Parents Sue O.C. Registrar to Recall School Board
Excerpts from California Political News and Views

Capo for Better Representation (C4BR), a group of parents who initiated a recall of their school board for what they say is financial mismanagement, formally filed a Writ of Mandate in Orange County Superior Court April 7 in an attempt to get the recall campaign certified.

C4BR filed papers in April 2005 to recall all seven trustees of the Capistrano Unified School District. The group, led by recall organizer Kevin Murphy, a financial executive and CUSD father of four whose wife served as a PTA president in the district, collected the 20,000-plus signatures needed for each trustee to place the recall on the ballot. Several hundred volunteers successfully gathered signatures at grocery stores, coffee shops, movie theaters and in neighborhoods throughout the district.

In early November, the group delivered to (acting) Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley more than 177,000 signatures: 25,000-plus signatures per trustee. In a surprising move, the registrar informed Murphy on Dec. 23 that the group did not turn in enough "valid" signatures to certify an election. They had delivered more than 25,000 per trustee when only 20,000 were required. The registrar had invalidated an unprecedented 35 percent of the signatures. 

Recall volunteers went to work inspecting the signatures to find out what went wrong. What they found was disturbing. As many as 3,650 signatures per trustee were invalidated because the petition circulators wrote in the address for some of the signers when asked for assistance in doing so. Even though OC Registrar Neal Kelly's office told the petitioners on eight different occasions this was allowed, Kelley apparently reconsidered at the eleventh hour and decided to disallow these signatures.

In addition, volunteers who reviewed the signatures found that the registrar made errors on roughly 30 percent of the invalidated signatures. The registrar invalidated voters' signatures because he claimed they were not registered when, in fact, the recall volunteers discovered that they were registered in the district. Other examples of errors include invalidation of signatures because the "signature does not match" the voter rolls. Many of the signers had registered decades before, so their signature would appear different today. In addition, voters were asked to sign seven times, once for each trustee. By the time they got to the seventh signature page, their signature often varied widely. These voters' signatures were summarily disallowed. It appears that the benefit of the doubt clearly was not given to the voter in these instances. Murphy also pointed out that the temporary staff members hired by the registrar to review the signatures were not trained handwriting analysis professionals. 

The registrar appears to have been overzealous in invalidating signatures and seems to have gone out of his way to invalidate, rather than validate, signatures. This raises the issue of whether the will and intent of the voter were truly respected.

The group is asking the court either to validate the signatures based on the errors uncovered by the recall volunteers or require a recount of those petitions invalidated due to registrar error. They will ask that signatures be allowed where the circulators completed addresses at the signers' request, as the group relied on the registrar's advice regarding the completion of addresses by circulators.  C4BR's lawyer anticipates a judicial review will not take more than 30 days.

For the entire article, go here.