Mr. Chair, thank you for your leadership in this space.

California takes pride in, now takes pride in being in the forefront of making sure that those who are eligible to vote have an opportunity to vote. And I appreciate that. And Senator Allen, of course, with your original vote center, legislation was very important, and we saw how important it was during the time of COVID when we expanded it. And we provide everyone for mail in ballots.

And from the time in 2016, when we were incredibly low, till 2020, where we had the highest turnout since Harry Truman was on the ballot, we are engaged in continuing to make sure that Californians who are eligible vote have access to the vote, that we enfranchise them. Sadly, some other states are going in the opposite direction. We're proud here in California that we are not moving in that opposite direction.

In my own lifetime, I've seen California move from a point in time when people with signs that said "non-citizens may not vote," dressed as police officers, could stand out in front of polling places and even question voters as they approached the polling place. Not illegal at the time, which was the catalyst for me actually getting into electoral politics till today. So I also want to thank all the registrars of voters.

We have good ideas, and then we launch these good ideas, and our good ideas then have to be implemented by someone, and sometimes that's a little more challenging. And I'm grateful for all the registrars who've stepped up over the last few years to make sure that what we think are good ideas are implemented and executed in a way that enfranchises many people as are eligible. So with that, thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Senator Umberg. And I certainly would only want to reinforce your praise for our county clerks out there, some of whom are here and are going to participate, but they really are at the heart and soul of our democracy, protecting our democracy and everyone's right to vote, and joining us in encouraging as much participation as possible. So let us begin with our first presenter. Let me invite LaKenya Jordan to come on up.

Ms. Jordan is deputy Secretary of State for the Office of Policy, Planning and Implementation. Ms. Jordan oversees the implementation of the Voter Choice Act. And Ms. Jordan, we welcome you to our Committee. You can begin whenever you're ready.

Good afternoon. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair and Members of the Committee. My name is LaKenya Jordan and yes, I serve as deputy Secretary of State for Policy and Planning, but also the Voter's Choice act. And I'm here to deliver remarks on behalf of Secretary Shirley N. Weber, California's first African American Secretary of State to be nominated in its 170 year history, which again speaks to the greatness of our state and where we are today.

So, with that being said, I'd like to prepare a few remarks for you. And I want to talk about, first, our vision around strengthening California's voting environment. So, as California is the fourth largest economy in the world, the most diverse state in the nation, we also have the largest voting system in the nation. Under the leadership of Dr. Secretary Shirley N. Weber, pardon me, a leader that has always stood for equality and everyone having a voice, California is uniquely positioned to strengthen its voting environment.

Building upon the hard-won past collaborative efforts of former Secretary Padilla, our counties, this esteemed Committee, our advocates and those who helped to establish the Voter's Choice Act, Secretary Weber has developed a strategic vision that focuses now 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, which means that we are intentional about including the considerations of our most hard to reach populations and to our historically disenfranchised communities.

As of today, California has registered nearly 83% of all its eligible voters, which is one of the highest registration rates in the country. So we are also a focus on ensuring access to the process through voter education and outreach by supporting our counties and our communities around the state. The Voter's Choice act enables counties to deliver elections in a manner that allows voters to have access to voting and voting options.

It also requires extensive voter education and engagement of the community for the development of the education and outreach plans that are most important leading up to an election. Unfortunately, despite the requirement in VCA counties to conduct education and outreach, there is no state level funding in the upcoming election for 2024. When first enacted in California, VCA only encompassed five counties. However, it grew to 15 counties in 2020. And when Secretary Weber took office in 2021, we had 12 additional counties join that effort.

Today, as you heard earlier, and as you said earlier, under Secretary Weber's Administration, the VCA now includes 29 counties, which encompasses half of all counties in the state and 76% of the state's registered voters. The sheer numbers alone underscores the importance and urgency that as a collective effort, we identify voter education and outreach funding to support our counties and our voters. I want to talk a minute about the education and outreach funding effort Secretary has made so far.

When she took office in 2021, we immediately began working with the Legislature to authorize funding for VCA counties, and we were successful in getting that funding. And then in 2021 and 2022, leading up to the primary and general election, she also came over and was successful to negotiate funding for those years. She also successfully negotiated, pardon me, the funding for additional staffing, which was needed for oversight compliance and for education and outreach, and for research.

It's important to note that VCA counties have a very high level of education and outreach requirements. So beyond providing more days and more ways to vote, there are specific activities that every county must take. One specific activity is delivering two direct contacts to all voters. That tends to be 17 million people, and the budget and burden of that particular requirement is heavy on counties. I think you'll hear from them today. They'll tell you themselves that they would like to see modifications in that requirement.

The other high cost is in the 11 day vote center, securing locations for 11 days at a time, we've heard from counties have been a burden on them as well. But most importantly, it's the community engagement piece. And we think that piece can only be done with the partnership of community-based organizations and the counties themselves, because you have people from different communities who have different needs, and so trying to meet voters where they are is of super importance.

So I also want to talk about just that piece, community engagement. Our office has actually worked with several organizations over the past election. Secretary Weber had a vision to establish ground level partnerships, and she began a program called the Ambassador Program. Through that program, we've been able to partner with organizations such as NALEO, the YMCA, League of Women Voters, United Way, and several other sororities and fraternities and universities and colleges throughout the state.

It's a growing program that encourages voters to be amplifiers of voter engagement in nonpartisan ways. And through that effort and others, the Secretary has included several outreach efforts over the past two years. One, our office engaged in 91 voter education and outreach events during the last couple of years, Secretary Weber herself delivered and participated in 37 events around communities that were hard to reach in California.

Over 9 million Californians have received voter education and outreach emails from our communications team, and we were able to successfully register 18,000 college students through our ballot bowl. And over 2000 new citizens have been registered through our new citizen ceremony. So, as previously stated, much funding is still needed for education and outreach. In terms of trends California's voting environment, we will still need to include other education and outreach efforts.

That includes other aspects of SOS, including our business filings, our archives units, and just ensuring that there's access to beyond voting, there's information that SOS and many communities actually need. On the note of our VCA reports, we want to talk about the fact that we were able to make some new strides. Previous data when we arrived did not include all populations, so we really didn't have a full picture of how communities around the state were actually participating.

But through extra efforts through University of California UCLA Voting Rights project, we were able to provide additional analyses that now give visibility to African American populations, Native American populations, and disaggregated AAPI populations where before that they were kind of clumped together. It helps us to understand the needs in different counties, in different communities. Finally, I want to close with the task force.

As you all have heard, the VCA task force was created in 2018 and it consists of several advocates and county election officials, as well as members of the Elections Committee in both Senate and the Assembly, and this group was instrumental in helping to look at the VCA as it was being developed.

The VCA's task force sunsetted though, in January of 2022, and the Secretary's Office is now currently working to administratively reestablish a voters task force/community advisory committee voting that will include county elections officials, language advocates, and advocates from the disability community, as well as language access community, as well as members of the Senate and other community-based organizations. We believe the task force can assist with key areas for policy considerations. Whether or not there's a need for regulations, we think there's a question on the table about that, and how to best overcome challenges such as how do we reach historically hard to reach populations and historically disenfranchised populations? We expect to committed task force in 2024, and our offices met with several members of the task force to get their input on current processes in counties, and we're currently working to complete an application to start that process for the VCA task force,.

There's an opportunity to also work with non-VCA counties to determine which aspects of VCA should be implemented statewide or not. It's important to have the conversation to include those counties as well. And some of the VCA seems to work better for some counties than others, such as the 11 day voting model. And the state has already seen aspects of the VCA actually work well, particularly with VBM, the vote by mail ballot voting.

And then I would say also finally, that the dropboxes are increasing. If I may say anything else, I just want to say thank you to the Committee for convening this Committee hearing. We really do think that the VCA is an invaluable piece of legislation that has impacted our state. It does appear to be giving voters more participation opportunities, and we'd like to work with you to see how we can improve it. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Jordan, for your good work in this area. So you mentioned the hope that there's continuous funding going forward, and you've mentioned the formulating of the VCA task force as kind of a project in the year ahead.

Sure.

Are there any specific changes that you would recommend in the VCA act to be done differently than how they're being done today?

Well, I mentioned several challenges with the VCA. I included the direct mailers. I talked also about that. That was a high cost to a lot of counties. I talked about the 11 days of voting. There are several pieces, though, that I think a sweeping change would impact counties differently. And so our thinking is that you don't make those changes unilaterally. You need to really convene the folks who are impacted by these changes and talk through what they could look like.

But there are notable changes and notable challenges, and I don't think anyone is agreeing yet on what they should look like. So today we are not prepared to say it should change one way or the other.

Okay. And we'll look forward to hearing perhaps some suggestions from colleagues in this field as this hearing progresses. You mentioned that in the 2022 election cycle that the Legislature provided your office with 5.0. I see it here on my notes, $5.8 million. And you referenced 91 voter outreach efforts, 9 million emails, 18,000 folks registered. Can you give any more detail about how the money was spent, though, specifically?

Sure. And for that, if you don't mind, I'd like to call up our budget and funding expert, Tamara Johnson, who is very detailed on how we spent all the money that we received for voter education and outreach and more detail.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Can you just introduce yourself for the record.

Yes, sir. Tamara Johnson, Secretary of State's Office. I am the Chief Financial Officer.

Johnson, welcome.

Thank you. So, as indicated, the Legislature provided $5,842,000. Of that amount included, about 5 million for local assistance funding and 800,000 for state operations. For the local assistance funding that supported county's education and outreach requirements efforts outlined in the elections code. Additionally, these funds supported state level messaging about voting options being made available to voters in VCA counties, social media toolkits, staffing resources.

We were able to bring on some positions to support the state funding side of that, and then also other social media messaging on various platforms, outreach and education materials as well.

Did you do that with in house staff or did you contract out?

We contracted out for a portion of those activities as well as using internal staff as well.

I would request just in a follow up to the hearing, it'd be great to have a copy of those contracts.

Yes, sir.

Okay. That's great. So was that in the form of a lot of grants to the county? Did they put in specific requests and then you decided whether to fund them or not?

So the way that we would issue the funding out or the way that we did is through contracts and through grants, and then they would have to meet certain criteria.

Okay. And then. Thank you for that. Appreciate that detail and that follow up. Ms. Jordan, one other question that I had. I did notice in the staff report that the reports that are supposed to be provided within six months of every election have not always come in within that time frame. Could you speak to that?

