San Diego City Wire

California voters will decide the fate of Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election set for Sept. 14, but questions have been raised about some of the mail-in ballots.

Jacqueline Timmer, founder and director of the American Voter’s Alliance, has been involved in examining elections before, as in 2020. The San Diego resident has turned her attention to the California gubernatorial recall election.

“I became aware of the integrity concerns when an attorney friend emailed me an IGTV video of a woman demonstrating how the hole in the ballot envelope openly exposed her recall vote through the outside of the envelope,” Timmer told San Diego City Wire.

Amy Cox posted a video that showed that two holes in the envelope for recall ballots could allow anyone to see whether the voter was for or against recalling Newsom. The video gathered considerable attention online, and spawned concerns about the integrity of the election, citing the possibility of election workers screening ballots before counting them.

Newsom, a first-term Democrat, formerly was mayor of San Francisco and lieutenant governor under Gov. Jerry Brown. He was easily elected in 2018, but his poll numbers began to dip in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused concern statewide.

Several recall attempts were launched starting in June 2020 until this successful one, which delivered more than 1.7 million valid signatures to the Secretary of State’s Office

Phill Kline, director of The Amistad Project, and Timmer’s father, said that even if the envelope holes were not malicious by design, “a voter should never be forced to reveal their vote by negligent design.”

Timmer said it doesn’t matter why this design flaw happened. The fact that it exists at all is alarming.

“First, regardless, whether ill-intent or negligence, voter privacy is tremendously important for the security of our constitutional republic, and should be addressed as such,” she said. “California should not have three or more counties with distinct ballot designs and envelope hole placement that all compromise the yes/no vote to whomever is handling the ballot. We are better than that. As a result, people have questions and those questions need to be fully addressed in order for the issue of privacy to be properly fixed.”

State officials have defended the design, saying the holes serve two legitimate purposes. 

First, they provide guidance to blind voters to fill out their ballot. Second, they allow election workers to quickly confirm that an envelope is indeed empty before discarding it and moving on.

Kline rejects those arguments, saying there were alternatives that would have allows visually impaired voters to cast ballots without reducing ballot security.

“I'm just I'm just speaking facts of what it is. I'm not speaking to intent,” Kline told Golden State Today. “I would need to know more. I just know that this is a flawed approach to assisting the visually impaired in their voting.”

Timmer said there are “countless steps” to secure the election process, but said there are three basics principles.

The first is keeping private funding separate from election administration, followed by establishing processes and procedures that ensure voter security (such as chain of custody and privacy sleeves for envelopes), and ensuring transparency and cross-party inclusivity in government action.  

Citizens can do many things to secure their vote and ensure elections are held with the highest regard for security and integrity, Timmer said.

“In the immediate, voters can educate themselves on the potential security issues and be intentional to place their ballot in the envelope in a manner that does not reveal their vote,” she said. “In the long term, voters can get involved in their local precincts, as well as make their desire for secure elections known to their local representatives. The recall election is a legitimate election in accordance with California law, and as such, should have the same procedural security as any other election in order to ensure the utmost election integrity.” 

Timmer, 29, and her father, a former Kansas state legislator and attorney general, were closely involved in scrutinizing elections in several states last year. She studied pre-law and philosophy, but her career resume involves marketing and fitness instruction. Because of her father’s background and involvement in election integrity issues, she had a firsthand look at the process and how it can be both protected and exploited.

Timmer and Kline cited overreach by some governors and also questioned the electoral process in some states.

Timmer said there are legitimate reasons to wonder how secure our voting process has become.

“Yes, I do believe there is an increase in ballot security concerns, but since COVID-19d there has been a dramatic increase in excess ballots; election procedures have been shifted drastically through executive decisions, often times contrary to state laws,” she said. “To put it directly, many states simply do not have the proper systems and procedures in place to securely support their immediate and drastic change to all mail-in ballots in 2020 and 2021. Moreover, 2020 is the first time in election history where private third party interest groups have been allowed to dictate election policy overriding state election law; many of those same groups, such as the Center for Civic Design, appear to be active in the California recall as well.”