Senate Standing Committee on Elections and Constitutional Amendments

Good afternoon. Welcome to the first hearing of the Senate Committee on Elections and constitutional amendments for 2025. It is an honor to serve as Chair and I want to first thank Senate pro tem Mike Mcguire for his faith faith he has shown in me in leading this esteemed Committee.

As someone who began their career in civic engagement as well as doing voter registration and voter engagement, I'm excited for the opportunity. I do look forward to working with my colleagues in this Committee in the coming months as we consider a number of election related proposals. Today's informational hearing examines the signature curing process.

As you know, after the 2021 enactment of Assembly Bill 37, which I was proud to be one of the authors of, Every active voter in California receives a vote by mail ballot. In last November's presidential election, over 80% of California voters voted by mail.

When voting by mail, a voter must sign the the vote by Envelope Mail Envelope. Election officials then compare the signature on the envelope to the signature of the voter that they have on file. If the voter's signature is found to compare, then the ballot is counted. If it does not, then the ballot is rejected and not counted.

However, before a ballot with a signature that does not compare is completely rejected, the voter does have an opportunity to to fix or cure their signature. This info hearing today focuses on the specific part of election Administration.

State law provides the framework for notifying voters that their signature did not compare and the parameters for comparing their signature to what is on file. The Secretary of State Office issues regulations to county election officials with more detailed standards.

In turn, county election officials compare signatures, contact voters with non comparing signatures and receive the process signature cure forms. In today's hearing we will hear from the Secretary of State's office, county election officials, stakeholders and political attorneys. Each has a unique role and perspective in the signature curing process.

As part of this process, we are trying to balance the competing but important interests of ensuring voters have their votes counted and ensuring the integrity of our election system.

By better understanding the signature carrying process, able to best determine what processes work, which aspects can be improved upon to expedite the ballot curing process and counting process and ensuring that every vote counts. Thank you to each of you who are participating in today's hearing. I look forward to a robust discussion.

Do any of my colleagues have any opening remarks? I will turn it to Vice Chair Dr. Choi.

Thank you Chair and good afternoon. I'm so happy that I get to serve on this election Committee because I am also one of those who are very interested in and concerned about the election integrity. When we talk about the election integrity, that also should expand to election efficiency as well.

And this effectiveness, efficiency and integrity involves so many different issues. Therefore, I have in fact submitted several bills related to this election concerns. Today's ballot curing signature verification issue is a big one because that delays our election results so much.

Ballot curing is something delays vote counting results and therefore how we can expedite and then also borrow maybe modern technology, AI technology, etc. so, that our human eye verification and the errors can be minimized and efficiently, more promptly, more quickly it can be accomplished.

I know this is a very complicated issue as we depending upon the situation, we are in haste, the signature may be different. Sometimes I sign full name, sometimes I abbreviate S. Choi. And depending upon the situation, and then also as you get older, I understand the signature changes. I think probably my signature has changed.

So how do we verify this, the differing changing signatures by people as we get older? So there are many issues and I am so looking forward to the suggestions and what is being practiced. State Secretary and then also each county register of voters. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Choi. Seeing no other Committee Members wishing to provide opening comments, we will move to our first panelist for a statewide perspective. We have before us Jana Lean, who is the Chief of Elections division for the California Secretary of State representing Dr. Shirley Weber. Please join us. Welcome to the Committee.

Well, good afternoon everyone. Sorry I had to run up that flight of stairs. It's quite a crowd outside. Just came back from the capitol, so I'm glad I got here on time. So, good afternoon, Senators. I'm Jana Lean. I'm chief of the Elections Division for Secretary of State Shirley Ann Weber, Ph.D.

and I'm here today to give a brief overview of the Secretary of State's role regarding the signature cure process in California. Senator Cervantes, you did a great overview. So I think some of my remarks will be mirroring a lot of what you already said, but we'll go through this, okay?

The Secretary of State is the Chief election Officer of the State of California. And as the Chief Election Officer, the Secretary of State is responsible for administering provisions of the elections code and ensuring elections are conducted efficiently and state election laws are enforced.

The election code allows for vote by mail voters to cure their voted ballot if their county official determines that the signature on their vote by mail ballot identification does not compare to the signature in the voter registration record or if they fail to sign the vote by mail ballot envelope prior to each election statewide Every prior to each statewide election The SOS issues a reminder to county elections officials of their legal obligations regarding non comparable signatures and unsigned vote by mail ballot envelopes.

Additionally, we provide courtesy samples of the documents that voters can use to cure these defects, including signature verification statements, an unsigned identification envelope statement, as well as a combined statement. We provide translations of these statements along with the required notice information in all languages required by Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

A minimum of eight days prior to certification of an election, the election official shall provide notice and instruction to all voters identified as having failed to sign their vote by mail ballot envelopes or to all voters identified as having non comparable signatures on their vote by mail envelopes.

The notice must be sent with a postage paid return envelope and must be sent to a voter on or before the next business day after the discovery of a missing or non comparable signature. The notice to voters must indicate specific information about the CURE process.

Voters must be informed they have the opportunity to verify their signature until no later than 5pm two days prior to the certification of the election. The signature provided by the voter may be added to a voter's registration record to be used for signature comparison purposes in future elections.

If an election official has a telephone number or email address on file for a voter whose signature does not compare, the election official must notify the voter by telephone, text message or email of the opportunity to verify the voter's signature.

If the election official calls the voter and the voter does not answer, the election official must attempt to leave a voice message. County elections officials must include a single or combined signature, statement, verification statement, or unsigned identification envelope statement along with the instructions on their Internet websites along with their mailing address, email and fax number.

Information related to voters who did not sign their vote by mail ballot envelopes or or whose signature on their vote by mailbox envelopes did not compare is treated as confidential voter registration information. This information is updated daily, including the name of the voter and needs to be provided in a searchable electronic format.

If a local election official offers other electronic means for submission of a statement, they must establish appropriate privacy and security protocols that ensure the information transmitted is received directly and securely by the election official and is only used for the stated purpose of verifying the signature on the voter's vote by mail ballot envelope.

When a signature verification statement is returned, county election officials are required to do the comparison on that signature to the signature that is part of the voter registration record.

If the signature does not compare, the vote by mail ballot envelope shall not be opened and the ballot shall not be counted and the election official shall write the cause of the rejection on the face of the identification envelope. This concludes my overview and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much. I will actually ask a couple questions and turn to my colleagues on the Committee. What role does the Secretary of State play during the queering process? And secondly, through Ballot Track, is there a notification that voters will receive whether there was a signature issue?

And furthermore, could the Secretary of State notify directly and specifically about a signature issue through ballot track?

Okay, so our role is to basically be able to ensure county elections officials know what the responsibilities that they have under the law. We also get an update on unprocessed ballots after during the canvas. And in that unprocessed ballot report, we do have information about the number of notices that are still waiting to be verified.

So there is that in ballot tracks. Yes. Voters who have an issue with their vote by mail ballot for any reason gets notified as a message through ballotrax right now. So they are notified if there is any sort of an issue to contact the county. County elections office.

Can you specify what does the text say?

I don't have that text in front of me right now, but I'd be happy to share with the Committee later.

Thank you. The Secretary of State currently provides counties a signature form CARE form template. Do you know how many counties use that form?

It is used as a sample, courtesy sample with the translations. I know that the majority of counties use that as a format. However, they have to put the information specific to their county on that actual format.

I know that there's other counties that do it through an electronic form and they have that available for folks to submit their signature verification statements. So it is used as a sample. So not necessarily the form itself.

But not every county has an electronic form.

That's correct, ma'am.

What changes would the Secretary of State's office propose to improve the signature carrying process?

I think there have been many laws that have been passed recently to allow for the more enfranchisement of folks to be able to do this through the CURE process. I do think that it is a process that is working relatively well.

The requirements for county elections officials to do all of those notices I think does pretty potentially add to the time.

However, it will further enfranchise folks whose ballots would not necessarily be counted if their their signature was not included on their vote for mail ballot or if there there was some sort of a comparison issue on their vote for mail ballot.

Thank you. I will turn it to my colleagues for any further questions. Dr.

Choi, thank you. I wonder how many. What percentage of total votes? Because vote by mail is 80%. That's a huge number. Is that a small portion? Are we Talking about this 10%, 15% or 1%, 2% of the questionable signatures come to light.

And I was briefed by several people that, you know, there were election office, the ballot counting time, the observers are there, right? And over the shoulder looking at if one party, Democrat or Republican will raise objection. You know, the signatures appear to be different then I thought that would be honored and set aside and for verification purposes.

But I heard they are not honored at all. It is up to the let's call it the clerk's officer's decision. Is that true? And that's the number one question. Then number two will be what's the purpose of having those observers? And third question will be what percentage of the total ballots are subject to verification?

And number four will be curing is. Did you say has to be done within two days? Did you say from the time.

No sir. They have to notify a voter as soon as they get received word or.

If they can have a certain time allocated or indefinite open.

So within the next business day of them discovering there is an issue with either a missing signature or a non comparable signature, the county elections office needs to reach out to that voter to let them know prior to two days prior to the certification of an election, the county or the Voter has until 5pm on the day before the election in order to have that counted.

But I think you had a couple other questions. Let me see if I can answer.

Your previous one so then you can answer that.

Okay, So I think the first one, what's the percentage of ballots that are not counted? Essentially, I think that's what your question is. So ultimately we do have a count of ultimate ballots that are rejected for any specific reason. The vast majority of them are missing and mismatched signatures.

Of the total number of ballots that are that are voted in any one. Election, missing means on the envelope. On the envelope, that's correct. So how many percentage. So the vast majority of the percentage of those that are not counted, it's less than 1%.

Less than 1%. In the last election it was less than 1%. Okay, 1%. And then a mismatch is.

That's combined, let's say missing, mismatched and for any other particular missing signature or.

Mismatch is a total 1% or less. Approximately among the quarter.

Right. So we do a ballot rejection report after Every election. So the ultimate numbers of ballots that have been cast, they're not actually counted. So we do have that. It is available. I can provide it to the Committee after this hearing. I think your other question that you had, sir, was about observation during the canvas.

It is true that some folks can issue a challenge of a potential vote by mail ballots and the disposition of that ballot. The ultimate determination is by the county elections official. They will review what the challenge is. They will review.

The purpose of allowing the observers.

The purpose of that is to give transparency for all voters and all observers to see the process they do have the ability to challenge. The county elections officials themselves will review what the challenge is and ultimately make the decision.

But the challenge is made. But the ultimate decision is you have the ability, the officer has the ability to reject the objections, right?

Yes sir. That's ultimate, their ultimate authority.

So there's no point of pointing at, hey, I object that it's a mismatch then has to be set aside for verification. But it's not done.

