On June 19, the California Senate Elections Committee passed AB 1436, the bill to permit individuals to register to vote on election day. See this story. Assuming it is signed into law, it won’t be in effect until 2015 at the earliest. By then there will be a means for polling place officials to check the state voter registration database to guarantee that the new voter isn’t already registered somewhere else.
The Senate committee also passed AB 2058, to make it illegal for registration workers to be paid “directly or indirectly” on a per-registration card basis. The vote was 3-2. The bill’s author, Assemblymember Richard Pan, said he will consider amending it later to ease the definition of “political party”. Representatives of the Peace & Freedom Party, and the Libertarian Party, testified that it is not fair to make it more difficult for parties to gain more registrations, and at virtually the same time eliminate them from the ballot unless they have approximately 105,000 registered members (Proposition 14, the top-two open primary, caused that problem).
The Senate Elections Committee also passed AB 2410, which says that persons convicted of certain types of felony may not run for public office. However, the bill was amended to apply only to state and local office; the bill no longer relates to federal office.
Also on June 19, the Assembly Elections Committee passed SB 1272, which says county central committee member elections are for four-year terms, not two-year terms. Candidates for this office will only run in presidential election years, at the primary. The Peace & Freedom Party and the Green Party persuaded the author of the bill to amend the bill, to provide that each state political party will decide for itself who is eligible to run for this office. The bill also expands the petitioning period for candidates to get on the primary ballot for this office.
The Assembly Elections Committee did not hear ACA 10, the measure to make it more difficult for initiatives (to change the California Constitution) to get on the ballot. That bill will probably be heard July 3.
Ballot Access News 
AB 2058 is just more voter suppression. Voter registration drives inform people they need to re-register to vote when they move, they provide that service. Move to a state that doesn’t often have registration drives, their voter rolls are atrociously out-of-date and therefore voters vote provisionally, their votes are often uncounted.
The people who register the most voters like to get paid per card. Take that incentive away, you will get a lot less people registerd to vote. GOP knows this, Democrats are asleep, not fighting against AB 2058.
Why do we need same day registration. People who vote should be responsible enough not to wait until election day, since those people may not know the issues or candidates.
Registration is just an unnecessary paperwork hassle.
North Dakota manages to conduct elections without it – everyone who is eligible is automatically registered – and the rest of the states should follow suit.
Barring that, it should be made as easy as possible; same day would be great.
Having filled out the form weeks, months or years earlier has nothing to do with whether anyone has studied the issues and candidates. I know many counter-examples to do that in both directions.
MDB @1 True…
This is just awful all around:
1. Will make it easier for massive voter fraud for the Dems.
2. Virtually eliminates any chance whatsoever of the Libertarian Party keeping registration levels up above the 105,000 threshold.
Wow. If there was ever a reason for all Libertarians to hate the Democrat Party, this is it.
To Dave:
You are sooooo right. This is like affirmative action for lazy voters.
You know that couch potato neighbor of yours, who’s too damned lazy to get up and take a 20 minute trip to the county courthouse annex to register him/herself.
Well, they’re about to have same day registration, PLUS! absentee voting at your kitchen table.
Lazy-ass Californians of the World Unite!
The Democrats are better at getting people out to vote when you have same day voter registration. One can wonder why people who have no intention of voting suddenly decide they need to go out and vote. Would it make sense to move that deadline to Monday of the Friday before the election, so we don’t have those last minute votes, from people who would not have voted otherwise.
It is SOOOOOO very difficult to go down to a clerk’s office and register to vote a mere circa 28 days before an election.
How about have foreign nation INVADERS (regardless of age) register to vote the second that they cross the U.S.A. border and INVADE ??? — esp. at the busy CA – Mexico border.
How soon before Civil W-A-R II starts ??? — due to the well known schemes of the left/right usual suspects — now trying for PERMANENT control of the U.S.A.
#8, the current California deadline for registering to vote is 15 days before the election.
It’s too bad that someone didn’t talk to the author of SB1272 to have Party County Central Committee elections during the state’s Gubernatorial primary rather than the Presidential primary year. It’s virtually certain that there’ll always be SOME Constitutional Offices vacant due to term limits in every Gubernatorial election year. Which should probably help even out the vote over time.
Presidential years are far more likely to be low vote affairs like this year, due to both major parties candidates already being chosen by the voting in June. If the State again moves the Presidential primary THAT would likely further REDUCE the number of primary voters, especially when one considers that there’ll no longer be ANY Propositions on the primary ballot!
