Senate Passes Bill to Outlaw Guards at Polling Places

Reacting to an incident at the polls in Santa Ana last year, the state Senate on Thursday approved legislation that would make it a crime to post security guards at voting sites without the permission of election officials.

Sen. Milton Marks (D-San Francisco), who authored the bill, said the measure was meant to prevent a repeat of what he termed the “disturbing episode” that occurred Nov. 8 when the Orange County Republican Party hired 20 uniformed guards to monitor Latinos as they went to the polls in Santa Ana.

Republican leaders said the guards were retained to watch for voter fraud after party officials heard persistent rumors that Democrats were going to bus non-citizens to the polls to vote illegally. GOP officials said the guards were given strict instructions not to interfere with voters and were pulled from their posts when the county registrar of voters complained that their actions might intimidate Latinos, even those legally registered to vote.

The bill would make it a felony or a misdemeanor, subject to the discretion of a judge, to hire or serve as a uniformed security guard within 100 feet of a polling place without written permission from the appropriate elections official. The measure also would prohibit anyone other than an elections official from receiving a ballot from a voter or asking a voter to turn over his or her ballot.

The legislation was approved on a vote of 22 to 2, one vote more than the majority needed for passage in the 40-member Senate. The bill was sent to the Assembly, where its first stop will be the Elections, Reapportionment and Constitutional Amendments Committee.

That panel includes Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), on whose behalf the party hired the security guards. Pringle defeated his Democratic opponent by fewer than 900 votes.

Marks, chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, described his bill as “an attack upon the intimidating” of voters in Orange County. He said he would have introduced the bill even if the guards had been hired by Democrats.

“No single party has a monopoly on stupidity,” Marks said.

But Sen. John Doolittle of Rocklin, chairman of the Senate Republican Caucus, asked Marks to delay his bill until a federal lawsuit and a criminal investigation pending in Orange County are resolved.

“That’s a charged environment,” Doolittle said. “Why don’t you wait for that to be settled and then bring this up?”

Marks, however, refused to postpone action on the bill, and it gained a majority with the help of three Republican votes, including that of Sen. John Seymour of Anaheim.

Sen. Cecil N. Green (D-Norwalk), who represents part of Orange County, also voted for the bill. Sens. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), Edward R. Royce (R-Anaheim) and William Campbell (R-Hacienda Heights) did not vote.

None of the Orange County senators spoke during the brief debate, but Bergeson, reached afterward, said she did not vote for the bill because, like Doolittle, she saw it as a purely partisan measure.

“This bill is just a way to embarrass Republicans,” she said.