Sure. So as the VCA grew, as we said, from five counties to 15 and then to 22 and then to 29, the workload associated with actually analyzing data for all those counties on the basis that's outlined in SB 450, which includes race, gender, of course, language access and disability, required a greater workload than was anticipated. And so, as you heard, also, we were ramping up staffing.

Also, we had to put funding in place and contracts in place that was not in place when we got to office. And so our team spent the time ramping up to get those things in place. Today, we actually have, like I said, a more robust report that includes more populations and gives you more data. We've also streamlined our reporting to separate the race and the language and disability reports to come after.

Initially, we tried to get them all out at the same time, but we've now decided to have the Vote Cal data, the automatic data, be analyzed and produced your report first, and then the other reports are supplemental, which I think you're starting to see on our website. But initially it was a challenge as the program grew, as you can imagine, as staffing had to come along. And then we were also trying to make sure we included more populations in that process. It delayed some things.

Great. And certainly, I'm sure the Committee appreciates the work to try to provide as much data as possible.

Yes, sir.

Those reports. Do you feel like going forward that you'll be able to meet the statutory requirements of six months?

Yeah. Secretary Weber has worked with our team to, again, now have the reports come out separately. So with us being able to generate the general data off of just age and political party affiliation, very general electronic information that can be produced on time, it's the additional reports that will be a little more challenging. So if we have funding to do research, we'll be able to produce additional reports like on language access and race and disability.

But those reports are going to be contingent upon funding, for one, getting it in and getting those in place, and otherwise you'll get those afterward.

Senator Allen mentioned in his opening remarks that it's his belief, and I certainly wouldn't dispute it, that the Voting Choice Act has increased participation. But it's a challenge to actually be very clear on exactly what and why people participate or don't. One of the things that we strive for as policymakers is really hard data, objective hard data so that we can make good choices. And sometimes just looking at election cycle, through election cycle, that really isn't always so clear.

That's right.

What's working and what's not. And I don't know if the secretary has ever engaged in more objective data collection surveys to try to understand barriers, more specifically that we should be more aware of and responsive to. I'm not aware of any efforts that the Secretary's Office has really engaged in that space.

Yeah, I'm happy to, actually, pleased to tell you that we just actually are finishing up a study with Sacramento State University where we did just that. We surveyed folks after the election, the general election, to find out knowledge, if people were aware that they were in a voter's choice act, that they know their voting options. How is it working? And that report we expect to actually have out in January.

So we do have additional data coming forth, and we are actually looking at drafts of it now, and we'll be pleased to share it with you.

Fantastic. Great to hear that. That certainly will help all of our work improve. Senator Umberg, Senator Allen, any questions for--Senator Umberg?

Thank you. And thank the Secretary for all the efforts that you have made collectively to again, enfranchise as many Californians who are eligible to vote, that they do vote, any counties that have been resistant to those efforts?

So I laugh because I think that the Voter's Choice Act, first of all, is voluntary. You know that. And so I think there are a lot of factors that go into whether or not a county actually can do it. I'll tell you this, I'll tell you that counties have attempted to do it, but getting that local support is super important because, one, you have to have the budget to do it, so you have to have your county Board of Supervisors support it.

But also challenging the misinformation or disinformation is really key. There's a growing, I think, misunderstanding about the Voter's Choice act that many counties are fighting. So it is to say that I think that a county may want to become VCA, but the barriers to becoming VCA may be more than just giving people more access. It tends to be more of a funding related issue.

And whether or not people actually understand what their voting really options are, which is kind of ironic because VCA is there to help create those options. But if you look at the state of things, you have the majority, the high population counties actually becoming VCA. The other half that are not yet VCA, I think are smaller counties, are maybe more remote and just haven't gotten there yet.

So I think as we continue to refine VCA and work out the things like the 11 days of voting and the requirements on counties to do some things like direct mailers, I think you're going to see participation probably go more towards VCA. But I think those are challenges for our current VCA counties. And so anybody trying to become VCA is thinking through those things very seriously.

So if we cut down the period in which the vcas need to be open, if we cut it down, perhaps you can provide us what kind of cost differential there is. If we went, for example, down to, say, four days, just from Friday through Tuesday or something like that.

Respectfully, I think that our counties will give you a better idea of that because they're the ones bearing the cost. So the Secretary does not bear the cost of the 11 days or four days or however many days you have open. But I think you're going to hear from your panel next that the cost will be different depending on.

I'll defer my question. Okay.

Yes, and I apologize. I wish I could answer, but I think it's better suited for a county. Thank you.

Okay, any other questions from panel Members? Good well, Ms. Jordan, thank you for your presentation. Thank you to the Secretary for all her good work in this area.

Thank you so much for having us. And should I stay here, or would you like me to go back?

I think you are welcome to stay here in the hearing room. And if there's other things that you want to comment upon, we welcome you back.

Okay. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Let me next invite up Dr. Mindy Romero. Dr. Romero is the founder and Director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, and she has done considerable amount of research on the Voter's Choice Act. Dr. Romero was the principal researcher and advisor for a project that provided an analysis of the Voter's Choice Act and provided recommendations. Dr. Romero's team put together a number of those recommendations for us to consider moving forward. Dr. Romero, welcome to the Committee.

You can begin your testimony when you're ready.

Thank you very much for having me. Is this on?

Not yet. Let's try that one more time. Try one more time.

Hello. Testing, one two.

Why don't you hit the button in front of you?

Nothing's happening.

Okay, we'll get that figured out in just a moment.

All right. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here today. Chair, Committee Members, Senator Allen, Senator Umberg, and of course, staff Scott as well, for inviting me. I am pleased to walk you through, give you a brief overview view of the report that you just described, Senator, and also in the Q and A, answer any questions that extend beyond the report, since we have done a considerable amount of research on the VCA and produced a number of research reports on the VCA over the years.

But I will focus on this report today. And what I'd like to say at the outset is I was the principal advisor but not the author of this report. This was very much a production and reflects the interpretation and interests and focus of the Committee Members.

And so there'll be a few times where I may just kind of make a distinction between a recommendation that they've made that might be not different, but just, we wouldn't go as far in terms of our data, but otherwise, very happy to represent the report today. I'm going to make sure that the PowerPoint is working. And there we go. All right. So jumping in because I do have limited time, eventually it'll work. There we go. Okay. Should be able to see that. Great. All right.

So as you've said, the report is on the impact of the VCA. We want to be really specific that this is looking at the voter participation gaps that are present in California. Has the VCA impacted those voter participation gaps and the overall accessibility of the election process?

One of the things that we confirmed in this most recent set of research that we conducted was that when you think about the VCA, people have different ways of interpreting its success, different definitions of success, whether you're a county elections official, whether you're a voting rights advocate, whether you're a community leader. Right? Or maybe whether you're potentially even the SOS. So we're here focused on those participation gaps, turnout, accessibility, access and experience of voters with the VCA.

As you've also mentioned, though, that we are limited to some extent, looking particularly at those participation gaps, because research and the number of election cycles that we have does not allow us to definitively, clearly make a causal connection to really parse out when we look at turnout, what the impact of the VCA and all of its many elements are on turnout. So hopefully that makes sense. All right.

And of course, the report author was Lori Shellenberger, and it was funded by the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund. There were a number of methodological approaches that we took. It was a very large, extensive study, counted analysis of voter guides and other work that was, other materials that were available to us through election officials, their outreach messages and so forth. Interviews with election officials, with advocates across the state, working in the elections, field surveys with organizations and with elections offices.

And then, of course, a quantitative analysis of the voter file. I'm going to cover. Let me see if I can get rid of this one little thing on my screen to make. There we go. I'm going to cover the successes and challenges, the impact as we know it, at least descriptively, on turnout and voting method, what the State of that is, and outreach and education under the VCA.

So again, I'm going to go through this really quickly, and I know that there is a couple of panels after me that are going to give you all the detail that these points deserve, or at least I assume, much detail, and they'll be able to flesh it out right from the perspectives that each of the panelists have. So, advantages, there's a strong infrastructure, mechanisms for public engagement and accountability, particularly around voter outreach that the VCA requires. That's already been discussed today. Flexibility, of course, in voting.

The idea that people have more ways, more days, more choices and an understanding, I think, at least for many, when the VCA was being considered, knowledge and understanding and a respect that people not only want choices, but many groups need choices, right? There are variations and patterns in how people want to vote, choose to vote, need to vote, and so forth. Election officials report more public input is helpful. They like getting that input that they have to reach outright to receive, acquire.

Organizations report that when they do participate, that when it's solicited, when they're engaged, which doesn't always happen, but when it does happen, that they feel that their input at least is generally incorporated into EAPs and that's a positive. Vote centers are easier to staff, fewer problems reported, provisional voting numbers going way down and so forth. Let's talk about the challenges. So the dramatic disparities that are entrenched in our electoral process here in California as well as the US remain, right?

We have significant in any given election. In the 2022 General Election, we saw a low turnout number, about 43%, but we saw turnout much lower, right, for voters of color and for young voters, 10, 20, 30 percentage points lower. This remains. Turnout is a little higher in VCA counties. Many VCA counties, at least in the initial cycle or two, started off with higher turnout.

Initial cycle did, and we aren't seeing, again, we can't make that causal connection, but we aren't seeing now that that number has grown. Any significant difference in turnout between VCA and non-VCA counties and any difference in the gap, right, that the disparity situation that again, a concern for many, but not all, when we talk about the VCA, but a focus of this report. Stakeholder surveys and interviews revealed that the mechanisms for public engagement and accountability are being underutilized.

So many groups not being fully aware or aware at all that they can and should be engaged, that they're not hearing from election officials or election offices, not being recruited, if you will, or engaged with. And even though there's a positive when much of that information is utilized, it's not at the level I think that many had hoped to see, right, when we first saw the implementation. Right? The Bill passed SB 450 and the implementation.

And again, county is not as engaged, especially more recent VCA adopters. The 2018 cycle saw a massive engagement of statewide organization, local organizations, the Secretary of State's office at the time really getting the word out about the VCA looking for successful implementation and engagement by voters. And we've seen less of that in recent years and less of it, although a lot of good work by counties, less of it with the recent adopters, and of course, fewer funding availability or funding options as well.

There's a lack of public awareness of EAPs, lack of clarity, transparency of how outreach dollars are being spent, lack of statewide leadership and holding counties accountable was consistently cited by interviewees, especially since the VCA task force has lapsed, and I'll talk about that in a moment. And lack of accountability for county voter outreach plans. So these plans are required. They're sent to the Secretary of State's office. Secretary of State's office have to specifically approve the outreach component of EAPs.