It would be set, it would be set aside in order for the county elections officials to make the ultimate determination. It is reviewed. So if something is brought up as a challenge, it would be reviewed.

You know, I thought about this a lot because our. You call it the canvassing time, but I would like to phrase it as vote counting time. It takes just too long because of two major factors. Number one is this signature mismatch or missing signatures.

The provisional ballots for those who just walk up and did not meet the deadline of the voter registration and they come up and vote and then later through the process.

I understand that also takes so much time and why majority of 99% of people will have to suffer waiting, waiting, waiting for this small fraction of voters who were responsible for missing the signature on the envelope. I mean that's the regulation.

If that's so important enough, then I guess we need to put the burden on the voters rather than on the state or 99% of voters. And mismatch is a little bit different one because if I registered 203050 years ago, it could have changed. So you may validly raise that question. Are you the same person?

So maybe there's some process every five years or 10 years. I don't know how long it takes for signatures to change, then maybe to renew the signatures process. So the signature verification time is this long then periodic. 5 years, 10 years.

Verification system is more up to date signatures on your file than the questionable mismatch signatures will be so little. So vote counting that Kind of questionable signature issue will be from this long will become so little in a few days to take care of all the questionable ones rather than months.

Right now, total is what from the election day, 38 days for your Department.

There's 30 days for that? Yeah. It is 30 days for county elections officials to certify the vote, but ultimately.

For your office to certify the election result is 38 days.

Yes, sir. Once all the county elections officials are done with this.

So this is outrageously ridiculous, shameful. You know, in the US with this kind of technology, why we have to wait that long? I mean, it can be done in few days, you know, if not few hours. So.

And Dr. Choi, just. And we could. Regarding the question you had on challenges, I think that's best redirected to our county election officials who are actually going to be coming up next.

And so just in the interest of time, I just want to make sure if there's any closing comments you want to make as it relates to questions.

Yeah. Just to say that think about as a research topic where the burden should be placed and we can improve the efficiency as long as we take care of the integrity as well put the burden on the voter.

Thank you, Dr. Choi. Ms. Lien, if you'd like to close for us, that would be helpful.

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So for the official canvas, it does take quite a bit of time in order to make sure that all vote by mail ballot signatures are verified. 80% of the turnout from the last election was by vote by mail voters.

So when we mail out over 22 million ballots to voters, it takes a lot of time for those ballots to come back. So during that whole time, the canvas opens right as the election here ends. Right. So election day.

But the vast majority of ballots on election day are actually vote by mail ballots that are dropped off at either dropboxes or county elections voting sites. So during that first few weeks, that is what county elections officials are doing. So they do need to verify those signatures on those vote by mail ballots.

And that is an important process as part of the integrity of vote by mail. So while we can, we can't actually get ballots tabulated on election night. Absolutely. But it would take many weeks in order to get all of those vote by mail ballot signatures verified.

The last, let's say week or so after all those are done, it becomes those last little bits, those ones that are missing and mismatch. And of course the provisionals, because those take a little bit longer in order to make sure a voter hasn't already cast a ballot at a polling location.

They haven't submitted a vote by mail ballot. So then the provisional would be verified that that person hasn't already counted, and then it would be counted if they're eligible. So it does take, the process does take time.

And I know that was part of this signature carrying is what, one more piece that California put in law in order to make sure that every ballot that is possibly eligible to count. To count.

Thank you, Ms. Lean, for your testimony today and your perspective. Our second panelist is our county perspective, Senator Allen.

I guess my only follow up is, you know, just from the Senator's line of questioning, we have a problem, you know, in the sense that we, we're trying to do something really good, which is to ensure that we're counting every ballot and that we're really maximizing participation and enfranchisement.

That's a, that's a critical and really important mission, goal and achievement. The flip side is the process. And by the way, in so doing, we're also really tight on integrity.

We want to make sure that we're doing it all right, that every signature is properly, that we're not counting, in spite of all the crazy claims out there that we are being really careful, and that's why it takes so much time.

The flip side is, of course, most other jurisdictions in the country get their results much earlier than we do. Perception becomes an important thing. Certainty becomes an important thing. We had situations where legislators weren't even really sure whether they should come to training or not because we didn't have enough information as to whether they won or lost.

And so it starts to run up to deadlines, and then the public perception problem becomes a big one, too. I guess my question for you is what advice would you give to us as legislators?

Ultimately, it's our job in this Committee to, to come up with legislation to help you and all the elections officials do as good a job as possible of balancing these two goals, which is enfranchisement. Well, three goals. Enfranchisement, integrity, and also speed of results.

And it seems like we've put a lot of emphasis on the first two and less on the third. And there are downsides to that. Is there a way for us to speed up the results that in a way that will still maintain our enfranchisement and integrity goals?

I think there's a lot of things that are potentially that could happen. I do think one thing that would help would be to not pass legislation that would require all county elections officials wait until the 28th day before the election in order or after the election to certify their ballots. Right.

There was a Bill that was passed last year that required everyone, whether or not they were complete or not, to wait until at least E +28. I think that caused the vast majority of counties to not certify before then.

So I think there could have been potentially some county elections officials that were done with their vote counting that had sent out the letters to get the cure process done and could have potentially certified the election earlier that could have addressed some of these close races.

But in those cases, you still had the. The raw data about the numbers. Yes, right. If they got it done earlier, then they were still counting toward the statewide electoral college count or, you know, that's correct.

But I think some of the questions that came in were some of the very close races. I know that was what one of the big pushes to. Why to speed up the count. This is not a new process. The certification timeline has been in law for state law for several.

Several years, almost a decade, I believe, or more. And I understand the want to make things quicker, but California is the biggest voting jurisdiction in the nation. We send out the most ballots. It's going to take longer for us to count ballots versus, let's say, new Rhode Island. Right. A small state.

Even Oregon, because we have much more. We have a much larger eligible population that are voting. Are there things that we could do? I think that. I think we welcome this conversation and what steps we could potentially do. I think that something the county elections officials would probably want to come up and speak to.

Also a date certain might be good for when there could be a deadline in order for voters to get through their ballots in and cured that. That could be something that could help set a quicker potentially deadline.

But I think the process for, and I think for the Secretary of State and other county elections officials in California is to make sure that speed is not always the factor. The factor should be enfranchisement of voters.

Right. Okay, look, I'm going to be interested. We have a lot of good folks coming up and I'd love it if, you know, we could hear from each of them as to how they'd answer this question. Of course, it's not the only factor.

The flip side is I actually think there's a De facto disenfranchisement happening of California voters because we're so deliberative. The other states are so much further ahead of us that, that their data ends up taking hold of the conversation.

And our Votes end up, you know, I mean, perceptions are about the results of an election and where things stood get, get really shaped in the first week after the election. And sometimes I'll go back and I'll find out three years later, zero, that person actually won by a lot.

When I always thought it was a really close race because on, you know, two days after the election, it looked like it was really close and turned out they won by 10 points. So this isn't, I mean, again, you know, if every state did it as slowly as we did, then this would be a different story.

But they don't. And so we have to grapple with this disconnect. And, and I guess I do agree with the Senator's comments about how in this, you know, yes, we're a bigger state, we also have more staff. You know, some counties are the size of these states and yet those counties are much lower than the other states.

So I don't know that the size question is entirely, is enough of an excuse. So anyway, I think, you know, certainly don't want to put you on the spot anymore. But to the extent that the Secretary of State's office has ideas about this and other folks through the course of.

The hearing, I'd be Senator, Senator Allen, great questions. I think some of those questions will be great for our next panelist, which we do have coming up. I do want to turn it to.

Senator Limon and for interest of time, I'm just going to echo, I think what's been said despite being a really big state, I do think we're looking for recommendations to solve for some of what is either perceived concern, but maybe not a real concern in terms of the timeliness and efficiency of it so that we can, I think create better, further advance like our trust right in the system.

That I think is really important and I think it's there. So I just want to echo what my colleague has said and look forward to the next panel maybe giving us a little bit more information.

Yeah, we are on just one coming follow up is on the size matter. California, yes, it's a big state. However, counting is done by each county that, that's, you know, county by county. So county can expedite and we are trying to provide the efficiency how we can do so. But hey, we are big city takes long.

I don't think that's a valid answer.

Which I think is a great segue into our county election officials. Thank you, Ms. Lean, for your perspective and time. This is why we're having this hearing today to examine this process and how we can further improve. Improve this process throughout our state while safeguarding each vote. If we can have our second panelist join us.

Bob Page, who is the Registrar of Voters for Orange County. And Kristin Connolly, who is the Clerk, recorder and Registrar of voters for Contra Costa County. Welcome to our Committee. Please begin when you are ready.

Thank you, Chair. If I could, since I'm an appointed official, I would like to defer to my elected colleague to let her go first.

Thanks, Bob. Good afternoon, Chair Cervantes. Dr. Choi. Senators, my name is Kristin Braun Connolly. I am so proud that the good people of Contra Costa elected me as their Clerk Recorder and Registrar in November of 2022.

I'm a Contra Costa native and just to word a little bit, so you understand the scale, you know, very proud and Contra Costa and somewhat are a microcosm of California, but we are a bit smaller than Orange County. So we have nearly 1.2 million residents across 19 cities and 34 unincorporated communities.

And we have a innovative, creative, award winning, efficient team of just 28 full time election staff working year round in our elections division. For the November 2024 general election, we had just over 722,000 registered voters. To scale up for this presidential election, we had 89 additional seasonal staff work in our office and our election operations center.

We remain a polling place county and I hope that's okay with you, Senator Allen. And in order to pull that off, it takes 1209 trained poll workers at 146 polling places. Above and beyond what's required of us in Contra Costa as a polling place county.

We do three days of early voting starting on Friday, November 1, Saturday, November 2, and on Monday November 4 at 55 regional early voting sites. And and before diving into the specifics about our experience with signature curing, I just want to mention we saw a higher percentage of in person voters than the statewide average.

Of the total vote cast, 14% was in person at our regional early voting sites or on election day. And our total voter turnout for November was 74.6%. Our voter services team remains hard at work year round. As I speak, we are preparing for special elections in both May and June.

In terms of our signature curing experience, I just want to emphasize that the vast majority of our ballots are cast as vote by mail ballots. We only use humans to conduct signature verification. And in preparation for the 2024 election, we actually wanted to make it more accessible to observers to watch our signature verification process.

We installed four monitors into one of our rooms outside of our tally room so that people could simultaneously watch multiple processes happening at the same time, which also had the added benefit of getting observers to be away from my staff while they were doing the signature verification process.

We got really good feedback the observers that came and watched that. So of our 722,861 registered voters 539,219 votes were cast and counted. We sent 5,464 cure letters to voters of which 2,523 ultimately were cured. Said a different way 46% of our signatures that were challenged ultimately got cured.

