Sacramento Bee/Yahoo! News (Op-Ed): What has California’s Voters Choice Act helped accomplish?

When the Voters Choice Act was signed into law in 2016, many California policymakers and voter advocacy groups expected that the new law would help bring meaningful change in the voting process, making it more accessible and inclusive.

A key aim of the act was to bolster voter engagement and turnout — particularly among historically marginalized voting groups — in counties opting into the new program. The Voters Choice Act sought to accomplish this by expanding voting opportunities, offering more flexible options for voter participation and requiring elections officials to work with communities to improve their administrative and voter outreach planning.

Implementation of the Voters Choice Act began in five counties in 2018. Five years later, 27 California counties — representing more than half of the state’s eligible voting population — have opted into the voluntary voting model, and two more counties are adopting it in the 2024 election cycle.

When enacted, the Voters Choice Act represented a major election reform for the state. But has it held up to the expectations and actually improved voter turnout, particularly among under-served and marginalized populations?

To find out, California Common Cause, the California Black Power Network and other leading voting advocacy experts from around the state came together to take a deeper look into the law’s impact. This included surveying and interviewing community organizations and county election officials, as well as looking into data from the 2022 California voter files.

While it was challenging to isolate impacts from the Voters Choice Act and a range of other factors that could affect voter turnout, our findings on the law’s effectiveness were a mix of both successes and shortcomings.

On the upside, we found that counties that adopted the act reported fewer issues with bilingual poll worker staffing than in counties that had not; more accessible voting machines for voters with disabilities; fewer reported problems at vote centers during the three days before and on Election Day; and a significant reduction in provisional voting. The rate of in-person voting continued to be higher in Voters Choice Act counties than counties without it during the 2022 elections.

But we had a harder time determining other expected benefits.

Despite the law requiring counties to develop specific plans for voter outreach, many county elections officials and community groups reported being uncertain as to whether their voter outreach efforts actually reached historically marginalized voters, including communities of color, youth and low-income voters. Voter data for the 2022 elections also showed a continued lower turnout among these groups, and no evidence that the law — as currently implemented — has done anything to close California’s deep and persistent voter participation disparities.

Elections officials and voter engagement organizations in counties that adopted the law also told us that a lack of funding was a major barrier to achieving more effective voter outreach and education, among other issues.

In light of these mixed results on Voters Choice Act implementation and its impact, we clearly need to do more to shore up its effectiveness. With the 2024 election season already underway, improvements to the act take on a whole new sense of urgency.

First, we need to reignite state oversight and leadership of Voters Choice Act implementation. The state’s monitoring and engagement in implementation in counties has dropped off significantly since 2020, resulting in less support for community groups and election officials involved in implementation on the ground.

We believe that the California Secretary of State should reinstate the official Voters Choice Act statewide task force with membership representing the broad categories required in the law. This would bring renewed attention and much needed support to the law, especially for future counties implementing the voting model. There are early signs the secretary is moving in this direction, which we applaud. The secretary of state should also work with and convene a wide array of data experts, advocates and community organizations to identify, research and develop solutions to the ongoing voter file race and ethnicity data challenges, especially for Black voters and Asian-American subgroups. Each of these ideas could help potentially support needed outreach efforts to California’s most marginalized communities ahead of the 2024 elections.

There also needs to be more voter education and outreach funding in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2024 budget directed toward disenfranchised voting groups. While we recognize this is a challenging budget year, additional state funding that enables trusted messengers to reach under-participating communities may finally close voter participation gaps in a way that legal changes and policy reform have not.

While the Voters Choice Act was never intended to be a panacea for all voting challenges facing California, one thing is very clear: The law is a reform worth revisiting and reinvesting in, and still holds promise for expanding electoral participation across the state and across many voting groups.

Jonathan Mehta Stein is the executive director of California Common Cause. James Woodson is the co-founder and executive director of the California Black Power Network.

 

To view this op-ed online, click here.