But there's a feeling that there is wide variation in the quality of these eaps, although a lot of good work is not all bad, right? A lot of good work that's going into these EAPs, but a great deal of inconsistency in the quality, the detail, and specifically about how much they reference and talk about and have a detailed plan when it comes to engaging marginalized voters. And there's really a lack of accountability for this. Right?

Vote center youth rates and rejection rates continue to vary by race, ethnicity, voter frequency, county, other subgroups, and those 14 or so criteria that were required by the Voter's Choice Act when it comes to citing vote centers, right? And this is one of the components of the Voter's Choice act, you may remember. I know Senator Allen certainly does.

That was heavily negotiated with advocates and voting rights groups and election officials in the state, ledge members in the state at the time, people wanted to see, okay, if we're going to move from neighborhood polling places to vote centers, how do we know? The concern we heard from many was that these are going to be cited in ways that people can access them. Will it leave out communities? Right? And so those 14 criteria were developed.

Again, there was a negotiation with voting rights groups and community groups and an agreement that these would be to some degree, right, at least a good set to start off with. And what we found from our research, that counties often are not utilizing these, or they're utilizing just a few of the criteria, so they're not being engaged with, they're not actually required to utilize all 14 or 15 of them. They're required to look at them, right? But not necessarily.

And it's not actually happening on the ground. Eligible voter turnout is only slightly higher, as I mentioned, in VCA versus non VCA counties, participation gaps persist. Again, we talk about this in the report, gaps across VCA and non-VCA counties from 2020 to 2022. Yes, turnout went down in 2022, low for midterm, but even lower, right, the lowest that we'd seen for general elections since 2014. And we saw everybody's turnout for the state as a whole decline, but we saw Latino turnout drop 38 points.

These are data from the Public Policy Institute of California. Asian American turnout drop 34 percentage points and Black turnout drop 29 percentage points. Now, let's talk about method. So, in person voting is still a critical, important option for many voters. And we know this by the numbers, but we also know this from the survey research that we've conducted.

So if you look statewide at our four methods now, right, in person, mail, drop off at a staff location or drop off at a dropbox. In person is 12 percentage points, or 12% of those that are actually voting. Right. We haven't seen much of a change from 2020 to 2022, but we still see very high numbers of people that are dropping off at a staffed location, 17%.

If you combine the numbers of people, the percentage of voters that are voting in person versus those that are dropping off their ballot at a staffed location, that's a large percentage of voters that are still using a vote center in some way. And we know from a lot of research that sometimes people just drop off that ballot because that's the most convenient drop off place.

But a lot of voters are specifically choosing and needing a staffed location because they want to double check that they filled it out, right, or that it doesn't need a stamp or they trust that they see it goes in the hands of a person or at least a dropbox inside a building that looks like a vote center that looks familiar to them. Lots of reasons.

Can I pause on that one just for a second? I want to ask the obvious question, which is that there are some forces out there that have raised questions about the legitimacy of dropping a ballot in the mail. Did you do any of that as a part of your assessment to see whether that false claim has affected these numbers that you're going through?

Sure. So in 2020, we saw, of course, a lot of concern around using the mail and the accuracy of the mail, but also potential fraud around the USPS. We saw dropbox use actually become, out of those four methods, the most common method. Almost 40% of voters in California dropped off at a dropbox, but we still saw about 17% or so using a staffed location, and we're still seeing very similar numbers now using a staffed location.

And what we've learned in--and this is not a survey that we did specifically for this study, but surveys that we've done more broadly for my research center--it does depend on whether you have language access needs. It depends on race, ethnicity, age. There are different reasons, right. Why people choose or need to. I'm always careful with the word choose because sometimes it's really not a choice. Right. If somebody feels compelled, they need to ask a question, they may not vote. Right.

Or may not feel comfortable voting unless they have that in person experience in some way.

What about ideology? Because that's really where that.

And there's differences by ideology as well. Yeah. I'm happy to talk offline and get into the details of some of that, but definitely.

You can go back to your testimony.

Yeah, there are real reasons why people choose their methods or use a certain method over another. And understanding that and meeting voters where they're at is just really important. Right. In terms of the methods.

And it's always important because there's often conversations around when they see the low, people will see those, what seems to be pretty low in person numbers, and everything gets bulked together into just a vote by mail stat. People will assume in California that people don't need voters don't need an in person experience, and we know that all of the different methods can be quite significant. Individual voters. Right. The distinction. Okay, moving on. Outreach and education.

So both election officials, voter education orgs, identified the lack of funding for outreach and education. That's going to be a theme today, I suspect, right from the Secretary of State's office all the way down with every panelist. To some degree, funding is absolutely critical. It's critical for election officials, and it's critical for organizations that often are the ones that are picking up the slack. Right.

If election officials don't have the ability, for a variety of reasons, including funding, to engage fully and fully meet the needs of their voters, local organizations, statewide advocacy organizations will be the ones that attempt to make up that difference. And they're, of course, underresourced. Right. And having a myriad of issues and responsibilities in an election, goals to achieve in an election. And it's very, very difficult. Voter education orgs express frustrations that eaps lack specificity on outreach strategies to reach the most marginalized voters.

Again, we talked earlier about those inconsistencies across plans, but particularly around marginalized voters, sometimes feeling like what was listed there was not only insufficient, but maybe unrealistic or insincere or very sincere, but again, just not funded to actually happen on the ground. Okay. When surveyed about how they target outreach to marginalized voters, election officials largely reported using the same outreach strategies used for the general population. And a majority of voter orgs reported that they did not do VCA specific outreach.

Instead, they emphasized voting access more broadly, the who, what, how, and so forth. Because of their limited resources, many times. Right. Or because of their limited engagement with the VCA, again, because they were taking on so many different components of the elections landscape. I want to emphasize here that we again talked to election officials, many of them with outreach strategies, working sincerely to try to figure out how they could engage with historically underrepresented groups in their communities.

But across the board, nearly everyone that we surveyed and interviewed could not say if they were actually reaching voters. Right. Voters of color, low-income voters, voters with language access needs, voters with disability. Voters with disability needs, whatever it might be exactly, that they felt that they were doing a lot. They felt like they were reaching those voters or they were hoping they were reaching those voters. But when we actually asked, how do you know? They didn't know.

And this is not to criticize those election officials. As I said, many of them trying very much, sincerely, to try to outreach to communities. But it was striking that it's continued, even under several cycles of the Voter's Choice Act, that most election officials could not, nearly all could not tell us if they were reaching those voters. And a lot of it had to do with difficulty in figuring out what the metrics would be and actually accessing that data. Right.

It's not an easy feat, but it's important to note that. Majority of voter--well, I already said this one. Last slide under outreach and education voter org, and this is the interview, the surveys, the poll data said that there were challenges that needed to be tackled. So from all of that, this is what we came up with. So a lack of civic education and understanding of what and who is on the California ballot, that's daunting.

These are a little more broader reasons for why we see the lower turnout, and these are the challenges that go along with trying to successfully implement a VCA. Let me make sure I'm setting the stage here. Widespread distrust of elections and political institutions, accessibility of information and voting materials in languages. That's difficulty. Right. In accessing that and inadequacies of traditional voter outreach methods. I'll leave that, because, again, there's panels after me. Three areas of recommendations. So one, stronger statewide leadership and state funding.

Two, greater county election official engagement with voter education organizations and three, deeper philanthropic investments. So under the first, stronger statewide leadership, we convene the VCA task force. So again, this is an example of a recommendation that came from the Committee. We think it makes sense. My center and myself thinks it makes sense. But this really is derived from seeing the data and understanding some of the great hills that still need to be climbed to get a representative electorate, even under the VCA.

And what I want to emphasize on the, well, actually in a moment, I'll emphasize something on the task force. So sound the alarm on participation gaps. Lead the push. And these are all things, of course, for the Secretary of State that the Committee is emphasizing and the report is emphasizing, lead the push for more voter education outreach funding work, and convene a wide variety of data experts and organizations to identify, research, and develop solutions to voter file, race and ethnicity challenges.

So I will say, I know that the Secretary of State's Office and of course, LaKenya just now, Ms. Jordan talked about the new data that's being produced, and we're excited to learn more about that. But this bullet point is a little bit different in the sense that the Committee, the working group, was emphasizing a joint collaboration, right.

That the Secretary of State's Office work with other academics, community groups, statewide organizations, people with a history with the voter file and the data challenges in California, and maybe possibly to get consensus also on some of the data thresholds and difficult decisions that you have to make when identifying race ethnicity out of the voter file, because it's not an easy task. So I just want to emphasize that was a little bit different here in terms of this bullet point being a collaborative one.

And then, of course, publish the required VCA reports, which I know has already been addressed today. And then on the task force, just to note that the task force had very specific requirements under the VCA. And this was also one of those items that advocacy groups, statewide groups, negotiated around to help bring, as well as the reports, by the way, to help bring accountability. Right. And assurance that the VCA would be reexamined every election cycle. That data would inform counties, right.

In a timely manner going forward. And the task force was a way to make sure that community groups, data experts, others were part of that conversation in an established way. So I'm sure you already know this, but in SB 450, it actually highlights the type of groups that should be part of that and the very specific role in reviewing things like EAPs and so forth. At least under Padilla's office, that was something that was done. Of course, there could be a re-envisioning.

And if the law does require an examination of that in the future, I'm not saying that that should be that, but that would be the question. Yeah. All right. So state Legislature, what can they do? Hold a joint elections information hearing on those participation gaps. We just had one, of course, from the Assembly in November.

And you all are holding this VCA specific focused Committee hearing. Renew the requirement of the VCA task force and push for increased elections funding in the Governor's Budget and establish metrics which are so important. Some of the things I've noted before, how do we determine that we're closing the gap? What is closing the gap? What is making the gap better? What does that look like? How do you use some of the data to determine that?

And then steps statewide organizations can take now participate, of course, in the VCA task force in a very robust way. Participate in state LAAC and VAAC, share county EAP, share VCA studies, toolkits, siting tool, others and support efforts to secure more state funding. And of course, many groups, voter rights groups across the state have been pushing to amplify the conversation around budget and funding increases. And then area two election official engagement with voter engagement organizations. Just a couple of slides here.

Build authentic and enduring relationships with voter engagement organizations working in marginalized communities. So this is just recognizing here that many counties do great work in this area.