If you want to do the math, a different way to Dr. Choi to your question before, that's 0.4% of our total votes that were cast were ultimately from those 2,523 voters who were initially challenged but then cured their signatures.

As the Secretary of State's Representative Jana Lean mentioned and I put in the handout that I prepared, the uniform certification date of December 3rd meant that we delayed our certification. It's the latest date at which we've certified. Our office typically is done with the canvas before then, and we were done with the canvas before then.

But it did mean that an additional 71 votes were counted because we had to take signature cures through 5pm on Dec. 1 that we would otherwise not have taken because we were done with the canvas. It's worth noting that our office began offering a text to cure function for our voters with last year's primary.

While it remains less popular than curing by mail, we have received positive feedback from voters about the ease of this tool, including voters of all different ages. We intend to continue to offer this as a service moving forward. As described in the briefing document for today's hearing.

Signatures for the verification process come from the voter's paper registration card, both the original registration and any update and or the DMV when they register electronically. Our office typically sends a notice to the voter after a second level review in order to give the voter as much time and notice to cure as we can.

A second and third review are required before we deem a signature incurable or non comparing and again, all reviews are conducted by humans. A word about the forms we use we used two signature cure letters for mailing, one that is for unsigned and a second for signature mismatch.

We found it easier to have separate letters for sorting, tracking and vote by mail envelope pairing purposes. However, a combined letter was made available on our website in compliance with the Secretary of State's requirement as required by law. We attempt at least two forms of contact. First, a letter is sent through the usps.

Second, we attempt to call or email the voter, whichever contact method has been given to us by the voter and is stored in the voter's file. After a voter is contacted about a signature issue, the length of time it takes typically for a voter to respond and return the form simply depends on the voter.

Some voters respond immediately by either returning the letter or using text secure and some never respond. Some voters respond by returning the letter by email. We continue to receive them by fax, but this remains very rare. If multiple forms are received from the same voter, our office will use any received to attempt to cure the signature.

While duplicates are retained just for pretense and purposes, if a signature is provided and compares to the signature on file, it is uploaded to the voter's file for future use. Specifically, we scan these signatures and attach them to the voter's record.

By contrast, when a signature is rejected, that voter appears on a signature cure list that external agencies can receive, usually a campaign that wants to help their voters cure signatures.

There is not a different code for if an attempted cure signature is also rejected, the voter just stays on the list of those who need to cure their signatures. We do not send out a new letter, but the second method of contact may be used to notify the voter. As was mentioned, there was a question about ballot tracks.

Voters who signed up on ballot tracks are notified when their ballots get rejected and no further notification is done after the two attempts we make to contact the voter voters information with the challenge vote by mail statement status is available on either the unsigned or signature data files that can be purchased from our office.

In terms of follow up, we send out signature update letters to voters that have initially been challenged but were eventually made good after experts review to ensure our office has their most updated signature on file and will therefore not get challenged during first level review. This mailing is usually done a month or two after the certification day. Specifically for unsigned vote by mail ballots.

Contra Costa sent 977 letters and of those 326 of the 336 that were returned were made good and then of those 977 that were missing the signature unsigned, 107 voters used our text to cure function of which all were made Good and and just 33 voters returned their signature cure form via email of which 29 were made good.

It should be noted that all voters that remained challenged were sent another signature cure letter for signature mismatch reasons and for vote by mail ballots originally challenged as a mismatch.

Our office sent 4,667 letters and of these 1,241 were returned by mail and 849 were made good and Text2Cure was used by 583 people of which 423 were made good. I want to point out that's really different than when the missing. The cure rate of the missing signatures.

And our staff maintains, and I believe Bob's going to testify this, it continues to be a problem that if people sign something different than we have in their voter registration system, just because we got another version of a different signature, we can't cure it. And so that's. That's disparity. Right?

100% of the people that use Text2Cure when they were missing their signature were able to make their signatures good. In terms of. zero, when I, when I talked to our voter services staff about these different issues, you know, they do emphasize that it does feel like voters seem to ignore the letters from our office.

And so they'd love to somehow magically get people to pay attention more because we would certainly love to be able to cure more of these signatures.

But in terms of potential process improvements, our office is focused on making additional outreach to voters to ensure we have their most updated signature on file and to constantly improving our training for staff that verify signatures.

Again, I'm grateful for the expertise and diligence of our voter services staff in helping me to prepare today's hearing and I welcome any questions.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Honorable chair Cervantes and Members of the Committee, I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I am Bob Page. I am the registrar of voters for the County of Orange. And along with Kristen, I'm here to represent the county perspective about the signature cure process. And as my.

It's my duty as a register of voters to implement California elections law that prioritizes voter access and participation.

One of the things that was discussed in the last panel, a key part of this duty is to ensure that all Orange County voters whose vote by mail ballots have been challenged are provided a sufficient opportunity to cure their signature or proof of identity issues not mentioned.

We've only been talking about signature but when we have federal election federal offices on the ballots, we also send letters to voters who did not provide ID when they registered and they have to in order for their ballot to be processed, we need them to provide proof of identity.

An analysis of the signature cure data from the last three General election I believe in Orange County provides the following insights. The first is that the number of days available to a voter to cure a challenged vote by mail ballot is important.

Average number of days for mailing of cure notices to the date that the ballot is cured or made good. In this Last election in 2024 General, the average day was 13 days for our voters between notice and cure in 22 it was 9 1/2 days. In 2020 it was 7.3.

I believe the increased number of days in 2024 is most likely related to Assembly Bill 3184 that was discussed earlier, which required all counties to provide voters until 26 days after election Day to cure a challenge vote by mail ballot.

This was, in terms of Orange County's experience, five or six more days than we typically provide voters to cure a signature challenge ballot in 22 and 2020 respectively.

But what I can say if this Committee looks at something along the lines of AB 3184 and trying to have a uniform cure date that maybe is earlier than E plus 26, something along the lines of E plus 20 or E plus 21, I can share with you that in the last election in November 2024 there were and Kristin made this point as well, we had 850 voters in Orange County that cured their signature challenge after E plus 20 at at 5pm so if we had done our normal we were ready to certify on E plus 22 which would have set the deadline at 5pm on E plus 20.

Because we had those additional days, we were required to wait. We had 850 more voters who had their ballots accepted and counted.

The second point from the data that I see is that voters who were mailed a cure notice before or on Election Day are more likely to cure their challenge vote by mail ballot than voters mailed a cure notice after Election Day.

The percentage of challenged vote by mail ballots that were cured based on when the notice was mailed in the 24 election. For those who were mailed their notice by election day in 24, just over 59% cured their challenge ballots and if the notice was mailed after Election Day, Only just under 38% of voters cured theirs and similar kind of trends in 22 and 2020.

This may be either because the voters had more days to cure their challenge vote by mail ballot or because they've seen the election results and do not believe that curing their challenge ballot will matter. Obviously we care that they cure it, but a voter may decide that contest I care about is decided.

I'm not going to send in my cure. The third point that I pull from the data is that if there is an active curing effort by a political party, we do see more party voters curing their ballot. And as an example in 2024, as mentioned, there were some close contests.

I had two congressional contests in my county that were watched nationally because they were close and the results changed during the canvas period. And when I looked at the data, I know that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party of Orange County were out there knocking on doors and trying to get their party Members secure their ballots.

And that's shown up in the data in that the Democratic Party voters who have a preferred party of Democratic Party, 72 and a half percent of those cured their challenge ballot. In the congressional district 45, which was one of those two close contests for Republican Party Members, just over 61% cured theirs.

And then when you compare that to no party preference voters in congressional district 45, only 54% cured theirs. So obviously that shows to me that because parties were out there knocking on doors trying to get their party Members to cure, that did have a positive impact in making sure those voters cured.

However, I would state that because they had very active campaigns, we did get a lot more calls this election for voters angry about how many times people knocked on their door to ask them to cure their ballot. I really didn't have an answer for that other than if you send it in, we're going to work it and then you won't be on that list anymore.

The fourth bit of data that I see from looking at this is that, and this was mentioned as well, that young voters are more likely than any other age group to have their vote by mail ballots challenged.

So when I broke it down, the percentage of vote by mail ballots cast by age group, the voters in the age group of 18 to 29, just over 4% of all those vote by mail ballots were challenged. And then it decreases as I go through each one of the four age groups.

So for 30 to 49, it was only 1.44% were challenged. 50 to 64 years old voters, theirs was only 1.09% of their ballots were challenged. And for voters 65 to 100 years old, it was only 0.8% of those ballots were challenged.

I believe this is because early voters, first time voters, especially those who were voting in the first presidential election, the only signature we may have on file is the electronic finger signature they provided at the DMV.

And as Kristin mentioned, when somebody signs by hand a vote by mail ballot or signs by hand a cure notice, it's not going to be the same signature they have on file.

So obviously there's a need to encourage young voters to look at their signature that they have on their driver's license, but also to update their registration so that we get a more current signature.

And what Orange County has traditionally done to ensure this happens for all of our voters is that we will flag any voter whose ballot was challenged for a signature issue or even those that we start to see differences, even if we might accept it.

But we're noticing some differences creep in, either because of age or health or other issues. We mail a letter to each of those voters and enclose a paper registration affidavit and encourage them, telling them we know people's signatures change over time. We know that electronic signatures of the DMV are not high quality.

So we encourage you to fill out this paper affidavit and send it back to us. And so in this last election, we have mailed out just over 12,000 of those letters to Orange County voters from this last election.

And depending on the election, that's ranged from obviously with a lower turnout in the primary, it's down to under 5,000 of those letters we might send out. And then in General elections, it's anywhere from six and a half, 6,500 to the 12,000 we just mailed. So that's something we will continue to do in Orange County.

And I think it does help. Granted, as was mentioned, not all voters pay attention to the mail that we send them. So we don't get a high percentage of those back. We can't accurately track how many of those come back if that's the reason why the registration's updated.

But we still think that's an important step for us to educate voters about the signature issue and to make sure that they're providing a current signature. And thank you for your consideration. Any questions?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Page. I actually wanted to follow up on that mailing of the letter. Does that happen after the election?

Yes. So during the election we follow the law and do the cure process where we'll send a letter to every voter whose ballot is challenged. Then after we certify a month or so later, we will send a follow up letter to those voters we flagged to ask them to re register and provide us a new signature.

Wonderful. Now, when in the process does your county process cure forms specifically? As they arrive to the election office? After all the vote by mail ballots are processed? If you can both shed some light to the Committee on that in terms of the form, in terms of the accured form. When, when do you all process that? As they come in or do you set them to the side and how long?

Oh, I mean, we start that process. We do wait a few days before we have started. We sort of wait for a small a few days so that there is a bit of a. Enough of a massive votes to begin that process. Right.

Cause it all starts with firing up our sorter and we get all that process started and that all needs to work. And we have an entire project plan based on how much through put and how many hours are running our machines. So it's a few days.

