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California and the Laws that Divide
Part 4--“Representation” Without Representation
Californians have by far the worst ratio of legislative representation per capita of any state. In fact, it is so poor that it can legitimately be argued Californians have lawmakers, but in reality, no representatives answerable to their constituents.
In 1862, the size of the California legislature was capped at 80 Assembly Members and 40 Senators.
The population at that time was 380,000.
- Each Senator represented 9,500 individuals, roughly only half of whom were of voting age.
- Each Assembly Member represented approximately 4,750, or fewer than 2,400 adults.
Today’s population is upwards of 40 million.
- Each Assembly Representative now decides the fate of 500,000 individuals.
- Each Senator determines the quality of life of TWO MILLION Californians.
To make matters worse, until 1964, the apportionment of Senators had been one per county, with the very smallest counties combined logically to groupings of like populations. Patterned after the federal two-Senators-per-state-regardless-of-size model, populations with very diverse needs could still have an equal voice within California through the one-per-county model.
But in 1964, the “rules” changed, and senatorial apportionment is now assigned by population only, with district lines being gerrymandered and un-like populations combined beyond all sense of fairness.
That cannot be defined as legitimate representation
by any stretch of the word.
An added consequence is that as long as the population of the state remained relatively low, even people of modest means could successfully campaign for office, and even knock on every door in their district to communicate with perspective constituents.
Those who truly desired to be public servants and were motivated to preserve the general welfare were able to earn votes.
Now, our Representatives’ positions are bought rather than elected.
With the need to win the support of such large numbers of voters across a wide and diverse geography, only extremely wealthy or well-connected individuals who can pay for the demands of such a campaign need apply.
The probability that our elected officials are motivated by a desire to serve the PEOPLE and protect our liberties and quality of life is greatly reduced.
[Click here to read the rest of the article]
Nevertheless, there are still ways for assertive voters to capture their legislators’ attention, and a loud public voice still has influence.
The best ways to stay a bad legislative idea, or prop up a good one are:
- Submit a letter directly to the author(s) of a bill.
- Submit a letter to the first committee to hear the bill. For election bills, that would be the California State Assembly Committee on Elections for Assembly bills (ABs) and the Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee for Senate bills (SBs).
Note: Letters must be submitted a week prior to the committee hearing date to be included in the Bill Analysis.
Once you have an account:
Those letters remain in the file for those bills, and will pass to any other committee assigned to hear the bill prior to the floor vote.
- Contact Committee Members directly in advance of when the Committee will hear the bill.
Unfortunately, legislators will not receive email communications from non-constituents, so unless your representative is on the committee in question, the only way to directly communicate is by phone or snail-mail letter, both of which may be disregarded if you are not a constituent.
Go to the following https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/ NOW, write down the information, and then put your representatives’ names into your favorite search engine to find their website. Their committee assignments should be listed there.
It is vital to know who our Assembly and Senate representatives are,
and on which committees they serve!
Knowing which bills are assigned to your representatives’ committees allows you to have a direct voice to add to your letters submitted to the Committees through the portals.
Anyone wanting to speak to a particular bill before a committee, or even officially register a support or oppose position in front of the committee, is obliged to be in the room, in the Capitol.
- The two most populous counties in California are 350-500+ miles from Sacramento.
- The far northern counties are equally as far, with road travel much more challenging in the mountainous areas.
Citizens wishing to engage in self-governance and direct the members of various committees to their arguments are restricted by geographical, monetary and time concerns.
Therefore, virtually all those attending and speaking at the meetings are paid lobbyists representing well-funded and heavily self-serving organizations.
The concerns of We the People generally are not on their radar.
In the societal darkness created by the COVID hysteria there was at least one bright light that emerged in the darkness of the California Legislative process.
During the shutdown, since there was no public admittance to Capitol goings-on, a phone access was established, so that any citizen from anywhere could call in, listen to the proceedings, and have an opportunity to weigh in with an actual voice.
For the first time, ALL Californians had an opportunity
to voice an opinion during the committee process.
EIPCa supporters took great advantage of those opportunities to put public pressure on legislators.
During one very consequential hearing, over 900 of you called in. And our voice was heard, ensuring that over 40,000 registrants on the inactive list (most of whom are either deceased or moved out of state) would not be mailed a ballot in 2020 and beyond!!
This year, the State declaration of Emergency for COVID was finally withdrawn, and sadly, things have gone back to “normal” in our legislature. Once again, you have to be there to have a voice.