Many counties still have to learn a lot, even by their own admission, in terms of how do they engage with community members, how do they identify all the relevant community members in this space? History, right, in counties where that has not occurred in a great way, sometimes rebuilding of relationships and all of that with limited funding is a real challenge.

I think, for time. I think your report is going to be provided to the county so they'll see that, as well as just trying to make sure we can hear other witnesses.

Oh, yeah, and I just have a couple of slides, too. So. Almost done. Thank you. So I was just about to say these are very kind of specific requirements so you can look at those in the report and then just also seeking more input from voter engagement experts, voter strategies. Right. And, of course, increasing in-language voter outreach to new and infrequent voters. And then philanthropic. It's pretty simple here. It's funding research.

It's funding all this outreach, providing a deeper look and a deeper long term commitment on voter engagement period in California, reducing those gaps in California that we've talked about. And when it comes to the VCA, not letting go or letting it slip through the conversations, those future counties, we have two new counties this election cycle, right in 2024. And understanding that.

I want to make sure we have time for questions for you. So, Senator Allen or Umberg, any questions?

Tell me, who are some of the players, from your perspective, who are the biggest players in philanthropy in this space that you found most helpful?

Yeah. Well, one is affiliated with this report, the Haas Jr. Fund, certainly in California.

And then on this whole question of the task force, why, I probably should have asked the representative from the Secretary of State's office, but obviously they could continue it voluntarily. I suppose they've chosen not to. Do you have an understanding as to why it hasn't continued?

I think that question would be directed towards the Secretary of State's Office.

Why don't we ask?

I may have missed an excellent.

Ms. Jordan, if you could come up maybe and address it, see if there's an answer to it here. You spoke, you testified earlier that you'd be reconvening it, but maybe you can speak to Senator Allen's question.

We were in the middle of building the VCA itself and kept going, but we really kept meeting with the advocates as one off, so we'd have the different members contact us and ask us for feedback or input on things. We actually kept the relationship with all the members over the last couple of years. It wasn't just formal, though, as a task force. So we continue to value the input and impact of those advocates. We've taken their considerations and created guidance and best practices for some of our counties. So what's just missing is a formal group.

Got it. Senator Allen, anything to follow up to that? Just in essence of time. Senator Umberg.

Thank you. Dr. Romero. If I understood you correctly, you said we don't really know what modalities actually incentivize folks to vote. Is that right?

I was talking about the VCA, so more broadly, there's a lot of data that will give us indications of what we should be doing and could be doing to increase turnout. Yeah.

Okay. So we know what messages resonate?

Specific messages in any given election cycle, not so much, but we understand more broader messages. We understand how to engage with voters. We know how to disperse those messages. We have a lot of research that tells us what works with voters. We don't know so much about how to get to 100 percent, right? How to see significant gaps. But we do know techniques that will increase turnout in communities. The problem with a lot of that, it's a multi-touch over time off the election cycle.

It's incredibly expensive and time-consuming. It's incredibly important, but a lot of groups who either are not aware of it or maybe they are aware of it, they just aren't able to engage in that level, especially without funding.

I'm just looking at your VCA challenge. It says lack of accountability for county voter outreach plans and spending and how the counties are reaching marginalized voters. Does that mean we don't have the metrics? We have the modalities; we just don't have the metrics? Maybe explain that a little bit.

Yeah. So, on the VCA, when it comes to the specifics around what counties are doing with communities--and we've done surveys as well, right? Counties are happy to tell us the number of media hits that they've sent out and that sort of thing. But whether they're actually reaching voters, like sustained studies, right, that track that, those aren't happening at a county level. They would be incredibly expensive to do, but doesn't mean that they're not important to do, but they're not occurring. So this outreach is happening without any kind of tracking or studying.

Are we doing that at a statewide level?

At a statewide level.

In other words, if I understood you correctly, one of your recommendations is more funding. But another challenge is that we don't know whether funding increasing whatever we're doing now will actually reach voters. Is that accurate?

What I would say is we do know, as I said, more generally. So in the report, we're talking about some of those detailed VCA specifics, right? In the report, we know funding just, again, multi-touch over time, knocking on people's doors, building with trusted messengers, right? Building the case for voting over time does have positive impacts on communities. That's been established for a long time.

More direct messaging to voters, making sure that voters of color, voters that are historically underrepresented, are actually being, they're very unlikely to get outreach and mobilization kind of beyond maybe just the voter guide, even when registered to vote. So more very specific, targeted messages to communities can help increase turnout. But in terms of what I thought you were asking was what counties are doing, we don't have a lot of information on the detail of what counties are doing or may be able to track.

They aren't tracking because it's very difficult for them to do that or they're not inclined to do it either way, but it's not happening. And we don't have--I say we, the field more broadly--the ability to track what counties are doing and being able to say something about those specific efforts, if that makes sense, or to tie it to funding. And also, to be quite honest, getting information on just the county's budgets on the VCA or otherwise is very difficult. We've surveyed, others have surveyed, and to try to break out, some counties have very simple budgets. You try to break out what they spend on outreach. It's not very specific.

I'm sure Glazer's effort to keep us on track, in spite of the fact that he's got other colleagues that don't, but in any event, in any event, and we can pursue this maybe later, is that what I'm trying to understand is more money to increase outreach, but we don't know whether that outreach today is actually touching the voters we're trying to reach. Is that accurate?

If the groups are doing it, right, a lot of the techniques that groups are doing on the ground are consistent with research that has shown that those are going to be positive, right. If counties are going to be given funding, I would argue that there should be some greater tracking and accountability over time, transparency with those budgets, more detailed budgets. So as the counties are doing that work, they're upfront and after the fact--

I'm going to pursue this maybe offline because I'm really trying to get my head around--

Funding would be helpful, period.

But the essence of the question comes from a place in which we have a deficit in the billions and billions of dollars, and we've heard loud and clear from the Secretary of State's Office saying like more money, and I know that generically we do too. But we know we're going to be pressed by our colleagues to have some real hard reasons for why--

If I may offer just one little piece, and I'd be happy to talk with you more offline as well because I don't want to belabor our time here, but I do think that what we've done with counties in terms of holding them accountable to what's included in the VCA and funding those activities, specifically around Education and Outreach, have been helpful.

And I know without that funding, counties aren't able to perform those requirements. So I would like to continue the conversation. We can offline if you want, around funding, and there's more I think collectively we can actually do to help that conversation.

Indeed, we have a six month budget cycle that begins in a matter of days with the governors.

Okay, I'll leave it. Okay. Thank you.

And I appreciate the question. I know it's a difficult period right now to be talking about increasing funding at all.

Yes, it's going to be an ongoing conversation, but I don't think it comes without our general support for why it brings value. But it's just a matter of convincing our colleagues about the tough choices we have in the overall budget.

Dr. Romero, you've presented a fantastic report with solid recommendations, both for the Secretary, for the Legislature, and for others. Appreciate all the work that you and your team did to create this. I know our time was a little short to get it all in, but I know it's available for us to continue to peruse and have that conversation with you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

All right. We're now going to head to our third panel. It involves three election officials that are on the ground doing the work and coming with real life experiences that I know they want to share and we want to hear. So let me introduce--all of them are online. Let me introduce Dean Logan, who is the Registrar Recorder for Los Angeles County. Mr. Logan, great to always see you again.

Thank you.

Tricia Webber, the County Clerk from Santa Cruz, and Registrar Voter. Ms. Webber, good to see you again, and Juan Cervantes, who's the Humboldt County Clerk and Recorder. We know Humboldt's a new VCA county coming on board, so the three of you are our county panel today. I know you've coordinated who's speaking first and second and third, and we'll leave it to you to share your thoughts now.

Well, good afternoon. This is Dean Logan. I don't think we did coordinate, but if it's all right, we could just go in the order on the agenda. Okay. So, good afternoon, Chair Glazer and Senators Umberg and Allen. Good to see you, and 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.

And as articulated in the hearing background and in the opening testimony this afternoon, through the passage and implementation of the Voter's Choice Act, California has established a strong foundation to support free and fair elections, to encourage and facilitate voter participation, and to support a voter-centered approach to when, where, and how voting occurs in our state.

As I'm sure you are aware, the nature, integrity, and structure of the 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 mis, dis, and malinformation, and embrace the changing needs of our electorate. The expectations placed upon election administrators are more visible and demanding than at any time in recent history, and the threats against the profession are even more present.

That said, we believe it is the strength of the statutory foundation established by this legislative body that ensures our ability to focus efforts and resources on programs and activities that provide access to voting for all who are eligible in California. We know, and the data shows, that structure and policy alone will not bridge the gaps between rates of registration and participation, nor will it on its own ensure voter turnout that mirrors the demographic profile of our electorate.

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 unfortunately, it's eroded by cynicism, lack of access, confusion, and controversy. Our role as election administrators is to ensure that once that intrinsic motivation is achieved, there are no barriers to participation and that we deliver a voting experience that conveys the significance and power of the vote.

The Voter's Choice Act has strengthened our ability to do that. Los Angeles County is the largest and most diverse elections jurisdiction in the country, with over ten 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 both 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 market, and expanded the regulatory environment by setting a new standard for voting system design that prioritizes usability, security, and accessibility.

Los Angeles County introduced this new voting model and implemented the Voter's Choice Act together during the 2020 statewide election cycle. Responsive to the Covid-19 public health crises, that model was adjusted between the primary and general elections, and the November 2020 election marked the first in which all voters in Los Angeles County were mailed ballots and also had the option of voting in person at any vote center located in the county.

Most voters in Los Angeles County today vote using a vote-by-mail ballot, but how they interact with that resource differs across demographics, so the need for options and customization is critically important. The availability of secure ballot drop boxes, ballot tracking tools, and signature verification applications are examples. Under provisions of the Voter's Choice Act, we offer in person vote centers starting ten days prior and leading up to election day.

Voters can vote at any location and access a broad range of accessible services that offer an independent, secure, and private voting experience, as well as customizable language assistance through our audio ballot and multilingual ballot display options. Of note, in statewide elections, Los Angeles County has consistently established vote centers and drop boxes in numbers well above the minimum required under the Voter's Choice Act formula. This is directly responsive to the criteria outlined in the VCA for ensuring equitable placement and geographic distribution throughout the county.