And then we do start getting those notices out and we process them on an ongoing basis throughout the entire process. And we rely on the temporary staff that we have to help support the permanent staff in getting that done. It's just an ongoing thing.

Yeah, the same in Orange County. We as soon as we mail ballots out and we start getting. We get ballots back the first day. We have people who show up at our office that don't wait for the mail to show up, that want a replacement ballot, want to vote it on day one.

So we're processing things from E minus 29 until we certify.

Now when you received a cure form back. And that signature still does not compare. I think you had mentioned this. There's no further contact with.

Well, we still make sure. So we. They will remain on the list of folks who don't have a comparable signature. Right. And if. And we will make a second attempt to contact. Because we make two attempts to contact everybody. Right. And so.

And there's a lot of voters that will get their first letter from us and then act on it. And we haven't made a second attempt to contact them. So it's possible that, that you know, we do try to make, you know, we do make every effort.

We do not have a valid phone number and a email address for every registered voter. Just to give you some Context of our 722,000 registered voters, we only have about 330,000 valid email addresses. And so it is.

We're always trying to get all of that contact information, but we do make two attempts and then we don't make any more attempts after that second attempt.

And the same. The timing is a little bit different from Orange County in terms that we don't wait to make the second contact. If we will send out the letter and then that same day the letter is being mailed. If we have a phone number or an email address, we will contact them that day.

It's increased my cost that that requirement to do the second notice because I had to keep my phone bank staff that I hire specifically for the election on through days in the canvas, whereas before the I didn't have to have the phone bank active during the canvas period. As much so it has increased costs.

But we will, as we've challenged, done the final challenge after three Members of our team have agreed that there's significant enough differences in the signature with the one on the envelope with the one on file. You know, that triggers sending the letter out by the next morning as well as making that second contact.

But as Kristen said, there are no additional notices. If somebody signed up for a ballot tracking service, they'll get a text or an email through that, but we're not making an additional additional contact. Granted, as I mentioned, in this last election, the political parties were interested in a couple of our congressional races.

So they were ordering daily lists from us to go out and knock on doors and make those additional contacts to voters.

Thank you. And I will, you know, say, you know, this sheet here was really helpful to just look at the percentages and especially the age group where, you know, in my own experience in my county, Riverside County, we did see this particular age group, 18 to 21, where their ballots were more likely challenged.

And we saw the same thing.

And so certainly looking at ways to help improve on making sure that we can get that age group to update their signature. Right. And so certainly looking at ways that, and solutions to that. Do you know how often a signature is updated by voters?

I mean, it depends. We do a year round contact to our voters encouraging people to update their signatures when we're not busy processing ballots. And just like my efforts to get people to vote early, often that falls on deaf ears. And so it just depends. I don't have a firm, a firm answer on that, but we do. We continually update the voter file with valid signatures when we have them.

In Orange County we have 1.9 million voters just about. And on average per month, we are making about 60,000 updates to our voter registration rules.

So we're constantly, every day that team is updating records based on notification from the voter, notification from official government source such as a postal service, the Secretary of State, through Vocal Department of Corrections, the courts. You know, we're constantly making updates. So we, as I said, in a presidential year, it goes up. But generally, on average, we're making 60,000 changes to voter records every month.

Thank you. I want to turn it to my colleagues if there are any questions at this time. Dr. Choi?

Yeah. Thank you to here from my county, Mr. Page, for being here. Thank you for that updating. Yeah, we are dealing with two different issues here. Number one is signature verification mismatching and the missing signatures on the envelope. You might have mentioned that the Numbers. Number one case, number two case.

Can you tell me again if you have the total combined? Was, did you say 0.43 something?

not total

Yeah, but in terms of. Of total from that, not by the age. Yeah. I didn't break the challenges down by the type of challenge, but in the last election. I'm looking for my handout here.

Yeah. So I think you're referring to the age group information.

So you didn't distinguish by..

No, I did not. I did not. If that's something that you want, I can get back to your office. Breaking it down by challenge code. As Ms. Lean mentioned from the Secretary of State's office, the Secretary of State publishes end of an election ballot statistics report which includes the number of ballots challenged by each category.

So they would be able to provide you for every single county, not just for Orange County, But in the 2024 General election this past November, we sent out nearly 22,000 cure notices.

Okay, so glad to hear that you are constantly, every month you are updating the signature from various sources. But one of the sources, two places I can think of will be because you do require signature on the envelope. When the envelope is returned with a signature, do you capture that signature on the envelope? I think that will be at leave once in two years you can update.

Yes. So we are required what we do if we accept a signature, we are adding that to the voters file. And the reason that is as you had asked about earlier about automated software technology that might speed this process up.

Our evaluation of other counties or jurisdictions that use automated signature verification software is that the quality, the resolution of the signature that they're comparing to is very critical. And I'm sure you would not be surprised to learn that the Department of Motor Vehicles resolution of their signatures are poor.

So we have not implemented automated software for signature verification at this point because we want to build up a better library of higher quality, higher resolution voter signatures in our database before we attempt to see how successful that software could be for the first review of the signatures.

Right now we're holding off until we can build that library.

So you are not using DMV signatures?

No, we use DMV. We are. For some voters, that's the only thing we have. But because most of signatures are electronic finger sign signatures that don't look anything like how somebody handwrites their signature. Or as was mentioned with younger voters, they may still be perfecting what they want their signature to look like when they're 18 years old.

So by the time they get around to voting, they may have landed on a new signature that they didn't, that they didn't use when they were 16 at the DMV.

So we do use DMV signatures, but in terms of if we wanted to use automated signature verification software, DMV signatures are not high enough quality to actually be of any purpose for the software.

Have you seen any other state or counties using. We hear so much of AI technology that is very amazingly, sometimes more accurate or faster.

In terms of my neighbors, I know LA County, which does have a very generous investment in their budget in terms of what they do. They do use automated signature verification software. They were in the process last year, coming into this election of updating the vendor they were using.

I don't know if they've implemented the new software yet, but that's something that they do. They've also been experimenting and using it in different ways that aren't specific to ballot processing.

We do plan on looking into whether AI could help us do a better job of more efficient job of proofing all the different ballot styles that we have to create.

So this last election, because of all the different levels of government and the way that the districts are lined up, we had more than about 550 different individual ballot styles that we had to create. And each one of those has to be proofed. And so we are looking into, we're going to look into how.

Whether or not AI can help us and giving us an additional kind of backstop on proofing. We also plan on looking at it in terms of whether it might help us with translations that we're required to do.

In Orange County, we have four federally covered languages that we are required to translate all election documents and information into, as well as under elections code 14201 in the state, we have five additional languages we have to translate ballots for reference ballots in certain precincts.

So we will be looking at AI in terms of whether it can help us with the translation as adding a step to that. I'm not talking about getting rid of humans. I'm just saying using AI to assist our processes, to make us more efficient.

And Dr. Choi, I'm aware that the City of Denver uses automated software as well. If you were looking for another place to do research.

Yeah, you mentioned that LA is experimenting.

Well, they've been using.

Actually used it or just.

No, they've used it, but they were looking at using a new vendor. They were looking at whether there was improved software out there that they could procure. So they went through a competitive procurement process last year to purchase or to secure a new vendor for that.

Have they done any accuracy level so better than human eyesight verification?

Well, my understanding of the software, granted I haven't used it, but my understanding of what my staff research has done is that when you use that software you can set the percentage of exactness or level of match that you want.

The thing to remember and you mentioned earlier about integrity and efficiency is that and the burden putting the burden of proof on the voter.

The way that the state elections code is written right now is that everything we do is to the assumption that that is the voters ballot that we are, we are processing and conducting elections to the benefit of the voters.

So if, if, if you were to propose that that burden shift, there's going to be a lot of places in the elections code that you're going to have to address because we start at a position with vote by mail ballots that that is the voter's signature.

Yeah. Dr. The reason. Yeah. Can I just do one more question?

Yes. Let this be the last question I want to move to. Give Senator Allen a moment before we move to the next panelist. Thank you.

The reason I'm asking the percentage how small or how big the question of missing and also mismatching was that so far what I'm hearing is that is quite Low. And as you said that we are trying to count them as much as possible. And from the voters point of view, however, I mean we have regulations.

You already stipulated if you don't put your signature on the envelope, your vote is not going to be counted. Right. Already you stamped. That is your declaration. Why don't you go by that and then put the burden on the voters. Well if I make sure that if it may take one or two election cycles.

zero oops, I missed it then. Hey my ballot didn't count. To make sure next time they will learn that's only small out of this many voters. That's a small forgetful or irresponsible people have not put and put the burden on the entire system, entire county, entire voters. That's very unfair.

Well, yeah. So I would say that the way the law is written right now in terms of the cure process, the burden is on the voter. I have a burden to notify the voter that they didn't sign the the ballot envelope.

But if they don't return a care statement verifying that they cast that ballot, their ballot is not going to be counted. So in a way, you know there's a burden on me because I am required under state law to notify them immediately. When we find that their signature is missing.

That's the reason I'm trying to change the. Some of the laws so that be shifted to voters.

Yeah. And I think some of the next panels will probably may be able to address this better than me. But there has been litigation previously and decisions made, rulings made that we were required to notify them we could not just reject their ballot because they didn't sign it.

Thank you, Mr. Page. And we do have a political perspective as well, which will be helpful. I'm going to turn it to Senator Allen.

This is maybe a dumb question, but, but all the ballot curing is all vote by mail basically, right?

Correct.

Is there ever a situation where an in person voter needs a cure? I guess by definition you don't because you're.

Our position in Orange County is the elections code does not give my staff authority to verify voter signatures who come and sign the roster in person. They're required to sign it under penalty of perjury.

Voters require when they show up at a vote center to announce their name, verbally announce what their address is so they can be looked up in the roster. They're required to sign the roster under penalty of perjury that they are the voter. They are saying they're. They are.

And there's some, some warning language there about voting twice or violating that. But the law does not give my staff any authority to verify that the signature that voter put on the roster matches the signature we have on file for the voter.

All right. And if, if there was a situation where you'd have to people trying to, trying to vote under the same registration, then presumably then there'd be an investigation.

Right. If somebody comes into a vote center and it shows that they've already cast a ballot, whether it's a vote by mail or voted in person already, and that voter is adamant, I have not voted, we will allow them to vote provisionally. Right. And then we will do that investigation.

We'll evaluate the signature from the prior voter, the signature from the second voter. And sometimes we can figure out that the second voter is the voter and the first wasn't. So that can happen.

The other kind of thing, that's one of the common things we'll find when, when a signature is challenged is that, and it's one of our standard practices, is to look to see if there was a vote by mail ballot from the same household that was challenged.

