Check last fall's election results in the contest for a spot on the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, and you'll see that retired businesswoman Doreen Farr won a seat by just 806 votes over Steve Pappas, president of a local school board in the Santa Ynez Valley, near Solvang.
That race would normally have remained obscure and inconsequential outside the county, where environmental issues are often the biggest bones of contention in local politics.
But Pappas has turned his defeat into a lawsuit that could threaten voting integrity across California.
For this Election Day loser seeks to throw out thousands of votes cast in 18 precincts because, he claims, some voters were improperly registered. That's right: Pappas argues in his suit that despite the fact that ballots are secret and no one can be sure who cast which one, it is possible to determine how many might have been cast illegally and for whom they were marked.
It's no coincidence that Pappas lost by 3,057 votes in the precincts at issue, all in the area surrounding the University of California's Santa Barbara campus, near Goleta. Nowhere in this action does Pappas mention the possibility, even likelihood, that if some voters were improperly registered in those precincts, it's also highly likely other voters were not properly signed up in areas that went for him.
"We're not seeking to throw out all votes," said Pappas, a registered Independent whose rival is a Democrat. "That would be absurd. We're seeking to identify illegal voters through their registration cards. If you can identify those that might have been illegal, you can contest those votes."
As for potentially illegal votes in other precincts that voted his way, Pappas essentially invites Farr to question those. "I do not want votes that were illegal," he said.
This lawsuit is a departure from other recent California cases where candidates claimed large-scale voting by illegal immigrants. That was never proven, and it's not the Pappas claim. His action says some forms were not properly filed with the election officials. It also contends some people who helped others register, did not fill out the proper forms. and it claims some forms were turned in after the deadline.
Sweeping but Perilous Solution?
Eliminate all the contested votes, says Pappas’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lake, and Pappas would win the election by about 2,500 votes.
The nub of this claim is that there's some way to tell who voted how, whether voters were registered legally or not. But even Lake says the only way to be sure of that would be to haul all voters into court and get them to reveal how they voted.
Lake concedes it's impossible, otherwise, to know who cast which ballot. "But we can say a certain number of votes were illegal based on registration documents and then get that number of votes tossed out," he claims. This would leave the final result in affected precincts with the same percentage of votes for each candidate as in the previous official count. But, Lake says, cutting thousands of votes from the totals in those precincts would be enough to reverse the prior result. Of course, doing this would presume that votes by the improperly registered were cast in precisely the same proportion as the final overall count, a rash presumption at best.
The area in question is largely peopled by students, many of whom were registered in the weeks before the early October deadline by volunteers for the Barack Obama Presidential campaign. Even if it were possible to poll those new or transferred registrants and determine who they supported, there would be no proof voters actually voted the way they said.
Doesn't matter, Lake says. Most of the supposedly improper registrations, he claims, were done on campus just before the early October deadline.
"Sure, those voters thought their cards were properly submitted, but they were turned in late," Lake says. "So now you have to weigh counting the vote of a person who believed he or she was correctly registered against the preservation of the integrity of the entire election process."
National Threat to Voters
The Black Box Voting organization, which has spearheaded national efforts to ensure that electronic voting machines are secure and reliable, sees the lawsuit as a threat to voter rights nationally. "It puts at risk all votes from precincts with any ineligible voters," says Bev Harris, head of the non-activist group.
"If this were to succeed, it would open the door for harassment, mass disenfranchisement and election tampering using poison pills," she adds.
But the essence of this action is clear: If all votes are open to question in precincts where some voters are improperly signed up, then results can be questioned anywhere, and the outcome of close races like this one can never be definite beyond what some statistical formula might guess.
Which is ludicrous, except to Pappas. It threatens the integrity of every vote cast in every future election. If he's smart, Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge William McLafferty will dismiss this action outright.
Mr. Elias is author of the current book "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It," now available in an updated third edition. He may be contacted at tdelias@aol.com