We also operate Mobile Vote Centers and Flex Vote Centers to complement traditional voting locations. Mobile Vote Centers are deployed to high traffic locations such as sporting events, community festivals, college campuses, and employment centers. Flex Vote Centers are used to bring voting services to historically underserved and underrepresented populations such as language minorities, justice-involved individuals, seniors, people experiencing homelessness, voters with disabilities, and those in geographically isolated areas.

Our Mobile and Flex Vote Centers rely on community partners to identify and serve these communities. A key contributor to effective administration of elections under the Voter's Choice Act is the interaction we have with our stakeholder community. Through our long-established Community Voter Outreach Committee, our Language Accessibility Advisory Committee, and our Voting Accessibility Advisory Committee, we have formed partnerships that assist in the selection of vote centers, voter education, election monitoring, and early identification of any issues that may disrupt the voting process.

Overall, our experience has been that the Voter's Choice Act offers a more flexible, voter-focused model of voting, one that is responsive to our voters. It allows us to focus limited resources on services for voters who are less likely to have familiarity with the voting process and who are less likely to participate. It also allows for broader application of other legislative initiatives, such as conditional voter registration, accessible services, minority language support, and services for military and overseas voters.

Following the 2024 election cycle, a more complete set of data will exist upon which to consider changes or enhancements to the Voter's Choice Act. Some of those considerations might include changes to the formula for establishing the minimum number of vote centers or the number of locations required during the ten-day period before election day and those that open the weekend before, as has already been mentioned.

In analyzing that data, we believe it will be important to recognize that, in comparison to the traditional single day, precinct-based model of voting, the VCA experience is still relatively new. It is reasonable to assume that despite Outreach and Education efforts, many voters may not be aware of the options available to them for voting. For that reason, we would recommend caution in making sweeping changes to the model too soon.

Today, our voting system in Los Angeles County is 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. The infusion of state and federal funding in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles helps significantly with visibility, accessibility, and security.

However, the loss of that funding leading into the 2024 election cycle puts at risk the successes achieved by the policy and structural foundation that have been established by this legislative body. As election administrators, we're entrusted to facilitate voters access and ability to cast a vote and to have confidence that that vote's impact--I'm sorry--we are entrusted to facilitate voters' access and ability to cast a vote and to have confidence in that vote's impact.

But the process, outcomes, and legitimacy of elections do not belong to us. Rather, they belong to the voters for whom those systems give voice, influence, and power. We must never lose sight of that. Thank you again for holding the hearing today and for raising awareness around the impact of the Voter's Choice Act.

Thank you, Mr. Logan, and I guess the summary would be too soon to make sweeping changes. You want to wait till the 24 election cycle and we could use more money.

Well said.

Okay, terrific. Thank you for your great leadership in Los Angeles County. Ms. Webber, I think you're next up and we look forward to your testimony.

Thank you very much, Chair Glazer and Members of the Committee. As was said, I'm Tricia Webber. I'm the Santa Cruz County Clerk and Register of Voters. However, I'm not speaking to you today in that capacity, but rather as the California Association of Clerk and Election Officials Election Legislative Committee Co-Chair, which is how I see you guys mostly when I come in and talk about during regular hearings.

As you know, Senate Bill 450 was signed into law in 2016, and although I was not part of the team of legislators, Secretary of State representatives, county officials, and community members who met regularly to create the framework of SB 450, I was, as co-chair of the Ledge Committee, closely tracking the proposed legislation, bringing to the team Committee praises Committee questions and Committee concerns, and looking for clarification to the language.

Since the passage of SB 450, I have watched and listened to the counties that have adopted, and I've also watched and listened to the counties who have not in order to hear their concerns. I've also taken proposals and have talked to committees and other lawmakers to express thoughts, and as a county who adopted the VCA model in 2022, I've been able to experience these praises, questions, and concerns firsthand.

The number one concern, as you've heard numerous times today, is the number of days that the vote centers are open. There is a requirement to open in person voting locations at a specific ratio for a regular election. It's one vote center per 50,000 voters 11 days prior to election day. In Santa Cruz, that equals four centers. I will admit we have five because I put one in each supervisorial district. However, if we had only four open, it probably would not change the usage much.

We have found that 3.8 percent of our in person voters come during that first seven-day period. We have several days where locations will have zero people come in, even if that person is coming to return a voted ballot in a sealed envelope. And Santa Cruz County is not alone. Looking at the data that's posted on the Secretary of State's website for the March 2020 election, it was 3.13 percent of in person voters across the state voted in that first week.

I got statistics from other counties such as San Mateo, Sacramento, San Diego, Orange, and others that show the same flat line that first week. One county indicated to me that their vote center workers complain about wasting tax dollars of having these centers open when very few or no voters access them. The cost per voter is astronomical during that first week. In Santa Cruz, we're looking at close to 100 dollars per voter. However, we have a lower cost because I still pay my vote center staff with stipends.

But other counties, it's dramatically higher because they pay them per hour as an hourly employee. So some proposals around the number of days that have come out of the Committee include reducing the number of days that the locations are open to being seven or less prior to election day, adjusting the ratio of voters in the formula to maybe something that's like one per 90,000 voters or less than the number of hours that a voting location is open.

Right now, they must be open eight hours a day, and people have found on Sundays, it's especially hard to be there for eight hours with a low number of voters. Another area where there's been a lot of discussion is about the mailing requirements. The VCA requires that there be three direct mailings to voters. These mailings occur each election, and that requirement never lessens over time.

My understanding is that the goal of the mailers was to inform voters of the difference between the VCA voting model and the traditional polling place model, and the fact that there's less in person voting locations available. However, there's more days to access voting, also to give language options and ways to cast and/or return a ballot. Counties understand the importance of communicating with the voters, especially when there's changes to the voting method or to the voting location.

But it seems like this communication should change over time, either with less mailings or have different messages. Specifically, for Santa Cruz County, we just conducted two special elections for the same general area: a school district and a fire district. The only difference in the number of voters between the two jurisdictions was 150. So there were 150 more voters in the fire district than they were in the school district, but they are the exact same jurisdictional boundaries, and these two elections were 14 days apart.

So the confusion was horrid because people were getting two different ballots because there were two different elections. They were getting two different guides, they were getting multiple postcards, and they were going out in that same month period of time. And people were very confused because--'well, what do you mean? I thought you said the election was on November 7th. It's on October 24th. What's the deal?' It didn't help to educate the voters.

It really just caused confusion and anger, most of which was directed at our election staff, who really--we couldn't say more than 'I know it's confusing,' but that's what we're required to do. So some proposals include reducing the number of mailings and/or allowing the mailings to be more creative in what they're messaging. Counties would like to have creative control over when the mailings are sent and what they contain.

Having rigidness over what needs to be on that mailing and whether the county is conducting its first, fifth, tenth election under the VCA model is something that should be relaxed. There should be some guidelines or floors, but the county registrar is the one who knows how their voters react and they respond and how they should be educated. Having choices is a theme that you've heard a lot during today.

Under VCA, the voter has a choice of whether they want to vote in person or by using the ballot that was sent to them. A voter has a choice of what day during the in person voting period to vote or return their ballot to a voting location. Voters can mail or drop off, but what counties have found during this journey is that what works in one county does not work in another.

During public comment or during meetings with the Secretary of State and/or advocates, counties always hear, 'you should do radio spots because that's what works in County A, but your county doesn't have a local radio station and has to rely on media coming from a neighboring county that's not a VCA county or County B is very successful with' and you fill in the blank, but that's not an option that is available for you.

Counties need to be able to make the choices that are best for their constituents without the strict codes or regulations or having groups pitting counties against each other for various reasons. And as always, underlying everything in elections is the monetary impact. Having locations open for few or no voters is not a good fiscal answer. Focusing mailings on specific items is not always a good fiscal answer either.

And aside from funding elections at a greater level, making changes to the VCA requirements respective to the number of days, the number of locations, or the mailing of notices would certainly help election officials. Counties could take the savings there and use those funds to do other educational activities that they put off because of funding. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Webber. Thank you for your leadership of the clerks and registrars over the years. Look forward to seeing you in person in the coming year as well, and thank you for your very specific recommendations from your testimony. They were very valuable. Let me next go to Juan Cervantes from Humboldt. Mr. Cervantes, thank you for joining us. We welcome your testimony.

Good afternoon, Senator Glazer and Committee Members. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this issue. I understand that the Committee has an interest in knowing about our path to the VCA, whether that's what kept us from it, what caused us to go to it, and any challenges or opportunities we've seen along the way. We've been interested in transitioning to the Voter's Choice Act since it passed actually. The cause for that is somewhat existential.

In Humboldt County, we're a pretty rural county that doesn't see a lot of activity when it comes to construction, and so finding sufficient polling places that meet our sighting requirements and ADA requirements has been a real struggle over the years, each year getting more and more difficult with more and more modifications necessary in order to get there.

We've seen those same struggles when it comes to recruiting poll workers, and so we saw the Voter's Choice Act as an opportunity to consolidate, to do more with a little less when it came to just the geographical limitations that we find in Humboldt County. Some of that's proven to be a challenge as well.

We went from having a difficulty finding polling poll workers for about 39 polling places on average for our major elections to finding a sufficient number of poll workers, election workers now interested in working for ten days or four days, eight plus hours a day. So the shift has moved from getting enough for a single day, multiple locations, to getting enough interested in working that many hours. In that way, revisiting what requirements we have for the number of days for different polling locations would be incredible.

We've seen similar numbers to those reported by Registrar Webber. For us, our number is--I believe the data that we're going off of is the brief 2020 period where we were able to do a hybrid kind of election. A VCA light, I think is what most folks talked about where we were able to do larger consolidations with more days. And for those early days, we saw about 2.7 percent of voters come in over those two days across the myriad of polling places.

The complaints we got from poll workers at that time was morale was low on those days where they spent a lot of their time and didn't seem to benefit the county or democracy because nobody came in. That was one of the things that we considered going through this, is the cost.

If we were to do something as simple as only having four days, we would save about 13,000 dollars, which may not sound like much for the bigger budget, but for our department, that's a meaningful amount of outreach that we're able to do. That's another point where we were concerned budgetarily is the additional requirements when it came to outreach and we were only concerned due to the budget involved.

I'll be honest and say that I used the Voter's Choice Act as an opportunity to ask more money for my county in order to fulfill those statutory requirements. And I saw that as a benefit. We took the opportunity of going through the Voter's Choice Act EAP process as a mechanism to engage with stakeholders that we hadn't had a great relationship with. Not a bad relationship, just a lack of a relationship with.

