If you’re looking for something to do to help our elections and democracy, you do not have to go far, or take a lot of time. Come and assure skittish supervisors that it’s the first option. Seriously!
A flashpoint for election deniers is coming Tuesday morning – agenda item #36 – approval for County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Michelle Ascension to sign a contract with Dominion Voting Systems, Inc to upgrade our current equipment (both the voting system and mobile ballot printers), and to pay for the annual licensing and warranties.
Speak at the meeting, live, or on zoom, and/or send a short message for Agenda item #36. (Instructions here) Riff off of something like this. Try to use your own voice. It can be shorter – we’re really wordy:
I ask the board to authorize County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Michelle Ascencion to sign contractual forms with Dominion Voting Systems as necessary to keep our voting equipment up-to-date.
We appreciate the changes that both she and her predecessor Mark Lunn have made to improving voting accessibility, along with facilitating our all-paper-ballot elections as required by state law – the gold standard set by election experts.
You might hear from others today that they want you to cancel our contract, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars already invested, or that they want an overwhelmingly slow and expensive 100% hand audit. We ask that you be ready to say “NO” to both arguments.
To the first – CA law requires us to have a state-approved tabulator-type system. And to the second – you must not allow unfounded fears to drag us backwards into the proven unreliability of 100% hand-counting. It would open our county up to the potential chaos of volunteers or employees with political agendas having access to ballots and the ability to potentially sabotage the vote count, already happening in Georgia.
Our current hand-count random audits, held after Election Day, have proven the reliability of our system. We ask that you approve it’s continuance.
Deeper Dive:
Election deniers dedicated to running elections off the rails with fake statistics and legal-sounding gibberish are everywhere across the country and unfortunately, Ventura County has not been spared their political theater. Election denialists pose an ongoing threat to U.S. democracy by unjustly reducing confidence in the integrity of our elections, frightening off experienced county employees and poll workers, and trying to hamstring elections with ridiculous demands for hand-counting ballots.
On June 19th, thanks to the encouragement of Trump’s Big-Lie campaign, some of the denialists at the Board of Supervisors meeting “expressed their lack of confidence in the $4 million Dominion Voting Systems purchased at the urging of the then-Registrar of Voters Mark Lunn in 2020, as the previous system was 13 years old and, according to a staff report, had “outlived its useful and operational life.” The most-recent system tabulates votes from the polls and mail-in ballots that are counted on high-speed scanners at the elections office.”
This is what they want: “By Ordinance any use of electronic tabulation machines shall be accompanied by a full 100% citizens assisted hand-count audit.”
This was the response: A 100% hand audit is simply not feasible, as logically it is slower and more error-prone than machine tabulation. State Law requires the Election Division to perform full testing of every piece of equipment prior to the election, and after the election they conduct a 1% random batch manual tally as required by state law to further ensure the tabulators are counting accurately.
Despite their aggressive nonsense, California law AB 969 passed by an overwhelming vote in 2023, limited highly unreliable and easily corrupted hand-counting to 1,000 registered voters and special elections with fewer than 5,000 voters. It also blocks counties from canceling contracts for voting systems in the future without a transition plan and a finalized agreement for a new state-approved system.
Some facts you can use!
- ALL VOTING IN VENTURA COUNTY IS DONE WITH PAPER BALLOTS! Either a voter returns the vote-by-mail ballot through the postal system, by hand or in a drop-box, or but even voters who use the touchscreen ballot marking device at the vote center get a PRINTED ballot that is put in the locked ballot bag and transported back to the Gov Center.
- Ventura County’s minimum 1% manual tally audit during the required audit takes a roomful of workers at least a couple days to manually count. Ventura County has 500k+ registered voters, so with just a 50% turnout, that’s 250k ballots – 2,500 for 1%. Hand-counting all 250k multi-sided, multi-page ballots? Do the math, and ask doubters if they are willing to wait that long for guaranteed inaccurate results, that they would trust people not to mess with ballots, and if they wanted to be the cause of throwing a lot of taxpayer money away.
- Pull out your calculators! The Ojai hand-recount in 2022 was estimated at $28,500 for the approximately 3,500 ballots in that race.
- (From Democratic Club of Ventura) “Election deniers are likely to object to the use of any election equipment, period. They choose to ignore numerous studies that show our nation’s elections to be safe and secure. Claims of foreign infiltrations and faulty algorithms have been debunked again and again. Their demands for hand-counted ballots would drastically slow the tabulation process and increase the likelihood for errors. State law prohibits hand-counting for regular elections of over 1,000 registered voters and special elections of over 5,000 registered voters. Deniers also believe that votes are cast electronically, when the reality is that every vote is cast on a paper ballot that serves as an auditable receipt.“
- (From Democratic Club of Ventura) Setting the Record Straight: Facts about Dominion. “They claim Dominion equipment can’t be trusted. But we thoroughly test every piece of equipment BEFORE the election for functionality and accuracy, in addition to double-checking the accuracy of vote totals AFTER Election Night with a random, manual-tally audit. Two-thirds of California counties use the Dominion Democracy Suite, and Dominion has customers in thousands of jurisdictions nationwide. Ventura County has been a Dominion customer for several years, having previously used Sequoia Voting Systems, which was bought out by Dominion in 2010. Dominion products have proven reliable in multiple elections and their service has been responsive and thorough. —edited from Michelle Ascencion, VC Clerk-Recorder & Registrar of Voters.“
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA 