Marin ‘election integrity’ group sues registrar of voters

A group of activists in Marin has sued the top county and state elections officials, alleging they have failed to maintain current and accurate voter rolls.

The plaintiffs, members of an organization called the Marin Election Integrity Committee, filed the suit on Oct. 4 in federal court in San Francisco. The defendants are Marin County Registrar of Voters Lynda Roberts and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

The lawsuit alleges that actions by Roberts and Weber that include “the failure to remove ineligible voters from registration rolls, allow illegal votes that dilute the votes of eligible voters, infringing plaintiff’s rights to participate in a fair election.”

Counties began sending vote-by-mail ballots automatically to each registered voter after Gov. Jerry Brown signed the so-called Voter’s Choice Act in 2016.

“We follow the law to continuously maintain the voter rolls as is required,” Roberts said.

The plaintiffs include Novato resident Francis Drouillard, chair of the Marin Election Integrity Committee and a candidate in the Nov. 5 election for a seat on the North Marin Water District board. Drouillard said his group compared Marin’s list of registered voters to the U.S. Postal Service’s change-of-address database.

Drouillard said they initially identified 1,162 people on the Marin voter rolls who had moved out of the county. He said 337 had left California.

“One of them is my neighbor,” Drouillard wrote in an email. “He re-registered in Lake County when he began spending most of his time there. He is now mailed a ballot from Lake County and Marin County.”

Mill Valley resident John Turnacliff, the organization’s treasurer, said, “If they are voted and returned to the Civic Center, these ballots will be processed and counted.”

Drouillard said, “We have no illusion that this is going to change the state or federal results, but I think it could have a significant impact on local races and measures.”

Drouillard notified Roberts of his group’s findings in August. Roberts, in a letter to Drouillard on Sept. 27, wrote that his organization’s reports “contain inaccurate and misleading information.”

Roberts said the voter roll data file used to produce the reports was extracted in December 2023.

“Because the elections department continually processes changes to the voter registration database as required,” she wrote, “the 2023 voter rolls used to make claims about ineligible voters are outdated.”

Drouillard, however, said he checked the Marin voter rolls again at the end of September and confirmed that 994 of the people who left the county are still listed as active registered voters in Marin and will receive a ballot.

Roberts said she checked some of the names Drouillard submitted to her but didn’t conduct a comprehensive review of the complete list. She said many of the names she checked had been canceled or flagged as “inactive,” meaning they wouldn’t be mailed a ballot pending further investigation.

Roberts said voters are labeled as inactive as a matter of course if mail sent to them is returned by the post office as undeliverable.

Roberts said that regardless of the validity of Drouillard’s claim, “it’s irrelevant that he submitted this because we can’t take third-party challenges anyway.”

In a Sept. 27 letter to county registrars of voters, Robbie Anderson, elections counsel to the secretary of state, provided several examples of voter list maintenance activities that might violate the National Voter Registration Act. The law governs the manner and timing of removing a person’s name from voter registration rolls.

“Recently, several county elections offices have received massive voter challenge lists from members of the public seeking to remove thousands of people from the voter rolls,” Anderson wrote. “The prohibitions of the NVRA extend to any list maintenance activity based on third-party submissions.”

Other counties that have received challenges to their voter rolls by third parties include: Siskiyou County, Napa County, San Luis Obispo County, Orange County, and Shasta County.

In her letter to Drouillard, Roberts wrote: “Several sections in the California elections code, plus various other laws, specify circumstances under which voters may retain a local address and live out of state, including temporarily away, employment or business out of state, students at an institution of learning, and those serving in the military living overseas.”

Formed in 2022, the Marin Election Integrity Committee issued a 100-page report last year about the November 2022 general election. The report said the “potential for election fraud and ballot fraud with mass vote-by-mail ballots and an electronic election system far outweighs their convenience to voters.”

“The best way to eliminate fraud in our elections and restore confidence in the results of our elections,” the report stated, “is to return to a system that has served this country well for hundreds of years. In other words, restore single day elections with in-person voting at the precinct level with photo ID required to vote on paper ballots and ballot tabulation at the precinct.”

The report also alleged that 7,947 ballots were excluded from the certified election results for the November 2022 election.

Roberts said, “After November 2022, we explained at length that there were not 8,000 missed ballots, and we made every effort to help them understand how to read the reports we provided upon their request.”

“Even with several thorough and repeated explanations, the misinformed thinking persists,” she said.

Drouillard said that the group’s formation was not prompted by Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden.

“Our focus is solely on Marin County,” Drouillard said. “We are just pushing for free and fair elections in Marin County. We want people to have confidence in the results.”

Drouillard said the committee is nonpartisan.

“We don’t get any support from the Marin GOP or the California GOP or the Republican National Committee,” Drouillard said. “Some of us on the MEIC have a very hostile relationship with the current Marin GOP.”

Drouillard was elected to the Marin GOP’s central committee in 2022. Turnacliff and two other central committee members, Ronald Elijah and William McLaughlin, were voted off the committee by other members in September 2023.

All four men sued Marin GOP chair John Wilkinson, accusing him of spending more than $8,700 in committee funds for the first year of a San Rafael office lease without the organization’s authorization in 2017, when he was treasurer. The suit also named former Marin GOP chair Kernan Jang as a defendant.

Wilkinson and Jang filed a countersuit. It asserted that Drouillard and the other plaintiffs had no right to file the small claims suit on behalf of the central committee because they were no longer members.

In March, the four men who were expelled from the Marin GOP’s central committee sought reelection and won, along with 13 other candidates who ran as part of a slate.

“So there are 15 of us that won in March,” Drouillard said, “and we’re waiting to take our seats in January.”