Until EIPCa’s federal lawsuit pulls the rug out from under 25 years of unconstitutional election laws foisted upon the citizens of California,
We must unite to fight the passage of further such assaults
on our right to self-govern.
- Your position letters submitted to the portals, and
- your well-timed letters, cards, emails and
- phone calls to your own representatives before committee votes
and before floor votes are even more vital now!
They are the only voice you have. Use it!!
EIPCa Alerts and links to our legislative position letters will continue to give you talking points and cues for how and when to weigh in.
Let’s do this!!
Please continue to support EIPCa as the lawsuit progresses.
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California and the Laws that Divide
Part 3: And the Beat Goes On
As this continuing article series will make painfully clear, many of the election laws passed by the California legislature over the past 25 years have created what EIPCa challenges as an unconstitutional election system.
[Click here to read the rest of the article]
- No longer can California citizens be confident that elections are fair, honest, transparent and valid.
- No longer can we be assured that our precious vote was not compromised by lack of chain of custody or faulty, error and manipulation-prone processes.
- No longer can we know with any certainty that our voice was not silenced or diluted by votes illegally cast and counted.
- There is nothing other than “trust but do not verify” policies in place to protect legitimate citizens’ votes from those fraudulently submitted by names on the voter rolls who are deceased or relocated.
And yet…our busy legislature is not satisfied. They continue to propose and pass laws that will make the election process go from incredibly bad to worse.
Consider the following three bills, currently before the legislature and all being strongly opposed by EIPCa.
AB 2050 - A second attempt to connect California to the ERIC system.
The Electronic Registration Information System (ERIC) purports to be the answer to ensuring that the state’s voter rolls are free from deceased individuals and people who have become recently registered in another state.
Although ERIC is officially a non-partisan organization, ERIC and its founder/directors operate from a political ideology that is highly biased in one direction. That bias permeates the ERIC contract and the way the organization operates.
In reality, the main focus of ERIC is to ensure every unregistered resident of the state of voting age becomes registered via an aggressive state outreach effort, with NO regard to citizenship or other eligibility requirements.
In fact, the ERIC contract forbids the transfer of citizenship information.
Instead of generating the accurately maintained voter rolls required by federal law, following the dictates of ERIC will make our rolls even more inaccurate and bloated.
ERIC claims to be secure and protective of all data.
In fact, ten states have withdrawn their ERIC membership
over concerns of data privacy.
The ERIC contract requires the DMV and every other public service agency to upload their complete files (all sensitive and private information, minus citizenship status) to ERIC every 90 days.
ERIC then shares that information with a third organization (CEIR),
which runs the data and produces the “reports”.
CEIR was founded by the same individual as ERIC and operates with the same political ideological bias.
To learn more about ERIC and why EIPCa opposes AB 2050,
read our opposition letter.
AB 2627 - Creation of an elaborate and expensive education and outreach program in high schools and colleges/universities.
While civic education and participation are vital for a thriving Republic (reminder: we are NOT a democracy), the sad reality is that California is broke.
Solvent (at least on paper) just a year or two ago, California has mismanaged its budget, in part by using one-time federal grant monies to initiate programs requiring ongoing funding.
As a result, California is now facing a 25-BILLION-dollar deficit.
AB 2627 is not affordable at the current time.
EIPCa is urging the legislature to
- show an understanding of our economic reality,
- pare down the legislative wish list to what absolutely must be done immediately,
- determine what can be accomplished more inexpensively,
- enact only what can be reasonably and responsibly funded.
After all, Californians are being forced to tighten our household budgets in this economic environment due to our state’s (and our nation’s) fiscal irresponsibility. We expect the same of our government.
For a more thorough understanding of our reasoning,
read EIPCa’s letter of opposition.
SB 929 - Mandating that the Secretary of State (SOS) determine who is and who is not eligible to run for the office of President of the United States vis-à-vis the Fourteenth Amendment, and remove from the state ballot anyone the SOS unilaterally deems ineligible.
This is clearly an overtly partisan bill.
It is also unconstitutional!
It flies in the face of the recent Supreme Court ruling that only Congress has the authority to adjudicate under the Fourteenth Amendment who qualifies to appear on the ballot as a candidate for President.
For more, read EIPCa’s letter of opposition.
California citizens can help determine whether these bills and others become law.
- You can begin now contacting your state representatives and expressing your opinion regarding these and other bills. When our voice is loud enough they actually do listen.
- By using the information in our alerts, you can become a source of information to those around you. Once Californians become aware of what has been and is still being done to us, our opposition will become a loud enough voice to turn things around.
- And you can support EIPCa’s federal lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of 25 years of election legislation madness.
