19 May The Red Brennan Group Gets a Second Opinion
City Counsel Commits Honest Mistake or Deceptive Ruse?
An FP-5 Awareness Installment
The August 2019 Letter to the Red Brennan Group
Recall from our last installment that The Red Brennan Group had reached out to San Bernardino County Official Bob Page to obtain the exact number of signatures required to get a repeal initiative on the next ballot. Mr. Page didn’t answer, but Chief Assistant County Counsel Penny-Alexander Kelley, on behalf of County Counsel Michelle Blakemore, did respond. The number of votes needed was to be no fewer than 10% of the registered voting population, as reported (by county officials) in the last report of registration to the Secretary of State, a number that ended up being 26,183. This letter was sent and received in August of 2019.
Unphased by this number, the Red Brennan Group initiated a 5-month-long campaign and was able to acquire over 34,000 signatures of people believed to be registered voters living within unincorporated areas in the county. Anyone else, seeing the successful campaign bear numbers well over the requisite number of signatures, may have stopped their efforts and waited for the initiative to reach the ballot. Not the Red Brennan Group.
A Second Opinion
While all this was happening, an employee of the Red Brennan Group offered a valuable tip to the group, which they promptly acted on and subsequently contacted the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association for both assistance and, essentially, a second opinion. Thank goodness they did!
After reviewing the August 2019 letter from Blakemore/Alexander Kelley, Laura Dougherty, a senior staff member at Howard Jarvis, discovered a few insightful inconsistencies, errors, and, perhaps even degrees of negligence in the original letter issued to The Red Brennan Group by County Officials.
Quoting myriad sections, subsections, and articles of the Elections Code and the California Constitution, Dougherty, God bless her heart, issued a lengthy response to Blakemore and Alexander-Kelley in a perfectly executed rebuttal of sorts. Doughtery effectively calls out the city officials for either misquoting, misrepresenting, misunderstanding, or simply ignoring pieces of the Elections Code and the California Constitution. When Alexander-Kelley, by way of Blakemore, told the Red Brennan Group to collect over 26,000 signatures, they were pointing to Elections Code § 9310, which indicates +10% of the voting population at the time of the last report to the Secretary of State. Dougherty, ever diligent, points out that local government must actually abide by the signature requirement applicable to statewide statutory initiatives. She points to Elections Code § 9035 which says that the actual number of requisite votes isn’t 10+% of registered voters in the last report to the Secretary of State, but actually 5% of voters in the district who voted in the last gubernatorial election. These are two entirely different numbers and Laura Dougherty is quick to point them out.
Adjust Your Numbers, Please
In so many words she tells the Office of San Bernardino County Council to recalculate their numbers. The following February, SBCC office agreed to do so, acknowledging the truth in Dougherty’s analysis, if not their own gross negligence. Applying the above criteria to those who voted in the last gubernatorial election (November 2018) the actual number of signatures to qualify the Red Brennan Group’s measure for the ballot would be 3,677. The Red Brennan Group conservatively estimates that number to be 7,800 signatures. In either case, the actual legal number of signatures required for qualification is well below the 26,000+ quoted by the city officials.
So what’s going on here?
On the surface, this could be read as an honest, albeit self-serving, misunderstanding on behalf of the County Council. A less forgiving interpretation of this error would suggest that the County Council, in setting the number of required signatures 7x higher than legally permitted, were actually trying to prevent the Red Brennan Group in succeeding with their cause. In this, thanks to the diligence of the Red Brennan Group and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, they have failed, and succeeded only in rallying the residents together in an effort to keep their local government in check. Though not particularly interested in the details of local government, after this debacle the residents of San Bernardino County have adopted a healthy concern for those that govern them and in maintaining their rights under the California Constitution.
And that’s all this is – all we’re concerned with. We want to make sure San Bernardino County citizens retain their constitutional rights in the face of an unconscionable violation of the law.
So what happens to all those votes the Red Brennan Group gathered?
Look for our next installment to find out.