Because a lot of times the return envelopes will get mixed up between the two voters in the household. They'll return the other Voter's envelope which has a barcode associated with that voter, but then the signature will be the other person. And so we're able to figure that out through some, some investigation.

But that's one of our typical steps that we do in the signature verification process is looking at challenge ballots to see if there's another challenge ballot in the same household. Right.

And we're the same on both points.

Yeah.

Okay, so what advice do you give to young people who are. Want to, you know, want to avoid this kind of problem? I mean, what's the best way to not end up in the, the caring doghouse?

I would say take some time when you're getting your driver's license, you know, to do, to do a proper signature that you can take a look at it. Vote the first time. That's what I tell my own teenagers.

But I do think it's important that they understand that their vote will not count unless they match what's on their driver's license, because that's what's on their voter file. And so we're trying all kinds of different techniques to push things out over social media and to try to get the word out and work with schools.

We've seen our pre registrations go way up over the last couple years with 16 and 17 year olds. And so we're hopeful that in that process while we're helping those people pre register, that we're helping them have a signature that they can replicate and that they will be successful in that effort. But it's a challenge now.

If they don't have a license, what signature are you working off of when.

Somebody 'S registering to vote? If they do it online, then that registration is going to be put in a pending file. It won't. Yeah. Be processed until we get a signature from them.

So we can get that off the form itself. If they do a paper, if they. Do a paper registration. Right. And so, but we could also, you know, go ahead.

If there's a discrepancy between the signed ballot and the, and the, you know, the, the, the license. Will you also look at the. Potentially the signed registration form.

Correct. We look at all signature, all the.

Ones we have on our file. What if people move from county to county?

Well, I unfortunately not a technical expert but I know that we do have access to other state databases to look at signatures. But I'd have to confirm kind of exactly how they do it.

But yeah, because there is a little bit of a hiccup if they move from one county with one type of system. To a county with a different type of system. I think that there could be some hiccups that it's not an automatic transfer. But yeah, I can get a follow.

Up on that because that was the same question.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I guess the best way to, I mean, in some respects, if you, if you have some, you know. Well, obviously you want to get your, your signature updated. Yeah, the DMV. But of course, you can avoid all this by voting in person.

But as you say, and as the charts have shown, there's been such a massive uptake in vote by mail, which is a good thing for other reasons. But it does add to all these extra complications, which now, since I have you here, you know, I don't know when we're going to have you back before this Committee.

I'd love it if you take just a quick second to answer this question that we raised to the chief elections division about how we can speed up the counting process while maintaining enfranchisement and integrity.

There's a phrase in our business among elections officials that you can have elections that are fast, accurate and cheap. You can pick two out of three. You don't get all three. And when it. And the reason that matters is that fast and accurate elections require significant investment. And so with the significant. I know for, for us, the.

Combined with, with a, with a liberal enfranchisement.

Absolutely right. Yeah.

I mean, that adds to cost.

Yeah. We've prioritized access. And so. And again, as Bob mentioned, and I say all the time, I am not the policymaker. That is your responsibility. And we are administrators of that. And so it takes more space to process vote by mail ballots. And that is the direction we have gone in.

And the footprints of each of our offices have most of them. Some people have great new space. We're not those people. And so it requires an investment in additional space. So, for example, we lease a sport court for part of the year during an election to do extraction.

I always worry that voters must think it's bizarre that pictures of our space have basketball hoops everywhere and that's where we empty our envelopes, but we don't have enough space. So it does take an investment in sufficient space and people to move up this process if you're not going to constrain some of the other pieces.

It's possible, but it just takes more money.

Are there any jurisdictions around the country that you look at and say, hey, they're doing it right, They've somehow found a way to thread the needle?

Well, I Think when you look at other states, the challenge in comparing ourselves to them is that they may have different deadlines for ballots coming back. I was getting a lot of questions during the last election about why is it taking longer after I explained it wasn't. This is the normal speed. What?

You know, to me, this is a perception problem. It's not that we're going slower, you know, as Kristen mentioned, because we have more ballots that are coming back as mail ballots, you know, when I became the registrar and because they're allowed to.

Postmark up until election day.

Yeah, until election day. Yeah. And in the 22 General election, I had the most number of vote by mail ballots cast on election day that we'd had for any election. Even with a Low turnout, we had more than 311,000 vote by mail ballots that were cast on election day.

And so I took that as an opportunity to talk to my county leadership about investing in building capacity to process vote by mail ballots. So the county invested $4 million to double all the pieces of equipment that I use for processing the ballot sorters, the extractors, and we also print and mail ballots in our county.

So I purchased an additional inserter for the mailing going out. And so it does take more money to go. As a result of that investment, you know, we're able to conduct the canvas in the same number of days, even with more ballots.

So going back to, you know, when I look at all of our General elections, going back to 18, which was the last election we had as a Polling Place County, 18 was the latest we ever certified, was 24 days after. Granted, a little bit different this last election because we were prohibited from certifying before E plus 28.

But if not for that urgency legislation, I would have certified on E +22. So we've been able to keep up through that investment of more money. We've been able to keep the pace. But when I say it's a perception issue, there are more close races. And because of that, media outlets, especially in your county. Yeah.

And, yeah, it's very purple county, so. But it's not just the political races, too.

More and more jurisdictions are going to districts. Right. So school boards, city councils, there are more close races.

Yeah. So it's party membership. It's the fact that the state, I believe, does redistricting. Right. It has an independent Commission that doesn't look at political party membership when drawing the lines, so you end up with more competitive state and federal office elections.

To Kristen's point, you've got more and more Local jurisdictions being threatened with litigation unless they move from at large to by district. So you've got a smaller number of voters, your contests are closer.

So to me it's, you have closer races, which then causes the media to not be able to, quote, unquote, call races as early as they used to. But our canvas periods have always taken this long.

There's not been a change in how long it took in terms of Orange County, how long it takes us to complete the canvas. The other key thing to remember about the canvas period is not just processing ballots, it's also doing the mandatory audit.

So for this last election, for the 1% manual tally, I had to have 24 teams of four board Members hand counting more than 30,000 ballots in those randomly selected precincts to be able to complete that took 10 days straight of 10 hour days for 10 days straight through the weekend for them to get that done.

So, you know, to me, when, when the Legislature is looking at a policy decision about whether it wants to speed up the count, I don't see it as something that it's, you know, you can fix the cure process or you can fix that.

It's really, to me, it's a, it's a hard discussion the Legislature needs to have about what are the deadlines. You know, do you allow the post office to still deliver ballots up until seven days later? Do you, do you, you know, do you, do you change the, how many days you get people to cure?

Because the reason why the states have the results faster is that they don't provide the same level enfranchisement for their voters. I'm not saying, I'm not advocating that you should. I'm just saying that's really where the discussion has to take place.

If California is committed to that level of access and enfranchising voters and giving them every opportunity to cure a problem with their ballot, then the only way to Kristen's point that you can go faster is investment. It's investment in larger space, more equipment, more people to process those.

Thank you, Mr. Page. So what we're going to do is I have to move to our third panel, but I certainly do look forward to follow up discussions. I know we could probably have about 10 more questions, but we're going to have to pause and just say thank you so much for your perspective and testimony today.

Thank you. Thank you.

If we can now bring up Mindy Romero, who is a Professor and Director for the USC Center for Inclusive Democracy, we also will hear from Kim Alexander, the President and founder of California Voter foundation and Deanna Kitamara, who is the managing attorney for the Democracy and National Initiatives Asian Law Caucus.

And to each of our panelists, if we can keep your presentation to five minutes, thank you so much.

Hello, microphone working, there we go. Hi. Well, first off, I just want to say thank you very much for inviting me here today. Thank you to the Committee and of course, to staff. I do have a lot of data to share, so I'm going to go, I'm going to jump in.

Obviously, I'm going to be talking about signature curing, non matching in particular when it comes to reasons for ballot rejection. But I'm going to set the stage a little bit and talk about rejection rates in California and give you some detail by subgroup because we do have disparities in terms of rejection rates long standing in our state.

All right. If this works. Oh, maybe not. I was told if I hit the space bar. Oh, well, I need somebody to advance it for me. It's not forwarding.

Do we have tech help?

Ah, thank you. Okay. There's always something right with technology. All right, so as I said, jumping in rejected ballot rates. So we look over the last decade and a half and we can see that there has been fluctuation in the percentage of all the ballots cast in California that are rejected voting mail ballots cast that are rejected.

Of course 2024 has already been mentioned. 0.9%. Really over the last decade and a half, ranging from almost 3% to 1 to 1.9%. So quite significant. And of course really we know that the number of actual ballots cast, turnout rates in each of these elections vary. And I'm just showing you General.

Now what does that equate to In California, that 0.9% last November was about 117,000 actual ballots rejected. This our number is slightly at CID, slightly different than the official Secretary of State number, but very close. Now let's break it out by race ethnicity.

So that 0.9% for everybody, it is higher for Latinos and this we've seen for quite a long time. 1.2% rejection rate, little higher also for Asian Americans, slightly at 1% and lower for whites and about the same for black voters. Look at age as already mentioned.

Now these are state numbers and I want to make sure everybody knows we have all of these data of course broken out by subgroup, by or at the county level. So I'm happy to make all of this available to you. This is brand new data that we just processed and our report actually hasn't even come out yet.

But we're making it available. Of course. I want to be able to share it with you today. So 3.3% is a rejection rate for 18 to 24 year olds in California last November.

And you can see you're looking at 55 plus, 45 plus, much lower if we look by party, about the same 0.8% for both Democrats and Republicans, but higher for those that are affiliated. No party preference. Now this is not how people voted. This is of course how they're affiliated in their registration.

And also third parties reasons for ballot rejection. So if you think about that pie of voters that had their ballots rejected in 2024 in November, that's what we're looking at. Now the top reason was a non matching signature. For a very long time in California, the top reason used to be late. It'd always be late.

No signature, non matching, some combination of the three types. Typically it was late. As mentioned, we've had changes in our law, right. So we have a more generous time period that people can return that ballot if it's postmarked on election day.

So 59% of all ballots cast, sorry, all rejected ballots were rejected because of non matching signature, 27% because it was late and another 11% because of no signature. Now I'm going to break it out by subgroup and I just want you to follow along. Let's look at the gold which is the non matching signature.

So for Latinos this is their share of, sorry, their pie of actual rejected ballots and the breakout for the reasons. Right? So 65% much larger than other groups in terms of the proportion rejected for non matching signature. Also high for Asian Americans, lower for black voters and lower for white voters as well.

And I'm happy to talk about methodology in terms of identifying race ethnicity in these. This is the entire voter population. Look now at age 18 to 24 year olds, almost three quarters of their ballots, remember they have higher rejection rates than other age groups. Nearly 3/4 because of non matching signature.

