Politics Report: Registrar of Voters Changes Course

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.

The Expansion of the Convention Center Is Now ‘Upgrades’

I can’t be the only one completely stunned that Mayor Todd Gloria is not committing to the expansion of the Convention Center after courts finally decided voters did approve the 2020 ballot initiative, Measure C. Measure C was all about the Convention Center expansion. It was so much about the Convention Center that supporters had to clarify it would still also provide funds for homeless services and streets even though those sometimes seemed like ways to make the primary goal of the measure— the expansion of the Convention Center — more palatable to voters.

Fully 59 percent of the money collected from Measure C’s increase to the hotel-room tax must go to the expansion of the Convention Center and over the life of the tax increase it’s expected to bring in $4 billion for the Convention Center expansion, which city officials now say is not enough for the expansion long envisioned. The city attorney, wrote this in the official voter pamphlet:

“Revenues from the tax increase and bond proceeds would be designated in specific amounts for: (1). Expansion, modernization, promotion and operations of the downtown San Diego Convention Center (Convention Center);” the city attorney wrote to voters.

That analysis went on: “If the measure is approved, additional government actions must be taken to expand the Convention Center …”

Now, it seems just as they have secured the money – money they tried for 20 years to raise to expand the Convention Center – they are not pursuing the long awaited expansion of the Convention Center. You’ll want to read this story by Mariana Martínez Barba.

The hesitation was coming clear months ago. Labor leader Brigette Browning had been telling people they should settle for something much less ambitious. “I think all the money needs to go to a small expansion and refurbishing the Convention Center,” she told me in March.

Maybe just improvements: But will the mayor even expand it at all?

In a statement celebrating the court ruling that will finally allow them to book the revenue collected from the hotel-room tax increases in Measure C, Gloria seemed to indicate it would be more of a facelift.

“This ruling is a win for San Diego — and for the voters who overwhelmingly said yes to this back in 2020. It finally allows us to move forward with long-overdue improvements to our Convention Center, stronger investments to reduce homelessness, and real dollars to fix our streets,” he wrote.

Martínez Barba quoted his spokesperson, Rachel Laing, who said the city would work with tourism industry leaders and the Convention Center Corp. to “work together to update the expansion and modernization plan, secure financing, and deliver a project that meets the evolving needs of the convention market.”

In his newsletter, Gloria described what was going to happen as “upgrades.” The expansion as planned is not happening.

The favorable ruling this week allows the city to book a lot of new revenue. It was the culmination of many years of just embarrassing failures to get the expansion but yet perseverance to keep trying. The tax is highest around the Convention Center because it is the primary improvement guaranteed by the tax.

They marketed it as the way to save Comic-Con and they even brought people out in cosplay to sell it. So is Comic-Con cool suddenly with “upgrades” to the current Convention Center?

What’s at stake: The city is dealing with intense backlash because its ballot initiative asking for permission to charge a fee on trash collection promised the fee would be about half what they ended up levying. And now they’re going to not build a Convention Center expansion using money voters approved primarily for a Convention Center expansion?

They’re really stretching the “who cares what we said” line.

There’s still some hopeful boosters: Shawn VanDiver, the chair of the Convention Center Corp., said he thinks an ambitious expansion is still possible.

“Expansion remains a priority for the Convention Center. The delays, and inflation, have caused a ton of problems, but in no way is expansion off the table. We owe it to our clients, San Diegans, and the entire region to get this right and deliver what we promised every voter who filled in ‘Yes’ on Measure C.,” he wrote.

The new Terminal 1 at the airport is … fine? It’s kind of weird that it’s not as good as Terminal 2, which has a better energy and design. If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.

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