Please continue to support EIPCa as the lawsuit progresses.
pdf of article
California and the Laws that Divide
Part 2: More Primary Election Chaos
Part 1 of this article series highlighted one major issue that led to an unacceptable level of chaos in the recent Presidential Primary election.
[Click here to read the rest of the Part 2article]
That issue was that the Motor Voter Law continues to generate “unintentional” changes of party affiliation for voters. The elements of the software that cause the difficulties for voters have been known and understood for years, and could have been resolved, but so far have not been.
But the Motor Voter Law is only the tip of the iceberg sinking California’s election integrity.
The complicated Primary rules
also contributed to the chaos.
In California, the primary election for all offices is merged with the Presidential Primary, appearing to be one big election. But it is not.
For every office except President, all voters may vote for any candidate, irrespective of party. The top two vote getters move on to the General Election, again irrespective of party.
This is what California voters
have come to understand
as the “rules” of a primary election.
As a result, the Presidential Primary comes as a confusing complication because it operates under entirely different rules, even though it appears to be an integral part of the rest of the ballot.
The state laws do not govern the Presidential Primary.
The “rules” are made by the participating political parties with regard to whether their Primary is “closed” (only registered party members may vote) or “open” - and if so to whom.
- Voters registered as American Independent, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Peace and Freedom and Republican may vote only for the presidential candidates of their party.
- Voters registered as No Party Preference (NPP) will have no presidential candidates on their ballot.
- NPP voters have the right to “cross over” and vote for either the American Independent, Democrat or Libertarian party candidates by requesting a cross-over ballot. That is because those three parties have written that exception into their rules.
- ALL California voters may vote with the party of their choice by re-registering, which may be done up to and including at the moment of voting at the polls.
This may all sound reasonable, but what is on paper (laws, regulations, policies)
has NO way of becoming general public knowledge.
It is all far too complicated, and laws, etc.
change and shift
so quickly and often, it is impossible to keep up.
More chaos may be attributed to failures of the Registrars of Voters (ROV)
- The ROV has a responsibility to train election workers effectively and see that laws, policies and procedures are faithfully followed.
- Each office receives generous federal funding earmarked specifically for poll worker training. Much of the money appears to be poorly and ineffectively spent.
- Voters upset because of the issues discussed so far had many options for quick and painless resolution, but under-trained poll workers were not prepared to guide them through the process.
EIPCa documentation shows that ROV employees answering the phone when voters called in their concerns and questions were by-and-large uninformed and gave voters mis-information more often than not.
Even in counties where poll workers were well-trained, the elections office employees were woefully ignorant.
EIPCa documentation also shows that poll workers in many counties were misinformed or untrained in proper resolution of these issues, which led to disenfranchised voters and many unnecessary provisional and conditional ballots.
California laws allow for voters in e-pollbook counties (at least 32 of the 58 counties and ALL of the most populous counties) to:
- Change their party affiliation or address at the moment of voting without a full re-registration.
- Register at the moment of voting if they attest to being eligible.
- Cast a non-provisional, same-day ballot at the polls without surrendering their vote by mail ballot.
- Use their vote by mail ballot, free of its return envelope, as a paper ballot at the polls.
California laws allow for voter in all other counties to:
- Change their party affiliation or address at the moment of voting by filling out a simple re-registration form.
- Register at the moment of voting if they attest to being eligible.
- Cast a non-provisional, same-day ballot at the polls by surrendering their vote by mail ballot and envelope.
And yet, EIPCa documentation shows that often voters were:
- “strongarmed” into submitting their mail-in ballot in the return envelope, thus denying them the right to vote in person.
- told they could not receive the ballot of their chosen party without voting provisionally (and not given a re-registration or cross-over opportunity).
- told their qualified county failed to implement the AB 626 mandate to allow voters to use their mail-in ballot as a “naked” paper ballot.
The passage of SB 626 gave a segment of California’s voting populous a sense of hope.
- Those citizens with a reasonable skepticism of the vote by mail system elect to vote in person. However, many counties now use Ballot Marking Devices so voters can no longer receive a blank paper ballot to mark for themselves.
- Many voters have justifiable distrust of the “machines” and are left with nowhere to turn. This situation acts as a form of voter suppression. Voters deserve and must have an election system in which they can have faith.
- AB 626 promised voters the blank paper ballot they desire, allowing them to vote without machine intervention.
- When eligible counties such as Orange, Los Angeles and Kern failed to implement the law, their voters experienced further disappointment and lack of faith.