This is quite striking because for young people, even when the state started to change, young people still had overwhelmingly their share of their rejected ballots were rejected because of late. That has changed now too. It's non matching for party Republicans. Quite significant here. Difference their proportion of rejected ballots that are rejected because of non matching signature.

And then I just want to end here with a brief conversation around California ballot tracking service which was mentioned earlier. You all know what that is. I'll spare the definition, but one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that California implemented as other states have is because of the potential positive impact on rejection and cure rates.

We released a very lengthy report last year and we thank again the Secretary of State for making the data available to us. Just some quick points here from that lengthy report which I'm happy to make available to you. And we were looking at 2022.

So in the 2022 primary and General elections, the VBM rejection rate was at least 50% higher among non Ballots Tracks users. Now of course people have to sign up for Ballot Tracks, right? There's a self selection process.

Rejected ballots cast by Ballot Tracks users had lower rates of signature issues than those that cast were cast by Non Ballot Tracks users. And the majority of curable vote by mail ballots cast by Ballot Tracks users were corrected and counted in that election or at least in 20 in the primary.

As of 2023, approximately 5 million Californians were signed up. I don't know what the latest numbers are, but we did see a stable period. We had significant growth in Ballot Tracks use legally being available to all counties in 2022 because of the pandemic.

And then between 2022 and 2020 and the 2022 General elections, we saw pretty much stability. The same number of Californians that were signed up for ballot tracks. So there is an opportunity for education and awareness to increase significantly the proportion of Californians that are signed up for this service. And then concluding thoughts.

It seems to me that there's really two areas that we've been talking about today, right, in terms of potentially positively affecting cure rates. One is how can we avoid signature rejections at county elections offices? So that's what county elections offices can do.

So I think some of my colleagues here are going to talk today about things like training, right? Training, matching, regulations, potentially for some counties at least, calibration of their software. And then there's also how we can help voters themselves to avoid rejection and cure their signatures. And this is a two parter. So the first is prevention.

We know that large proportions of Californians aren't aware that there is a signature verification process when they actually turn in their ballot.

So increasing awareness to prevent a rejected ballot and then awareness on the cure side when they get that notice from their county, awareness and a comfort level and an urgency around being able to cure that within the allotted time. And I think there's still a lot of voter education that could be done there.

And then lastly, just in case nobody here knew, the context here that we're talking about is there really is no tangible evidence in any way in California of voter fraud. And it seems like the signature verification process often gets linked to the fraud question. And I just wanted to make sure that that's established for the record as well. Thank you.

Do you have slides? Yeah, I do. Hello, I am Kim Alexander with the California Voter Foundation. It's great to see you all. Thanks for inviting me to be here. And I have some slides too. So let me. I know, really see if I can get this woken up the way Mindy did. Wants me to invite people. Okay.

We might need tech help again. Star of Today Show.

Just trying to invite people. Thank you. oh, okay. So we've been working on this issue for over a decade now. First starting in 2012 when I was visiting the Sacramento county elections office and noted these piles of ballots that were too late and signature problems in the elections office.

I want to talk about how we can improve the cure process. But more broadly, this sort of goes to some of the discussion earlier today. I think we need to recognize that improving this process requires state help state funding and consistency. And we want to reduce the need to cure ballots by reducing ballot rejection.

We want to ensure voters are treated equally when their ballots are challenged, and we want to improve the signature curing process. So I'm not going to go through all this with you. It's in my written testimony.

But I compiled all the things that we've done over the last decade to address ballot rejection, and there's quite a lot of them. And our nonprofit was involved in a lot of these efforts, so I just threw a lot of these up here on the screen. And we continue to innovate.

The good news is that we have brought down ballot rejection, as Mindy's data showed. And this chart shows. It used to be almost 3% of ballots cast were being rejected. Now we're down to 0.93% in the last election. The trend is that it tends to be better in General presidential elections and not as good in other elections.

The Average, though, is 1.5%, which is just too high. Now, we did a project the last election called the Close Count Transparency Project, where we monitored those close contests and tracked the vote count in the weeks following the election. You can visit that on our website.

And the ballot curing process was part of that long vote count, as we were hearing today. But we've got a number of recommendations coming out of that project. I'm not going to go into today because we're not focused on that issue. But I did want to share this one slide with you.

We've been downloading and saving vote counts in California for several decades now at cvf.

And what we see in this chart is that as the ratio of ballots cast in person has declined and vote by mail ballots has risen, the timeliness of the count has dropped from 81% of the ballots counted within two days of election day down to 66% in the last election.

We have this little blip here, November 2020, where we actually had a high rate of vote by mail ballots and a faster count. And that was really due to the fact that the state spent $35 million educating voters how to vote by mail and encouraging them to get their ballots in faster.

And we were in the middle of a pandemic and people were at home and didn't have as much else to do. So that's always a factor, too. But I do think we need to pay attention to the fact that that pandemic election saw the lowest rejection rate in the past 16 elections, 0.56%.

And the fastest faster ballot counting rate than we've seen in other elections. So there's some lessons to be learned there. We did a study with CID in 2020 looking at ballot rejection and we found then, as Mindy's data reinforced today, that young voters and first time voters are far more likely to have their ballots rejected.

And that is cause for concern because people don't like to do things they feel they're not good at. So, you know, if people are voting for the first time and gone through all that process and then they're being told, zero, you didn't get it right. I mean, are they going to come back? I don't know.

I worry about that. I do think we can reduce the need to cure ballots by helping voters make fewer mistakes, increasing the percentage of ballots cast as in person ballots that don't require signature verification, and increasing access to early voting for all voters.

We need consistent guidance for how to address how to correct a mistake on a ballot. This is the top search term, that term that brings people to the Calvoter.org website at election time. How do I correct a mistake on my vote by mail ballot?

People are looking and we need that message to be the same across all the counties because they don't all give you the same advice. When voters make mistakes, any kind of mistake, we need to tell them and make sure that they don't keep doing it.

And if there is a way for supervisors to review a challenge signature before voters are notified, that would be better so voters aren't unnecessarily alarmed. We can reduce the need to cure ballots by increasing ballots cast that don't require signature verification.

We have this great new law, AB626 that allows voters to turn in their vote by mail ballots as an in person ballot, no signature verification required. In Orange County over almost 20,000 voters chose this option. And those ballots don't require signature verification. Don't have to be open, don't have to be flattened.

It really speeds up the process and gives the voters a lot of satisfaction. And we should be ensuring that all voters have access to early voting the weekend before the election, not just voters. Choice act counties. This is a proposal the Secretary of State is sponsoring this this year 12 AB 1249 that we look forward to supporting.

We also need to make sure voters are treated equally when their ballots are challenged. And you can see here, these are the counties with the top 10 highest rejection rates, as high as 2.54% in Imperial and the lowest rates with as Low as 0.17% in Amador what accounts for those variations?

30 seconds.

And here is a list of 12 ways we can improve the signature curing process. This again is in my testimony to you. There is a reference here to the technology and the need to test and certify the technology. That's not happening.

Also, giving access to DMV signatures, all signatures, might be a way to give counties more access to more signatures. And thinking about shifting to a top down voter registration system would enable more access to more signatures from more counties. We need more state regulations, we need more funding, of course. And I lost. There's my last one.

Written procedures using a statewide form, annual trainings, and ballot guidance on the envelope itself saying make your signature look like your DMV signature. That's kind of a no brainer. Turning in ballots earlier gets cures faster. And keep reaching out to voters for a new signature if their ballots rejected.

Thank you, Ms. Alexander.

Good afternoon, Senators. I'm Deanna Kitamura with Asian Law Caucus. Asian Law Caucus is the oldest legal and civil rights organization in the nation serving Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Thank you for holding this important hearing and for asking me to support. This subject is important to Asian Americans because Asian Americans vote by mail in high percentages.

And as Dr. Romero noted, the Asian American community has a higher than average rejection rate with regards to signature comparisons. And I've thought about this a lot about why this might be. And I think about my mom. You know, she came to this country as an adult. When she came here, she had to adopt a signature.

She had to learn roman letters, her ABCs, first in block letters, and then she had to learn cursive, right. And so as I watched her sign, it was never second nature for her to sign her signature. In 2017, I was the voting rights Director at another organization and a demographer colleague and I released an issue brief on this subject.

And I want to talk about the trends we saw in addition to finding the higher than average use of vote by mail ballots as well as a higher rejection rate among Asian Americans, communities with high limited English proficiency rates had the highest rejection rates for comparison issues. At the top of the list were Vietnamese American voters.

And second were Korean American voters. One of my current co workers used to teach citizenship classes and he told me that his adult students made mistakes when writing their names. These were students that were about to become citizens, about to become voters. And inconsistencies are not just among new citizens.

Colleagues at Disability Rights California reminded me that voters with disabilities will likely have inconsistent signatures and are disproportionately impacted by the signature requirement. And now that some schools aren't teaching handwriting, rejections among young voters are likely to go up. My point is that we will always see signature inconsistencies, but that doesn't mean they aren't the voter.

So in my mind there are two categories of solutions, one related to the signature comparison process and another one related to the cure process. For signature comparisons. We already have statutes and regulations that make sense. If counties were properly following them, the rate of signature rejection should have gone down after implementation.

So one of the things I am wondering about is are counties calibrating the signature comparison machines too strictly for those that are actually using the machines? And the second question is, are training materials for the review process following regulations?

A 2024 lawsuit cites a county's training manual that tells staffers if they are spending more than a few seconds reviewing a signature, they should challenge it. That's a violation of our laws. The Secretary of State should first of all develop universal signature comparison training consistent with the regulations which would be required by all counties to use.

And the Secretary of State should look into the calibration issues. Counties should also be required to maintain on file all signatures that they receive. I understand that many already doing that, but it's unclear to me whether they all are doing that. And the paper affidavit that Orange County talked about should be required by all counties as well.

Because I think that you're never going to have a match if your DMV signature is based on electronic signature and you're always just signing your envelope. Of course you also need voter education for this as well as for the CURE process.

I'm going to talk about the cure process now and that the first thing is we should standardize instructions on the vote by mail envelope and explain what we're looking for. And that should be in plain language and in all the languages that a voter votes in. And we should capitalize on ballot tracks.

It's a great system we that many voters use. Ballot tracks should not just provide information about the ballot being rejected, but it should actually provide a link to a standardized form so that people can use that to cure their signature issues. And we need to maintain the cure period with a simplified process in order to reduce disenfranchisement.

In addition to our concern of disenfranchised disenfranchisements, disenfranchising voters for every election, we're also concerned that voters who have a rejected ballot will be turned off by the voting process. So if they have to if their ballot is rejected or if they have to jump a lot of hoops to get their ballot to be counted, then we think that they may not vote again.

And so instead of just disenfranchising a voter for one election, perhaps they're disenfranchised for every single election to come because they've given up on the process. And the last point I wanted to make is a reminder of what Dr. Romero had just said, that voter fraud is essentially non existent in California.

