An election watchdog group is suing Kern County and four other California counties for voting discrepancies in the 2022 election on the eve of the 2024 presidential election.
The Santa Clarita-based Election Integrity Project California sued Kern County, a routine target of derision in California’s political circles for its glacial pace processing of ballots and poor public communication,.
The big picture: The suit alleges Secretary of State Shirley Weber overloked requests to explain why voting data certified in November 2022 does not align with data released in June related to the same election.
- The case was filed in Sacramento County Superior Court, seeking a peremptory writ of mandate against the cited officials, including Kern County Auditor-Controller-County Clerk Aimee Espinoza.
- The petition for a writ of mandate was officially lodged in court on November 1, just days before the scheduled general election, with the plaintiffs – one from each of the five counties – seeking a hearing late last week but denied by the court.
What’s the big deal? The suit points to a discrepancy between the certified statement of the vote and a list of voters who voted in the November 2022 election (turned over in June this year). The group found the voter list had 43,624 more votes than the certified statement of the vote.
- The group also found that 21,355 voters had two or three votes credited to their voter identification numbers.
- However, even when accounting for removing duplicate votes on a single voter ID number, the group found that there were still 22,210 more voters than the number listed on the statement of the vote.
- The county with the largest discrepancy is, unsurprisingly, the state’s biggest: Los Angeles, with a gap of 49,777 votes between the statement of the vote and the voter rolls.
- In Kern County, the discrepancy is a difference of 490 votes between the 190,715 votes claimed to have been cast in the Secretary of State’s certified results and the later vote count of 191,205 votes.
- The difference, should it occur again in 2024, could have outsized importance for a majority-making Congressional contest between Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) and ex-Assemblyman Rudy Salas (D-Bakersfield).
- Valadao’s past contests, anchored in Kern County, often are decided by a margin of a few thousand to a few hundred votes, depending on the election.
