Michelle Dykstra hasn’t lived in her La Jolla home that long. When she signed a petition seeking to make La Jolla its own city, she wrote her street, Loreta Street, incorrectly. She wrote “Loretta.”
She’s slightly embarrassed about that. She got a call a few weeks later saying that the County Registrar of Voters invalidated her signature in its review of the petition. The Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, contracts with the Registrar of Voters to do that kind of work, as do most cities.
“I couldn’t understand. I’m a registered voter. I live in La Jolla. I pride myself in doing everything I can to always vote. I have my guide out now for the proposition. I made a silly mistake but I don’t understand why it didn’t count,” she said.
LAFCO, though, did something cities have been unwilling to do before: The agency overruled the registrar on several signatures, like Dykstra’s. It’s executive officer, Keene Simonds, decided the petition had enough signatures even though the registrar thought it had come in short.
When Simonds and his team starting going through the hundreds of signatures the registrar had thrown out, he easily found the few needed to qualify the petition within the first batches he checked. There were so many petty mistakes like Dykstra’s, there were more than enough.
Now, after decades of imposing a strict, unforgiving interpretation of compliance with petitions like La Jolla’s, the Registrar of Voters has quietly updated its guidance to employees reviewing signatures after a court ruling on a different petition in May. The Court of Appeal had heard a case from the Library Foundation, Parks Foundation and Municipal Employees’ Association which tried to advance an initiative to raise a parcel tax to support libraries and parks within the city of San Diego.
They had come close but came up short in part because signature gatherers had screwed up the dates they put on petitions. But the Registrar of Voters had also disqualified signatures for very minor mistakes by the people signing. The court hit the registrar hard.
“Election officials, however, acted arbitrarily in rejecting signatures due to some misspellings, illegibility, or nonstandard abbreviations,” the court opined.
The county said in May it would comply with the ruling but now we know it has dramatically changed how it reviews petitions. Now they have and if the policy had been in place as it is now for the last two decades, it’s possible several high-profile petitions that failed may have been closer to qualifying.
“ROV has reviewed the appellate court decision and applied updates to our processes as it relates to illegible and/or misspelled addresses, including dedicating more staff time to research the voter file in an effort to resolve missing or illegible information on the petition,” wrote county spokesperson Sarah Sweeney in a statement.
I followed up asking if mistakes like Dykstra’s – simple misspellings or different abbreviations of streets would be accepted now.
“If the ROV can verify an illegible or misspelled address, the signature can move forward to the signature verification process; provided, however, that all requirements under state law and regulations must be met in order to verify it,” Sweeney wrote.
This is a significant change. The city of San Diego is right now suing LAFCO for overruling the registrar and imposing this standard – the standard that is now the Registrar of Voters’ standard. The Association for the City of La Jolla filed an anti-SLAPP motion arguing the city was trying to suppress their freedom of speech with a frivolous lawsuit that is unlikely to prevail. There’s a hearing on that Oct. 24.
The city is floundering on this point. And Michael Zucchet, the general manager of the largest union of city employees, MEA, has lost patience. He thinks the city should not have fought his and the library and parks’ supporters’ initiative to raise the parcel tax. The city could have done exactly what LAFCO did and overruled the registrar on its petty invalidation of the misspellings.
And he remains disappointed in the Registrar of Voters.
“It’s amazing to me that the court had to tell them this,” he said. He described how, when their initiative’s signatures were disqualified, the registrar’s staff very helpfully went through each signature that it threw out.
“Everyone in room had our mouths on the floor about what they were doing on this issue,” he said. “They were looking at someone’s registration, knowing exactly who they are and knowing the spirit of law, which is simply ‘Is there enough there to determine if this is a registered voter?’ Yet they would say no we can’t do approve this one because two letters are reversed.”
He said they begged the city clerk and city attorney to see the logic and to not disenfranchise those voters and they would not contradict the registrar.
“The obvious will of the voters took a back seat to a hyper, hyper technical, almost OCD interpretation of the rules,” Zucchet said.
Why it matters: It’s a significant change that will make initiatives easier to qualify. However, it’s also now unclear how many of the high profile signature catastrophes over the last 20 years may have happened not just because of the signature-gathering incompetence of supporters and their hired contractors but because voter will took a back seat.
Remember in August 2018 when, after a frenzied effort to raise money and collect signatures for the Convention Center expansion and a hotel-room tax increase, the Registrar of Voters informed supporters that they had come up short. Would that have been different?
In 2010, the City Councilmember Carl DeMaio came up short on signatures to facilitate outsourcing city services. Earlier, an effort to redesign the governance of the San Diego Unified School District came up short. For years, it seemed like San Diegans were uniquely terrible at qualifying ballot measures.
Or maybe, the registrar was uniquely strict. And now it has changed.