And we already sign under penalty of perjury that we are the voter who is submitting a vote by mail ballot. So that means the signature review process is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist yet. The solution disenfranchises tens of thousands of Californians each major election. So it stands to reason that we need to reduce the number of ballots that are being rejected in the first place, while also improving the cure process. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Ms. Kitamura. So we do have, I think a couple questions we have time for if we can. I'll turn it to Senator Allen. Do you have any questions at this time? Okay, so I'll bring it back to myself before I turn it to Dr. Choi.

Do you, does your organizations or do you know of any organizations that are providing any kind of outreach or education on the signature curing process itself?

No, the only groups that I know of that are doing any outreach are the county registrars and their staff and political campaigns when they're in a close race.

My organization does Know youw Voting Rights workshops and we also do Know youw Voting Rights Flyers fact sheets. And during the workshops we do explain to the voters and the community Members the process of voting and the requirements required to vote by mail.

But we're only hitting, you know, so many communities and so it needs to be far more robust. And I agree that a lot of the, what I've heard is a lot of it is from the campaigns that are doing a lot of the education, certainly.

And also just if I could add, there was a concerted effort by a lot of organizations to provide funding in the state budget to support community based organizations doing this kind of voter outreach and education. And unfortunately that funding did not get approved.

But if it were approved in the future, there are plenty of organizations in California that would love to help get the word out and educate voters about this.

Thank you. And just to answer your question, we are a research center academic at usc, so we inform and educate around the data.

Yes, certainly no. And thank you for the proposals that you provided. We are certainly talking about many of those already. We have time for one more question before we move to the next panel. Dr. Choi, do you have any questions? Thank you.

Plenty questions. I have USC Professor Dr. Romero. Did you know that I'm a graduate of USC Price three days fight on. And then I was certified as a USC alumni. And also I taught at USC for five years after graduate school.. Right after my PhD. Anyway, for your participation. It is so alarming.

117,586 ballots were rejected in 2024. That's so high. Even though comparison, the percentages are so low. But in real number, that's like more than average city size. So as I listened to you, I was thinking how we can solve this problem, the speed, how to reduce the signature verification period using technology.

There are many different ways we can get there and I am caught in between because. Did you say that 80 something percent of the people participated in the vote by mail total? So the total vote of participants, they all voted vote by mail. So that means the popularity of the, you know, vote for mail has increased.

I think that has a lot to do with the state effort to send regardless of their choice. Before it was do you want the absentee ballot? That was the terminology they used. But now everybody is sent by mail ballot. So I think that may have contributed a higher rate of vote by mail.

So if to solve all of these problems, how about having an election day holiday? And with some exception of people away from home or in the hospital, everybody will have to come out the border in person. That will probably eliminate all of these questions. What do you think about that idea?

I get asked about a holiday often. I'll say two things. First, California really has moved over the last decade to increasing its vote by mail use. Right. And expanding obviously now, right. By mailing all registered voters automatically in a vote by mail ballot. So it's made a policy choice to expand access to vote by mail.

And then we have of course the Voters Choice act, which is now in a, you know, serves a overwhelming proportion of California voters. And that with the early voting period, was California's answer, at least for many to a instead of a holiday, you've got four to 11 days, right. That you can vote.

So I think there would have to be some reconciliation, if you will, of the path that we're on versus a holiday. The other thing is, I think once if you talk about reducing vote by mail again and expanding in person in some form, right. Not necessarily through a holiday.

We don't have data to tell us what that would look like in California could have potentially have disparate impacts, for instance. Right. So I think we need a lot more information and a lot more analysis to be able to say if this would be a positive pathway.

But the state and voters have invested a lot of time around vote by mail. There are challenges, right, to rejection disparities and rejection rates that are entrenched. I think we do have data though, that tell us outreach and voter information and awareness is absolutely key. It's Low and it's disparate.

So some of, or maybe perhaps much of what we're talking about today could be addressed by awareness and understanding, maybe through things like more information on the ballot envelope.

But I think also for that actual contact with voters, making sure they understand their choices, because they don't, once they have that vote by mail ballot, they can still go vote in person or they can choose to send it back right through the mail Dropbox drop off and that they understand what they have to do to get their signature processed right accurately and not get their ballot rejected.

So there's a lot of information in voter education that's still lacking. We make these changes and we implement, but we haven't funded the voter education aspect by and large. Around that.

Noted.

Could I add something? Good question. So I just want to say that even before California started to vote of us send a vote by mail ballot to every or a ballot in the mail to every voter, Asian Americans were already voting in high numbers by mail.

And that was the way that they wanted to vote. And so, and maybe one of the reasons is because this way they can get language services, they can talk to their family Members, so they can talk to a community Member about what's on the ballot in their language if they have any questions.

And so eliminating vote by mail, I don't think is the solution, just to have a one, you know, national or state holiday, election holiday.

And just real quick, we did do a survey a number of years ago, it probably should be repeated, but we found the percentage of infrequent voters, not all voters. But we asked infrequent voters, would you be more likely to vote or less likely to vote on election day holiday?

It was 50/50 who said they'd be more likely and less likely. So it didn't sell us on that idea. And I do think that the problem is not using vote by mail ballots. I think part of the problem is calling them vote by mail ballots.

You know, if we sent everybody just a ballot in the mail and said you can turn this in in person. You can vote early and not signaling to them. It has to be in the mail. I think that could help.

The other problem is people are turning in those vote by mail ballots at polling sites on election Day. Just creates this giant pile of work for everybody after the election.

If not only voters could get them in earlier, but if at that point of contact someone at that site actually looked at the envelope, made sure there was a signature there. Some counties do this, but not all that already would cut down on a lot of the signature rejection issues. If we had that fail safe in the process.

I think that's a voting behavior. I myself do that on election Day. So if I may, in the interest of time, I do need to move to our next panel, but I know that there are many questions that my colleagues will have. We could follow up with each of you individually. Thank you so much for your time.

If we can bring up our last panel, we have Richard Rios, who is a partner at Olson Remco llp, as well as Ashley Titus, who's a partner at Bell McAndrews and Hilltack LLP. Welcome to our Committee.

You each have five minutes. Please begin when you're ready.

Is red on or? Ah, mine's on. Okay. I don't think I'll take five minutes. I'd rather take your questions than give you a prepared statement. But I was very happy to find myself agreeing with the vast majority of the observations and the suggestions of the previous panelists.

I think I have at least one or two ideas to contribute that haven't been mentioned so far for introductory purposes. I'm the General Counsel of the California Republican Party. I work with the national Republican parties as well. Candidates, independent expenditure, and ballot measure campaigns at all levels.

I've been advising clients on ballot curing since the law went into effect, and I believe it was 2018, at least from a campaign point of view. I think there was some curing a year or two before that.

And for purposes of this hearing, I'm speaking on my own behalf, not on behalf of any client, political party, or candidate. I reviewed the background document and I agree with several of the ideas in the section on considerations moving forward, including implementation of a uniform form by the Secretary of State that must be used by all counties.

If counties want to have different versions, I suppose that's okay. But there should be a form that a voter could get anywhere that can be accepted by every county and not have to worry about whether they've used the correct form or not.

The possibility of using ballot tracks to notify voters more proactively if their signature needs to be cured, and establishing a uniform deadline for submitting the cure form that takes into consideration the speed of vote counting and providing voters and campaigns with election outcomes as soon as possible.

I also think it's a little gross that we have this curing process going on sort of at the end when we know what the totals are, and now we're just chasing down people to try to close that gap. The election's supposed to end on election night, and it seems to continue until, you know, E plus 28.

Now, I have some recommendations that I haven't heard mentioned and then just some others that I want to support. First, I would propose just eliminating signature comparison completely. I don't think that's something that could happen immediately, but I think comparison of a number is going to provide quicker and more accurate outcomes.

And so what I would propose is that we use Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers or or state identification numbers that already exist in many, many voter records. And to the extent that voter records don't contain an ID number, elections officials could continue to compare a signature.

But A number is objective, whereas a signature is subjective and a number doesn't change. So if someone's handwriting changes, if someone has a disability, that number's still going to be the number. And elections officials already have these numbers available to them.

If we're going to continue to rely on the subjective signature comparison, we should invest in some proactive outreach to voters. And some of the other panelists have already mentioned these items send voters a current sample of their signature on file. I think some would be surprised what their signature looks like along with the residency confirmation card.

So this is already happening. And perhaps this could be combined in a single communication with voters.

Alternatively, or in addition to that suggestion, when a voter checks their registration status online, could that show them what their current signature on file looks like so that they can see it and decide, zero, that doesn't look like my signature anymore and I need to provide an update?

And I believe Bob from Orange County said he's already doing this, but I think a lot of counties are not. If the voter signature has been rejected after the election and when the elections offices have time, contact those voters and let them know and give them a form so that they can provide a new signature.

To aid campaigns and others that are seeking to assist voters with carrying their signatures. It would help if there was a streamlined method of providing both the uncured list and the cured list. I have definitely heard voters complain about being harassed by campaigns that keep going back and keep going back and keep going back.

And it's not always clear to campaigns when a voter has returned a cure form, regardless of the outcome, or that their signature has in fact been cured so that they can quit bothering them. Right now, there's no consistency between counties as to even how to get that list.

The Legislature did tighten up the law to make clear that that list is available to campaigns, but it's still sometimes really hard to get. It's really hard to get updates. There's no streamlining of what that list looks like, what's on it.

And particularly removing people from the list once they've already been cured would be really helpful, and I think voters would appreciate that. And finally, improve training to elections officials at the county levels.

I've had attorneys in elections offices personally hear elections workers take phone calls from voters and give them bad information, completely unaware that curing is even a thing, completely unaware that the list is public, completely unaware that campaigns can legally have that information and contact them, and just flat out giving incorrect information about the entire concept of a cure.

And that freaks voters out and that's not good for the integrity of the process. So thank you for the opportunity to share my experiences and I am happy to respond any questions you have after Richard provides his comments.

Thank you, Madam. Am I on here? Madam Chairman, Members of the Committee, thank you very much for the invitation. My name is Richard Rios. My law firm is Olson Remcho. We serve as General counsel to the California Democratic Party. We also represent candidates, ballot measure committees, and other entities that are interested in the outcome of elections.

In the 2024 cycle alone, we represented clients in, in more than a dozen different counties. Big counties, small counties from Los Angeles to Orange County to the smaller ones in the Central Valley, Merced Madera, those kinds of counties.

Our client's objective in participating in the curing process really is to ensure that voters validly cast ballots are being counted. And as was stated earlier, you know, there is no evidence of fraud in California. Most of these ballots, if not, you know, all of them should, should be counted.