California’s election process is a mess,
and voters are suffering as a result.
Each successive law that passes simply
further confuses the process.
Please join us for the rest of the articles in this series, “California and the Laws that Divide,” as we explore the fallout from more of the allegedly unconstitutional laws being challenged by EIPCa.
And please join in supporting that challenge by remembering EIPCa with your generous gifts as the lawsuit progresses.
Please continue to support EIPCa as the lawsuit progresses.
pdf of article
California and the Laws that Divide
Part 1: Primary Election Chaos
[Click here to read the rest of the article]
Predictably, the 2024 Presidential Primary Election in California was mired in chaos.
The causes can all be traced back to the California Legislature (and Governor) whose efforts over the last 25 years have built an electoral process that voters can neither understand nor trust.
This series of articles will explore the chaos that was the California Presidential Primary and connect that chaos to the laws and circumstances that perpetrated it.
Election Integrity Project®California (EIPCa) strongly alleges California’s current electoral process to be unconstitutional, and is challenging over 20 California election laws on that basis. This lawsuit is groundbreaking and revolutionary, and not only worthy but in need of your support.
The proponents of California’s indefensible election system justify every successive law passed as allegedly making registering and voting “easier,” “effortless,” more “accessible,” and more “inclusive.”
But in reality, these permissive laws have made everything more confusing, with so many choices and so many things to navigate that voters are literally left wondering what to do in order to cast a vote, or to make that vote count. Many simply stay home.
In trying to create a system that they hoped would lead to almost 100% voter participation, the legislature has given Californians a system that inspired only 33% of eligible voters to vote in the most recent election.
This system is driving voters away,
and disenfranchising many of those who continue to participate.
EIPCa believes that more than 20 unconstitutional California election laws have led to this unacceptable situation. Our Federal Lawsuit challenging the Constitutionality of these laws, as well as Secretary of State regulations and Registrars’ policies and procedures, brings that challenge officially to the adjudication of the courts
The success of EIPCa’s lawsuit is vital in returning INTEGRITY,
a federal mandate, to the electoral process.
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act “Findings and Purposes” section §20501 states:
U.S. Code § 20501 - Findings and purposes
(a) Findings
The Congress finds that
(1) the right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right;
(2) it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the
exercise of that right; and
(3) discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a
direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office…
(b) Purpose #3 of 4 says:
(3) …protect the integrity of the electoral process…
The success of EIPCa’s lawsuit is also vital in restoring the basis of a Constitutional Republic and true self-governance. A win in California is a win in EVERY state because laws that are unconstitutional in California are unconstitutional in all states.
EIPCa made a commitment in 2012 to go the distance in researching, documenting and taking legal action to return the once Golden State to what America was founded to be.
We are getting close and need your support for this existential effort to restore and defend the Republic. Until the Republic is restored, election chaos will continue.
One issue that caused chaos in the March election were
Party Registration SNAFUs
With respect to the Presidential Primary, perhaps the most troublesome (and allegedly unconstitutional) law is the New Motor Voter law. In 2016, voter registration became virtually mandatory for all individuals interacting with the DMV in California.
Voters already registered to vote do not expect their registration to change simply because they renew their driver’s license.
But the computer questions they answer during the DMV renewal process are confusing. Voters are asked if they want to use the provided information for voter registration purposes, and are told that they will not be registered if they answer NO.
The wording is tricky.
What is meant is that a new or updated registration will not be generated, but voters understandably interpret the wording to mean they will no longer be registered to vote unless they answer YES.
So, most answer YES, and are unaware that if they do not continue to scroll further and select a party preference, they will be reregistered as No Party Preference (NPP), which is the default.
Due to California’s Top Two “Jungle Primary” (also challenged as unconstitutional in EIPCa’s lawsuit), party registration is irrelevant for all elections other than the Presidential Primary slate.
Voters whose registrations were flipped some time ago
may not realize it until the once-every-four-years Primary.
Chaos ensues as voters believe someone has maliciously changed their registration to interfere with their ability to vote for their chosen candidate. Accusations fly and ill-will and distrust abound, when almost always the situation has been caused by an unnecessary and intrusive law that over-reaches governmental authority.
There is a great deal more to say regarding voter confusion and election chaos. Please join us for the rest of the articles in this series, “California and the Laws that Divide,” as we continue to explore the fallout from more of the allegedly unconstitutional laws being challenged by EIPCa’s federal lawsuit.
And consider contributing to the success of our ground-breaking lawsuit with your frequent and generous financial support.
Please continue to support EIPCa as the lawsuit progresses.
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