Gov. signs law aimed at vote fraud
SACRAMENTO -- In a move to head off election fraud, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation Monday requiring county registrars to send a card to voters notifying them when papers have been filed to change their party affiliation.
Assemblyman Juan Arambula (D-Fresno) wrote the bill after a controversy last year in which workers were paid to register new Republicans in Orange County. Later, 279 voters complained that their party affiliation had been changed without their consent.
Voters already are notified whenever they are registered or re-registered. Those notices include the party affiliation, but don’t specifically indicate whether it has changed.
The new law also allows the secretary of state and county elections officials to develop a better system for addressing voters’ complaints of their party affiliation being changed without their knowledge.
On Friday, Schwarzenegger signed a measure bolstering the state’s open meetings law by requiring that any writing regarding an agenda item distributed to members of a city council or public board within 72 hours of a public meeting be made available for public inspection at the same time.
SB 343 by Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-Chino) halts the practice of local agencies’ using documents for deliberations and votes in open session when the public has not had a chance to read the documents.
The governor vetoed a bill that its author said would improve transparency in government.
The legislation by Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), rejected Friday, would have strengthened the rules against serial meetings of governing boards by prohibiting a majority of council or board members from engaging in a series of communications aimed at developing concurrence on an issue in private before a public vote.
Current law, Romero said, does not make clear whether consecutive meetings with individual members, rather than one group of members, violates the law.
The legislation also would have required that members of all local government agencies be given equal access to all agenda item documents and not be charged a copy fee for them.
Romero called the veto “a blow to transparency in government.”
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