We wanted to call attention to a couple different issues. Most importantly, the elections code, as is mentioned in the staff report, contemplates that counties administer their own elections. The counties are essentially in charge of, of their own elections.

And what that means is that we get disparate interpretations of the law governing the curing process and different standards that are applied to the signature verification.

And, you know, having been in these different counties, we see counties that are counting the signatures, you know, almost all of them, unless there is a clear disparity, while in other counties, the standards are quite high, notwithstanding what the elections code says about the presumption of validity of signatures.

So this is really a huge problem in the disparity in the way that these signatures are validated or not validated throughout the state. And, you know, the disparate application of the law is an area that really needs to be focused on as well.

I want to give just a couple examples of certain circumstances that we dealt with just in this past election cycle involving the curing process where there were disparate standards that were applied by different counties, sometimes in the very same election.

In multi county jurisdictions, you get one rule applied by one county in the same jurisdiction and other rules apply, or the rule applied differently in another county in the same district. For example, this year, the 26th day after the election fell on a Sunday, that also happens to happen to be the deadline to CURE ballots.

And so we would ask counties, well, the deadline to submit cure forms is the 26th day, just like the statute says. Right. And some counties said, yes, of course. The 26th day is, and we're going to open our office, we're going to accept the cure form.

And then other counties within the very same district said, no, the deadline extends to the very next day because of these different statutory provisions which say that if a deadline falls on a holiday or weekend, it extends to the next business day.

And so we had counties in the same contested election applying different deadlines to this, what seems to be a clear rule. And I would just mention, in that circumstance, the Secretary of State had also issued guidance which stated that the deadline would be the statutory deadline.

So I do believe that counties do their honest and best job to interpret the law correctly. It's just not always consistent throughout the counties. And that makes it very difficult for campaigns that are attempting to participate in the process understanding and knowing what the rules are and what the rules of the game will be.

We also experienced variance in how counties reported their data, kind of to go along with what Ashlee said. And some witnesses testified earlier. Some counties would. Under the law, you have to. When the ballots need to be cured, they have to go through several layers of review before they're finally determined to be rejected.

So in one county, after the first level of review, but before a voter's ballot had been determined to be a mismatch ballot, they uploaded into the database that the signature was mismatched, even though it had not finally been determined to be a mismatch signature.

And what that meant is that the data that was received by the campaigns included voters names whose ballot had not been determined to be mismatched ballots. And so you've got campaigns going to the voters, asking them to cure their ballots, and they've not yet been determined to be mismatched signatures.

So the systems, the data systems and the processes by which the state requires the data to be tracked by the counties and reported out to the public is hugely important to the campaigns and to the transparency in the process. I just want to offer a few policy solutions, if I might.

We believe, or I believe, that the provisions of AB 3184, which prohibited registrars from certifying elections prior to the 28th day, should be reenacted Shorter. As was testified earlier, the data shows that the longer voters have an opportunity to cure their ballots, the more ballots we get cured. So we would.

I would encourage the Legislature to consider reenacting that provision of AB 3184. There is no requirement or no process by which the counties are required to communicate with voters whose cure forms have been rejected. There is A requirement to notify voters when they're vote by mail signature has been rejected or is mismatched.

But if a voter signs a CURE form which is then determined not to match, there is no subsequent notification to the voter. We would encourage the Legislature to consider standards around notifying voters whose signatures have been whose cure signatures have been determined not to match.

Finally, we think there should be a mandatory period by which the counties are required to review CURE forms. This all ends up being an issue at the very, very end of campaigns.

And for counties who decide to delay the review of CURE forms, those voters have less of an opportunity to cure their ballots than voters in counties who whose CURE forms are reviewed earlier. So therefore, we would encourage some kind of mandatory review period for reviewing the CURE letters. With that, Madam Chair, I'm happy to answer questions.

Well, thank you both to Mr. Rios and Ms. Titus for your insight and those proposals. Given your direct experience this last cycle, I do have one question. The list of voters who attempted to cure their signatures and they were still rejected. Is that list public? Is it free? How do does every county operate differently? Can you shed some light for the Committee?

The list is essentially public. You have to fill out a form saying that you'll use the data consistent with the legal requirements for which it's made available. But it is essentially available. In some counties you have to pay for the for the list. In other counties, they provide it for free. Has been my experience.

And you have varying levels of updating the cure list. In some counties, the lists are really not updated very well. In other counties the lists are updated. And that just kind of goes back to my point about uniformity throughout the state as you have all these different counties applying different standards, which makes it really difficult.

I would also say in some counties you can pay with a credit card. In other counties you have to walk in a check. I think that, you know, again, it really would be helpful if we had uniformity throughout the state on some of these issues related to data.

Some still want to give you a CD.

We have time for two questions here, two additional questions. Seeing Dr. Choi.

Thank you. Regarding the. In the earlier testimony, I heard that the DMV signatures are not so reliable to compare mismatching signatures. Is that probably. My guess is that because of the electronic signature pad people are using. How about if we eliminate that? And because driver license is what every.

Depending upon your age category, I think is every five years or 10 years or different. But it's periodically renewed. So at that time everybody has to sign. So Rather than unreliable electronic pad signature, changing the system on paper, wouldn't it be one of the solutions that we can. The voter registrar's office can use a DMV signature.

Well, Motor Voter is a law both at the state level and the federal level. And it would be pretty hard to disentangle voter registration at this point from DMV records completely.

But from an outreach point of view, as was recommended by previous panelists, the more we encourage people to vote in person, the less the signature comparison matters and the more opportunities people have to vote in person, whether it's election day, four days before election day, or 11 days before election day, the less we need to worry about the signature comparison and then therefore the cure of a signature.

And as I propose, using a number, you know, then whether it's done in a Sharpie or a stylus or a crayon or anything, the number is the number.

You know, you may have situations where you can't decipher what somebody's written and you could allow them to cure that, but at least it's an objective measure rather than a signature that changes over time. And I can tell you, my daughter's 18. She just turned 18 in November.

She first encountered the DMV at 15 and a half when she was applying for her permit. She was more worried about passing the written test than what her signature looked like. At 15 and a half, you don't even really have a signature. It's her first name and not even her last name.

And her registrar of voters visited her AP Government class in the fall and recommended that they register in paper and not register through the DMV for that exact reason. Because at 18 years old, her signature is already different than it was at 15 and a half. And his advice was, your ballot is probably not going to count if you vote by mail.

Now, earlier, the Asian testifier told us the Asian voter mismatch was higher than other ethnic groups

But using a number would be consistent for that person throughout their lifetime.

Young age related. And this one is, you know, dealing with a new language. All the, you know, people try to learn how to sign in romantic Roman Roman language. In my mother's case, it was the same thing. She learned the Alphabet abcd. And then I practiced for her how to sign in Roman characters.

And later I found out when there was any form that her mother please sign here, she refused to sign that, but she signed in Korean language, so it could happen. Indeed, because she finally got the citizenship when she was, you know, frail and voting by mail. Probably her Signature became one of the targets for mismatch.

So how do you solve that problem? Young people, older people, you know, foreign voters. So we have a lot of studying to do and improve how to recognize that the same person's signature is the same.

Point well taken. You know, I will say, you know, as we have heard from each of our panelists about evolving signatures over the years, we have a lot of work to do, but there are certainly a lot of takeaways and just valued, value and appreciate your insights here today.

I think many of which many of us agree with. I want to make sure that no additional comments. If there are any closing remarks you'd like to give, we'll turn it to public comment.

I have no further comment. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you both. Thank you. I would now like to move on to anyone wanting to provide public comment. Thank you. We have one minute for public comment.

One second. All right. Hello, Chair and Members. My name is Eric Harris. I'm with Disability Rights California. It's wonderful to be here with everyone.

Disability Rights California supports California's current signature verification and cure process because it takes into account whether disabilities might affect the voter's signature and provides adequate time to allow voters to submit a signature if theirs was rejected. I want to note that many voters with disabilities have changing signatures or cannot provide a signature due to disability, injury, aging.

We do not think that the current regulations need to be changed, but we have a few recommendations. The Secretary of State should create a universal signature verification training program for counties, and training should not be optional for those counties.

Additionally, creating a standardized vote by mail envelope across counties would reduce confusion and allow for a statewide public education campaign. Finally, voters. Voters need more education on how to sign and complete VBM envelopes. Every voter, every eligible voter deserves a fair chance to have their ballot counted.

We urge the Committee to prioritize accessibility, voter protection and voter protection in any contemplated changes. Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, Chair, Committee. I'm Dora Rose, Deputy Director with the League of Women Voters of California. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I don't want to belabor the excellent points made by my colleagues with the Asian Law Caucus and with Disability Rights California. I will align our comments with theirs.

We absolutely agree on the points that they made. I'd instead like to focus a little bit on the fact that with the introduction of Universal ballot mailing, AB37, as you mentioned, Chair, at the beginning it was really critical to expanding voter access, but it was never paired with a robust plain language voter education and outreach campaign.

And this was a big mistake. As Dr. Romero's research has shown, many people are not aware of their voting options or the mechanisms of voting. A good campaign would require state investment money. Funding should be structured to capitalize on the expertise of community based organizations.

It would, of course, include information about, you know, filling out, returning, tracking ballots. And it would also help evangelize the value of voting, the power of what voting can do to achieve your community's needs to get them met. Underrepresented communities and Low propensity voters are unlikely to ever hear from political parties. They don't get the mailers right.

They need to be invited into the political process. And this can be done in a purely good government, nonpartisan way. The league and many of our colleagues here today have been advocating for state funding to do this for many, many years now.

Our vision includes funding for the Secretary of State to develop messaging and translations for county elections officials to coordinate with community based organizations, and for community based organizations to be put out there as trusted messengers.

We believe that this is critical to addressing the problem of underrepresentation in California to make sure both that people vote and that those ballots get counted. For that, we need funding. We need state funding. Thank you.

Any additional witnesses?

Hi, good afternoon, I'm Eric Lawyer speaking on behalf of the California State Association of Counties. And want to just take a brief moment to talk about election funding. Elections are by and large conducted by counties and typically paid for by counties.

And while school districts and cities and special districts typically pay for their proportionate share of ballot real estate, the state and Federal Government typically do not and only occasionally provide funding for election costs.

So we would just urge this Committee in looking at, you know, policy changes that are really critical to elections like signature curing, expanding language accessibility, and those types of things that you consider resources to help make it happen. Thank you.

Thank you. Seeing no further public comment, I will close. I want to thank every individual involved who participated in today's hearing. Your feedback is certainly valued and you know, our signature carrying process aims to both ensure that every valid vote is counted while upholding the integrity of our election system.

By thoroughly examining our process, our Committee can further identify effective practices and areas of improvement as mentioned today. But certainly look forward to working with each of you as we continue to move forward this session. We have concluded today's agenda and the Committee on Elections and Constitutional Amendments is adjourned.