Some of those will be speaking shortly after me, but we saw that as an opportunity to engage in a way that our county hadn't engaged before. We did that through that process, through engaging and renewing our efforts with the Language Accessibility Advisory Committee and the Voting Accessibility Advisory Committee. We took the outreach requirements and the opportunity, the grants that the Secretary of State provided and used that to do outreach in a way that we hadn't had the bandwidth to do.

As a small county, those dollars are limited, and in order for us to do something, we have to not do another thing unless we're able to find those grant dollars. We took an approach of meeting people where they're at. We went to the county fair, we went to tribal days. Wherever we were invited, we made it a point to meet folks and engage, and the Voter's Choice Act gave us that platform and that opportunity to go about doing that. Going forward, recruiting is still the challenge.

It's the thing that keeps me up. Finding enough folks capable of engaging in such a short-term project in terms of how many months they're going to be working or the month, the few days that they're going to be working and to do so for several days is something that I'm concerned about. We'll get there. We'll do what we can. We always do. But being able to adjust those things and make them fit the county is huge. Those things don't scale well.

Even given the formulas that are in the Voter's Choice Act, we still find ourselves--I don't want to say wasting--but using resources far more inefficiently than we can afford to use them. And I'll allow some time for questions.

Thank you, Registrar Cervantes. Thanks for telling us the story of your journey to the VCA family. Welcome to the VCA family, of course, of counties that are undertaking the processes you're now very familiar with. I'm going to take a pause there, see if colleagues have questions for any of the clerks. I don't see any nodding heads on the panel. So to the three of you, Registrar Logan and Webber and Cervantes, thank you for participating and for your continued input as we work to maybe make changes, maybe not in the year ahead. So thank you very much. All right.

Thank you.

Thank you. We're going to go to our last panel of community organizations that have been very active in this space. I want to invite up to the dais here, Paul Spencer, who's the Senior Attorney for Voting Rights for the Disability Rights of California, Sietse--I'm going to pronounce that name wrong.

Sietse Goffard--thank you--who's the Senior Program Coordinator for Voting Rights for the Asian Americans Advancing Justice at the Asian Law Caucus, and Russia Chavis Cardenas, who's the Voting Rights and Redistricting Program Manager for California Common Cause. Thank you all for participating. And I understand from my lead consultant here that we've asked you to limit your testimony to five minutes each. And why don't we begin with Mr. Spencer?

Thank you, Chair Glazer. I really appreciate you all having us here. So I'm an attorney with Disability Rights California. We're the protection advocacy system for people with disabilities in the State of California. We were involved in negotiations regarding SB 450, and we've been actively involved in the implementation ever since. These comments are really based on input from my colleagues and really in probably all 29 of the VCA counties, we've either submitted comments on election plans or we've gone there in person.

I mean, personally, I've gone. I was counting in the plane ride up here 15 of the VCA counties since implementation. So the VCA has had some improvements that are good for voters with disabilities. Extended voting periods are great. Vote centers are fully accessible. To Senator Allen's point, you can work out the bugs in elections. We've seen complaints about ballot marking devices drop significantly since--part of that too is that the state required new voting equipment.

But also, you don't have a voter who's blind coming to a polling location at 8:00 a.m., an hour after polls open on the Tuesday and the equipment is not set up yet because in a Voter Choice, that county--it's been set up a long time. So those are good. You know, we like that there's a requirement to do outreach to the disability community and there's best practices, like you don't have to get input on the election planning process. You have to start a Voting Accessibility Advisory Committee.

This is great for developing relationships. However, you know, DRC was neutral on the Voter's Choice Act because we have concerns about accessibility, and in particular, the closing of neighborhood polling locations is hard for voters with disabilities. Traveling even a little bit farther to a vote center is a significant barrier. You know, part of the VCA was that we were going to have vote centers open for more hours. We were really going to be intentional about where they were placed.

We'd think about public transportation routes where people with disabilities live, and we'd get input from the disability community. But in practice, it's been sort of a mixed bag for voters with disabilities. Those parts of the VCA have been very difficult to implement and they haven't really happened evenly across the state. And I'd say my colleagues and I were really still actively having to work with counties to make sure that they're following the meeting requirements and when they're supposed to post the Election Administration Plans.

It's frustrating and it really hasn't improved as time has gone on. There's really been pretty common issues with how to properly implement the VCA and how to get input from people with disabilities. So just for kind of three big buckets for challenges, one is, again, in the election planning process. Counties have really struggled with how to interpret the VCA's meeting requirements. As you've seen a lot in this hearing, there's a real need for Education and Outreach. Time, staffing, and money are issues.

And this is another thing about time. Counties are starting VCA implementation too close to election times. This hinders the development of community relationships and thinking about your election planning. We think counties should be implementing up to 18 months before their first VCA election, but we're seeing counties push it closer and closer. And honestly, their Election Administration Planning is rushed as a result. Another thing is just the transparency and reporting. You've heard the Secretary of State's reports have been late.

There's also a requirement for counties to post their election costs on their website, comparing traditional elections to Voter's Choice Act elections, and this doesn't happen. I mean, last night I looked at eight counties. Two of them actually have reports. Like, for example, Nevada counties is great. It's really detailed, but you go to other counties and it has like four lines of data. It's really frustrating to hear complaints about certain things that aren't working. But in these counties, we can't actually see the data.

They're not doing this requirement. And again, that has real-world impacts, like on new implementing counties we've seen in the past where they're not really allocating any funding for Education and Outreach. But in their defense, if they looked at--their colleague counties aren't putting up the cost. So just kind of wrapping up for our recommendations, we really want enhanced training and resources. The Secretary of State puts out materials for counties.

But sometimes the guidance that counties are getting is insufficient, and sometimes it's created problems that counties need more help with how to implement the law. Again, advanced planning. Counties should really be starting to implement the VCA 18 months ahead of time. Another thing about Education and Outreach funding is counties need funding to be able to hire dedicated outreach staff. A lot of counties don't have this. I mean, it makes it really hard to establish relationships like Dr. Romero was talking about.

A lot of counties are just doing, like, a general media plan. They don't really know how to target it. And again, those reports would be really helpful. I did want to address Senator Allen and Senator Umberg, and Ms. Webber had talked a lot about ten-day vote centers, but one thing is, a ten-day vote center gives you seven weekdays of public transportation, whereas a four-day vote center really only gives you two days of weekday transportation. And that really matters, especially in smaller counties.

And another thing is, it just takes time to get public awareness to increase about that these ten-day vote centers are available, and given sort of the sparse Education Outreach, it takes time to change voter behavior. To Senator Glazer, you'd ask for good data. One of the reports that my colleagues and I really like is from 2020. Dr. Romero did VCA reports, in particular, the Disability Access Report, and her report on Education and Outreach, I think, are really compelling.

It also helps support the fact that if you spend more money, you're going to get better outreach. I'm an advocate, so I might be a little more advocatey than Dr. Romero, but I think that data does support that spending more money helps. And again, the ten-day vote centers, they're important for people with disabilities, especially ones that need to vote privately and independently, and really in person voting is kind of the only way for a lot of voters with disabilities. But thank you.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Spencer, and I have a follow-up question, but I'll wait till the other panelists have spoken. Mr--excuse me--Mr. Goffard.

Thank you very much. Sietse Goffard from the Asian Law Caucus. We're a nonprofit legal aid and civil rights organization based in the Bay Area. We do a lot of community outreach and voter education work around elections as nonpartisan. We also run--did you have the slides, by the way? I have some data. You requested data earlier, and I'm pleased to say that I have some data to present to you.

We do have your slides.

Thank you. So I'd love it if you could follow along. We've been running a nonpartisan poll observer program since the 1990s, and actually next year we'll be working with Common Cause to run California's largest nonpartisan poll observer program. In November 2022, our volunteer observers visited 441 voting sites in 16 counties, including ten VCA counties, and that represents one-third of all voting sites in the region and about half of all vote centers. And you can see the map of the counties we visited.

Our volunteers were trained on federal and state language and disability access requirements, as well as poll observer rights and responsibilities. We certainly want to work with the election departments, and our goal is really to observe, do research, and pass along constructive feedback to elections officials, to you all, and to the Secretary of State's Office. So feel free to ask me questions about methodology later. If you turn to the next slide, we get to the fun part.

You can see the data that we have on language access and basically how well it's going in the field. You can look at the questions we asked our survey respondents to look out for and a breakdown of traditional counties versus vote center counties. Overall, as you can tell, there's overall very positive feedback when it comes to language access at vote centers, votable ballots, conditional voter registration, voter guides, all being translated and being present.

But if you turn to the next slide, I listed some areas for improvement that we've seen. One of them involves facsimile ballots. Occasionally, facsimile ballots, especially in polling places that are a little smaller and tighter, are hidden in faraway corners, posted in inaccessible walls behind other equipment, or just displayed to voters on request only, which is a shame given how much work goes into making sure that these are theoretically available, but not practically.

And also in VCA and non-VCA counties, voters were sometimes confused by composite facsimile ballot layouts where you have to show all races on the ballot and the onuses on the voter to kind of connect the dots and figure out which race they're actually voting for. We also do see some issues with translated signage. Translated signage--signage is not often always fully translated.

In Alameda County, at least five vote centers were switched out including a Sikh temple on very short notice, like a week before election day, which is already very problematic, and the signs telling voters that the original locations were switched were in English only. That's definitely a VCA county that we recommend looking into in terms of the voting issues we've seen there. If you turn to the next slide, we have some data on bilingual poll worker staffing. Give you a few seconds to look at this.

I mean, overall, we found that VCA counties had better staffing and vote centers, and therefore, by extension, more coverage of languages. One area for improvement we've seen in both traditional counties and VCA counties is bilingual coworker signage and identification being not very consistent. So therefore it's harder for voters to know about these resources, to know that there are bilingual poll workers to begin with. If you flip to the next slide, you can see a tally of bilingual poll workers by language.

We're curious to see what the representation looks like. And as you would expect in California, we have great coverage of languages like Spanish and Chinese and Tagalog, which are spoken widely throughout the state, but other languages, which are very common, are actually not very well-represented. Many election departments struggled with recruitment for South Asian and Southeast Asian languages.

We didn't find any speakers of Laos, Mongolia, Nepali, Tamil, or Thai, for example, across the many counties we visit despite those languages being required state languages in many of those counties. So if you turn to the next slide, we partnered with Disability Rights California to ask questions about disability access, and I can give you a moment to look at these as well.