I would be interested in reading about how come the Federal Government’s requirement that all the States mail out over-seas ballots at least 45 days before election’s doesn’t discriminate against said voters when U. S. residing voters can register or re-register right up to election day in some states? Also it seems to me that this bill will INCREASE the cost of elections because it will require every County, Municipal and District election to have someone at every precinct prepared to register people and verify that they aren’t registered somewhere else in California. too bad that there’ll be no way to check if the voter is registered somewheres out-of-state. Which also seems to prohibit ALL jurisdictions in California from holding an all-mail election, no matter how much money it would save them.
What a bunch of nonsense from Dondero and his buds.
Are there problems with rampant voter fraud in North Dakota, where all eligible voters can vote without registering? None that I know of.
How about Wyoming, which has same day voter registration? Maine?
Sheesh!
Why try to exclude people just because they have moved and haven’t filled out stupid and unnecessary paperwork, or did fill it out and either made a clerical error or had the county make one in processing the form?
What about first time voters who did not know about the registration requirements or the arbitrary and idiotic 15-day exclusion period?
If you have to have voter registration, and again there is absolutely no need for it as ND has shown in many elections, of course it should be same day.
And, yes, people should be allowed to vote while in prison, while on parole, or on probation, and petitioners should be able to work both outside and inside polling places.
Sheesh!
By the way, thanks to DEMOCRATIC Governor Brown for vetoing the idiotic bill to stop paying people per voter registration.
# 9 Does each regime in CA make ANY effort whatsoever in such 15 days to determine whether a new registered person is actually a LEGAL *qualified and registered Elector* ???
# 10 Robot party hacks can have their own private elections for clubby officers via snail mail.
# 11 How many foreign INVADERS invade the U.S.A. via the ND- Canada border ???
How many of such invaders then vote in ND elections ???
How many New Age LAWLESS folks are on this blog list (including ANY Invaders) ???
ONE guess what happens to foreign invaders going into regimes like Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea, etc. etc.
— BUT this is the New Age of MORONS in the U.S.A. who love everybody and all things statist.
Zero seems to be the correct answer
And you want to be more like North Korea? Why?
To Dave, why do they have an incentive to go out and vote suddenly on election day?
Simple: Bribery.
It’s called whiskey, or tequila, or free meals, or just straight out dollar bills, as in crisp $$ twenties. The Dems in New Jersey used to call it “walking around money” for election day.
Who said it’s last minute? Some people don’t know they need to pre-register. Or that it has to be done 15 days ahead of time.
o rly, if these people are too stupid to figure out exceedingly simple voting requirements, do you really want to extend the right to vote to them?
My gosh! We used to limit voting to just property owners. Any wonder why our country is a hellhole today? We’ve got moochers who steal money through government hand-outs from hard-working taxpayers, voting to give themselves even more $$ from those who work. And you want to help facilitate this rampant moocherism, even giving the right to vote to illegal aliens.
Question for ya. If I as an American extend voting rights to a Mexican visting my country, shouldn’t I have the right to vote in Mexican elections?
I’m a big supporter of Partido Accion Nacional (PAN). I love their hot female presidential candidate, even considered going down to Mexico for a few weeks to campaign for her. (I live only 5 hours from the border).
o rly, if Mexicans have the right to vote in U.S. elections, why shouldn’t I have the right to vote for Vera para presidente de Mexico?
Do you honestly think the local elections board in Tampico or Matamoros would give me a voters card if I came up to them, and said, hey, I’m here. I’m an American citizen, but I want to vote for PAN.
They’d laugh me out of the office. And probably spew hate-filled derogatory words, like “pinche burro gringo, estupido vete hombre!”
Who said anything about Mexicans voting?
I haven’t heard of Canadians voting in ND, WY, ME, WI, MN…
And who said anything about stupid? People may simply not know that such requirements exit, that there is a completely unneeded pre-election blackout, may think they already registered and some mistake on the form or at the election office prevents them from voting, or may be busy with other things going on in their lives that caused them to move to begin with.
Why should some people get an advantage just because they rarely if ever move? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
But, I sure do hope Dondero does go campaign in Mexico. If he remains there permanently, even better!
Nice attempt to skirt the question. Stop defelcting.
I’ll ask it again in very simple, straightforward terms.
Do you believe Mexicans should have the right to vote in U.S. elections?
Yes, or no?
@10, having central committee elections in gubernatorial years rather than presidential years would defeat the purpose (at least the stated purpose) of SB 1272. In gubernatorial years, Top Two will create a very long ballot because all voters will see all candidates for quite a few offices. And in gubernatorial years there is no other partisan office on the ballot, so that separate ballot types have to printed just because of central committee races. Election officials argue that this will be a nightmare. (Truth is, they could find a way if they had to.)
What proponents of SB 1272 and similar proposals don’t say is that they think elections for county central committee don’t have any value. They’d really like to do away with these elections altogether, making the leadership of each political party completely self-perpetuating — out of reach of its own voters.