We definitely see plenty of issues regarding disability access on the field. Overall, I think we found that vote centers tended to be a little bit better because they're larger and more physically accessible often than traditional vote polling places. But even in VCA counties, we see issues like entrance doors being shut, unattended, impossible to open automatically. We see curbside voting, technically supposed to be available, but very poorly advertised, with no phone number posted, no information about how to request assistance. And then auxiliary aids are like magnifying glasses and signature guides being very inconsistent.

So that would definitely be one signature guide. Can you tell me what that is?

I can help it. So it's a card with a cutout that a voter who is blind puts over the signature line. So you can line up a physical, tangible line.

Yeah, got it. Okay.

Definitely a best practice. We recommend.

Got it.

If you turn to the next slide, other observations about VCA counties that we found on election day. Far fewer late openings in VCA counties. Among the handful of late openings we noted, nearly all of them were in traditional polling place counties. And that sort of makes sense intuitively, given that late openings are usually due to staff shortages, which were less likely in VCA counties. And VCA counties have more time, they open earlier, so there's more time to set up the equipment and prepare.

And there's also, we noticed Shorter wait times. There are very few complaints of long wait times at VCA vote centers, whereas in contrast, several polling places in non VCA counties across the region that we monitored reported long lines on election day. And part of that is because of the sort of the difference in early voting. And then finally, on the last slide, just other feedback that we've had experiences with the VCA model vote center placement really, really makes a huge difference.

Same thing with Dropbox placements, especially for immigrant, minority and lower propensity voters. Vote centers in community centers, cultural associations, schools, residential areas typically saw the most voters. And that's data that's been backed up by a lot of our meetings with elections officials. And then finally lax and vax. I just want to make a plug for those. Those have been an incredibly fruitful and constructive way of engaging with language and disability communities. They're great opportunities to partner with local groups like ourselves.

I'm on 10 laxs and I love it. And it's a great way for organizations like ours to service trusted messengers and bridges between the communities and also offer valuable feedback. One problem that we've noted, and I think the robs have noted as well, is that VCA counties still struggle with Member recruitment and retention, and that's maybe an area where more funding could help or more staff resources could help.

People who serve on lax and vax. Right now it's sort of an all volunteer basis, and there have been many meetings where it might be just two people in the meeting, which is a good start. But we really want counties to invest in these great resources because they find a lot of value in it. It's been our experience. I think that wraps up my presentation, but I'd love any questions at the end if you have.

What do you mean?

Great, thank you very much. Russia Chavis Cardenas, we welcome you.

Good afternoon, chair Glazer Members, I'm Russia Chavis Cardenas, the voting rights and redistricting program manager with California Common Cause. Thank you for the opportunity to deep dive into some of the findings of the coalition report that we did with Dr. Ramiro. I'm going to draw your attention to two illuminating findings. You'll find them on page 14 of the report.

The first finding in the report is that in a recent poll, three out of 10, or about 30% of infrequent voters, cited a lack of information about the candidates and issues as a reason for not voting. And the second finding is that one in four, or 25% felt that their vote did not matter, given special interests and money in politics.

We've also heard the same sentiment in other surveys from residents that have been conducted throughout the state when asked whether they think that their local elected officials respond to their needs and their interests. What we're seeing here in this data is not a matter of how easy it is to vote, but other factors like trust in government, true representation, and the need and desire for more robust information about how the ballot is impacting voters and voter participation, particularly among voters who are traditionally hard to reach.

And so, as we consider how we can use the VCA as a tool to increase voter turnout, particularly for historically marginalized voters, the impact report points to a few recommendations. County elections officials can take steps locally to build relationships with voter engagement organizations and improve voter engagement education in hard to reach communities. The voter education and outreach plan for each county that they develop as part of their EAP can be a vehicle to do this, and that's what we're thinking in order to achieve that outcome.

The county elections officials cannot do this, however, with their current budgets, and so we recommend that the state invest in this work and that the county elections officials seek additional outreach funding from their boards of supervisors. Further, we believe that county elections officials should use whatever funds they receive and they use that by partnering with trusted messengers in the communities.

So the most obvious example here is the census, in which the State of California, when we seek to drive census participation, we gave huge amounts of money to trusted community based organizations and employed well known figures in those hard to reach communities and banking, that those institutions and those individuals who had those relationships with the community for years would be able to be the most persuasive in driving and encouraging people to participate in the census. So that's kind of like the model we're thinking about.

Some examples of how trusted messengers work with local communities include democratic representation teachings like the ones that have been hosted by the California Black Power Network. So in these teachings, what they do is they include information about voting, direct community engagement and decision making, engagement with elected officials, and information on setting and influencing public policy. Another example is when the league of Women voters, they'll partner with community groups to produce content that the communities want to see and in lower visibility races.

And sometimes they call them the spotlight on justice. And these talks will share information about what are the sheriffs and the roles the sheriffs plays, district attorneys, judges, and the other pivotal roles that those folks in those elections play to drive voter participation in those areas. And so you may ask, why do we want to consider increasing voter participation during austere budget times?

And we'd say in order to better understand the needs and priorities of Californians, and as we dig out of this deficit, we need to have a fully engaged electorate. Only after hearing from all of Californians can government officials and decision makers make fiscal and policy decisions that align with the will of the people. We'd also say that the forces who support voter suppression have funded their interests year in and year out and will continue to do so.

And we who are pro democracy must put our money where our mouth is and make sure that we're funding those democracy reforms in a way that allows for a true and representative electorate. So thank you for your time. I'm happy to answer any questions and provide any more details about the report.

Thank you. And do you recall offhand, because I don't. And maybe a consultant knows how much money we put in the voter education for the census?

I don't know that off the hand, but we can look it up.

Senator Allen, do you have any idea.

How much we put into the voter education for the census? It was millions of dollars.

I know it was tens of millions. I just don't remember the number. Anybody know somebody left to get on their little Google fingers and figure that one out? For follow up questions, I did have one for trying to. Of all the data that you presented, the one thing that I didn't see, and maybe, you know, is that what's the participation rate of the disability community in the vote by mail process without going to a poll center? So when you talk about access issues there, which are very important, very important, trying to get a scale and perspective.

Offhand, I don't know, but my assumption would be is that people with disabilities vote about the same rates as vote by mail as the average population. But some people with disabilities need extra assistance to go vote in person.

It'd be a good one to kind of dig down on, because in order to make sure that we're as responsive as we can be, that kind of data would be valuable, not just in the overall community, but broken down by disability, too, to see where we can do our work better.

And we'll go back and look at some of the VCA reports from the Secretary of State. One issue is that data on voters with disabilities can be difficult to come by, and there's a very wide spectrum of disabilities. So what we found that's actually really effective is when Dr. Romero actually has done surveys of voters with disabilities, like a pretty wide sample across the state, and you can get good feedback on who's using vote by mail.

But I do worry it would be difficult to have the same level of data. For example, you would have on Asian American voters vote by mail usage as compared to voters with disabilities vote by mail usage compared to the entire voting population. The data is going to be tough, is what I'm in a long way trying to say.

Yeah, because as you all know, I mean, the big change from when Senator Allen advanced this Bill successfully to create a DCA option, now we're sending ballots out to everybody now. Everybody. And a postage paid, too, which I think was also a change we made during the pandemic and also a wonderful thing to do for our democracy, to make it as easy as possible with no cost to just dropping that ballot in the mail. All this stuff, for me, at least, I want to make good decisions and advancing all the goals that each of you have, all the witnesses have here, for the good of our democracy, we just have to do it smartly.

And the more data we have, certainly the studies that Dr. Romero participated in, you heard my question to the Secretary of State on that same issue of examining studies, and she indicates there's a study coming out in January, and I'm excited about seeing that it's not just about doing our work well. It's also about convincing our colleague about investments. And we're playing that off versus health care, education, other really difficult choices that we're going to have on our budget side.

There was real motivation on the census. Why was there real motivation on the census to spend tens of millions? My guess is in 70, 80. I think it was a lot, and the motivation was that we were going to get more money back if we counted correctly from the Federal Government. So that was a pretty built in motivation for our Members to put a lot of money there, wouldn't you say, Senator Allen?

Yeah, I remember that very well.

All right. Do you have any questions for this panel?

Yeah, well, I just want to, I kind of building on Senator Glazer's comments. I listened very carefully. First of all, I apologize for missing some of your testimony. I was getting some reports and I'm going to go back and watch it all. I've certainly got the reports here, too, dealing with the situation. But look, there are limited resources.

I think we want to look at trying to find some meaningful efficiencies that are not going to substantively impact all of the access priorities that we had with the crafting of the act and that we have with the implementation of the act. For example, I looked at the data. It seems to me that there is a strong case to be made for a modest reduction in the number of days that the vote centers have to be open.

I remember this whole debate when we were going back and forth with the clerks about this during the original Bill. I totally hear you. You talk about public transportation and making sure that we have adequate weekdays. That being said, the data shows so little participation at the early end. Maybe there's a way to offset the cost savings with some other meaningful way to ensure that we're doing a better job of meeting the metrics that we've all been discussing here.

Anyway, I kind of throw some of this stuff out there as we look at how to tweak the VCA. How do we make sure it's really working well both on the implementation side and also for so many of our communities.

And so I just really kind of openly invite, and you can make comments right now if you like, but on a going forward basis, I openly invite a dialogue with the Committee, with the stakeholders who've been represented today and so many of you that are here in the room and of course, the clerks and the Secretary of State's office to come up with some reasonable ways for us to tweak this. When I talk about the days.

If you think about the amount of cost savings we could get by going down to seven days, for example, that's a lot of money that could be used to do something else. Right. Potentially that could help to address some of the other issues that have been raised. While, of course, all of us would love to have the election centers open on every block for a whole month, we know that that's just not feasible economically. And so this is all about trying to find some middle ground, and I just throw that out there to invite dialogue.

I do think we need to find the balance.

Yeah.

But just one thing is an advocacy. We really like the Legislature. We've made it very easy to vote in California. We've basically done all the best practices for election reforms, but we still have this big turnout gap. So to advocates, kind of what we're seeing on the ground is that people just really aren't aware of how to vote. Even though we've mailed everyone, for example, a vote by mail ballot, people with disabilities might have trouble getting mailed.

You might not have gotten the ballot in the correct language. You might not even be aware of an election is going on. I think some ways, like as the Legislature and advocates, we sort of assume people know more about elections than they do, and there's this really big knowledge gap we're seeing. So some ways, like we spent all this money to make elections easy to vote, but we think we need to spend more on education and outreach.

Right. And I guess what I see is if we did something, if we provided some cost savings to the counties, and I throw out the days thing just because I looked at the data and they brought it up, maybe they're somewhere else. But if that's where we focus, for example, then you take the savings from that, and then you can put it toward a really meaningful outreach program that more particularly addresses the gap issues that you're talking about. Once again, brainstorming here.

Sure. Yeah.

I have something that we could think about on the margins, and one of the recommendations is thinking about how we use the information we get out of the primary election. And so one way we can think about this is at the local level is using that information and those debrIefs that we're Recommending in the report from the Primary Election to figure out how is the ROV at the Local level Really Engaging at that level.

And earlier in today's hearing, we were talking about metrics and thinking about how we could get that information out of those metrics. And working with the local registrar of voters pulling those metrics out of that primary debrief to see how are we driving voter participation increases and how do we shift that and tweak those and implement them again in the November election.

And so that's one kind of more Low hanging fruit piece of tweak that we're thinking about and we recommend, and that may not cost a lot of money. And it's something that's pretty doable, and it should be reasonable for the rovs when we always want to hear what they have to say about that. But it's something that's out there and in the report.

And I just want to echo and uplift all of know our organization does a lot of nonpartisan voter education workshops all around the Bay Area. And usually there are two types of questions that come up primarily. First is, again, as you said, the very basic questions about the electoral process and not assuming that people know more than voting experts like ourselves might. And the second is really the why. It's like, why is it important to vote? Why does this matter? Why does this impact my life?

And I feel like that connection is not always very clear, has not always been drawn to voters. And I think really emphasizing that message at the state level and from local officials and community organizations is really, really important to getting significant increases in voter participation.

And of course, one of the things we found is just so clear looking at the data from election, election is when there's attention and focus nationally on an exciting or meaningful election, that's what drives the turnout. Ultimately, what we're doing is incredibly important, but ultimately, it's less impactful on turnout than an election that people perceive as being exciting and important. I mean, there's a reason why the numbers dropped from 20 to 22. Right? 18, of course, was 18 is interesting.

Right. I mean, it was not a presidential, but I think partly because of some of the national dynamics, there was a real sense of engagement and urgency there. These are all things that are somewhat beyond our control. But anyway, listen, I can't say enough how much I appreciate all the work that you all do in helping to drive kind of attention to this area, especially when other states are just, I think, so grotesquely moving in a different direction to see the thoughtfulness and the engagement.

And I do want to obviously give a big shout out to Mindy and all the folks who are involved with the report for how thoughtful and engaged we all are in trying to make this whole process easier for people to access. And I think that's going to be the lens.

I'm going to be looking through, and I guess to the extent that we can be just thinking about ways to make things easier and more cost effective for our clerks as we're also keeping our eyes on the prize of participation and turnout, that's what I'm going to be looking for. And I know that that reflects the chair's feelings, too.

Does indeed. Thank you, Senator Allen. Thank you to each of you for participating, not just today, but for years of engagement.

In the work of Senator Allen. And you all did create the act. And as we work to make it better, a few data points to close would be thanks to the representative from the Secretary of State. They provided the amount of money that we spent on the 2020 census over the four year period in preparation for it. Through that census year, the state allocated $187.2 million as a data point there.

And I can't help but reflect on this discussion of participation without noting that when you talk about investments in education and where it should matter the most, we're talking about our school system, our education system, and that our children, our young adults are coming out of that school system without motivation, without understanding, and with the lack of some incredibly important historical facts.

It's been a tough week for me and I know for others when we see the data that shows the huge proportion of our young people thinking that the Holocaust never existed. So what the heck is happening in our schools? What is happening in our schools? That's a deeper, deeper discussion. We're going to move to public comments next. Thank you all, panelists for having us. For Members of the public that would like to provide participation in our hearing, we're going to provide two minutes each.

We have folks here in the room also maybe have some folks on the phone lines. Let me remind them again to call in. The number is 877-226-8216 and when prompted, please use the access code 570096. We'll first begin with public comment here in the hearing room. If anyone here would like to provide any public comment, please come up to the podium. All been very attentive and feeling satisfied with all the discussion thus far. Okay, we have one gentleman welcome.

I'll just quickly. Hi, Raul Macias. I'm the democracy program Director with Evelyn Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. We were part of the, along with the Silicon Valley Community foundation, helped Fund this report and some of these advocates and the research. And we appreciate secretary's office participating in that and stakeholders across the state and really wanted to thank the chair.

And Scott, thank you for putting this hearing together and thank you to the Committee Members for clearly reading the report and giving it some very thoughtful questions arising from it. We just encourage, we hope we offer ourselves out in our resources and how we can make ourselves available to you with more research and to the secretary and to the state to help increase, increase turnout and especially targeted towards those voters who aren't participating, voters of color, voters with disabilities, voters, immigrant voters with limiting proficiency.

And we hope you all will stay interested in this, and we'll engage our grantees and find ways to engage philanthropy as well. So thank you very much.

Thank you. We are very appreciative of the Haas Fund for their support for this work. So thank you for coming up and recognizing yourselves and for us giving us an opportunity to recognize you and your foundation for the important work that you do. I hope you'll continue to do it.

All right, next we're going to move to the phone lines to see if there's any individuals who wish to provide testimony versus teleconference moderator, can you please prompt if there's any individuals that want to provide public comment? Yes, Mr. Chair, we'll go to line 17. Please go ahead.

Yes. Hi, chair and chair Members, my name is Sharina Latch. I am a taxpayer in California. I just want to say, according to the PPIC, supported by James Irvine foundation and a 2020 survey of over 2000 participants, it showed that Latinos, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans are more likely to vote in California elections, combined with 55% versus 65% of non Hispanic white counterparts. Well, why is that?

Well, that's because voters here in California is only 48% of Californians that trust elections because of poor transparency on Prop initiatives like Prop 49. And how you try to control voters and how we vote by getting rid of hand counting. You waste our money like in the bullet train, and you form more and more committees like this one and give each other raises with our tax dollars. And you partake in unethical practices like trying to pass laws that infringe upon our rights.

If you want to fix elections, add voter ID to the Voter Choice act. Take out the dropboxes and have people go to the voting polls, hire more workers. That's how you fix California elections. Thank you.

Thank you. Next caller, please. We will go to line number 22. Please go ahead.

Hi, is that me?

Yes. Please begin.

Oh, well, there's a lot of interference on the line, but I just wanted to call. I'm representing the organization goat Farmers for good government, and I just wanted to offer the perspective that you, chair Glazer, suggest at the end that.

Maybe there's something wrong in the schools, that the young people graduating out of California schools, which, by the way, are the worst in the nation, and parents are pulling their children out of the schools because of all of the pharmaceutical genocidal insanity that's going on when you took civics out of the schools, that was the beginning of the end of this state. You have a population that cannot name the three branches of government.

They don't understand, by your own admission, that Newsom himself running this state with an iron fist by Executive order for over 1000 days actually isn't about democracy. And just for the record, we don't live in a pure democracy. We live in a constitutional republic. And what that means is the minority has rights.

And in the case of the thousand plus days that Newsom locked the state down and denied people running their businesses and people were taken their jobs from them over pharmaceutical injection with EUA authorization only, maybe you should take it under advisement that the population is just choosing to ignore you and everything you are doing down there, from destroying the EDD to corrupting our election.

Ma'am, further, your time is up. If you could just conclude, please. Great. Thank you very much for your testimony. Moderator. Next caller, please. We now go to line 23. You may beginning line 23. You're open.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can. Please begin.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I do appreciate you having this hearing today, and I appreciate the somber tone and you realizing that what you're trying to do with getting people to vote is not working. The reality is most people, as my colleague from the goat farmers for good government said, most people don't care because they feel like they don't have a voice.

But those that do care do come to the election, and they do get excited about the initiatives that are on there and people that are running for office. Unfortunately, most people don't. But what you're trying to do is reach out to those who don't. Now, I'm sure you have colleagues that don't even read the bills that they vote on, they vote on based on party line or because somebody told them to do it. Is that somebody you really want voting on a Bill?

Do you want people making decisions for the rest of us that don't even care enough to find out who it is that's running, don't even know that it's the day of the election is happening, that you have to send them a ballot and they don't even bother to fill it out? If that's the initiative that people have, then why bother with them? Why worry about them? Because they don't care. They don't even know who their Senator is. They don't know who their Assembly Member is.

So as my colleague said before, I would go back to maybe a couple of days, I think one day, and I talked with some more on the conservative side. My liberal friends have said it would be great to have a voting holiday. We close down all the businesses and encourage everybody to come out. Maybe a week prior, we start talking about what the initiatives are and who the people are voting and actually go back to teaching civics in school.

It's unfortunate that people don't know about the holocaust, but what have we been teaching kids this year about their gender? That is the big issue. So I appreciate that. I'll send you an email with more documentations. I'll fill it out. And I appreciate your time today, and I appreciate the conference. You'll have a great day.

Thank you, sir. Thank you for calling in. Moderator next caller, please. All right. Well, let me just say in conclusion first, I know Sienna Kendall, April Littlejohn, Scott Matsumoto and others helped with our hearing today. Our gratitude to each of you, certainly to all the people who testified and have been involved in this important subject.

Last spring, the President Protemp of the Senate, Senator Atkins, spoke to all the chairs of Senate committees, and she said that an important part of the year ahead was to do oversight on important policy obligations and responsibilities in your Committee's jurisdiction. And it was out of that admonition that we are here today discussing, engaging, and one of the most important things that we do, certainly in this Committee's jurisdiction, which is ensuring our democracy has the most robust participation of our citizenry as possible.

I thank Senator Allen for his leadership in bringing the act to fruition, Senator Umbrook for his continued work to make it work, and to all the Members of the Committee who I'm sure some are listening and some are not here in person, but join in the commitment to that very important cause of our democracy, citizen engagement, or it will not be here for long. It's more fragile than people think.

If you're not able to testify via the teleconference service, you can submit your comments or suggestions in writing to the Senate Committee on elections and constitutional amendments or visit our website. Your comments and suggestions are important to us. We want to include your testimony in the official hearing records. Thank you, and we appreciate your participation. Again, thank you all for being here in your busy schedules.

I want to wish everyone a happy holiday, a very good new year, and we'll see you back here in the Legislature, in the Senate at the beginning of the year. So with that, the Committee on Elections and constitutional amendments is adjourned.