The Alameda County Board of Supervisors meeting turned into a courtroom this week, with the supervisors as prosecutors and registrar of voters Tim Dupuis as the defense as he argued why he could not provide the county’s voting record from 2022 on.
Amid an effort to increase transparency in Alameda County elections, tensions rose between supervisors and Dupuis on Tuesday as he offered various explanations for why he could not publish the cast vote record, an electronic document of how voters cast their ballots.
First, Dupuis cited SB1328, a legal statute that he claimed could put him or the county in legal jeopardy if the County Voting Record (CVR) was released.
But supervisors were not deterred, dispatching each of Dupuis’ excuses and demanding he turn over the records.
“Transparency is what is needed now more than ever,” Supervisor Keith Carson said. “Especially on an issue that has a lot of national focus today which is the integrity of the voting process and of the election. Every single day that integrity issue is being eroded away because of the lack of transparency.”
Dupuis’ office has been the center of controversy before. In 2022, his office made a critical error in declaring the wrong winner in an Oakland school board election because of a voting miscount. An Alameda County Superior Court judge later announced the correct victor, but concerns about the Alameda County Registrar of Voters remained.
In order to restore integrity in Alameda County elections, elected leaders, members of the public and voting rights organizations like the League of Women Voters and FairVote have called for the release of the CVR. FairVote author Steve Hill said Dupuis’s refusal to turn it over was beyond puzzling.
“There is nothing about his bill that makes it not possible, or not legal, for a county election official to release the cast vote records,” FairVote author Steve Hill said. “The only thing that SB1328 changed around cast vote records is it deleted one line to make the definition clearer.”
Any doubts seemed to be clarified on Tuesday when the law’s author, California State Senator Stephen Bradford, wrote the Board of Supervisors, “There is no language or changes made in SB1328 that seeks to prohibit the release of the cast vote records.”
Supervisors again pushed Dupuis to release the CVR, but he then said his staff “simply don’t have the time” to program and clean the CVR file just 28 days before the election. Doing so would be a Herculean undertaking, Dupuis said.
Carson dismissed the excuse, however. The shortened deadline to turn over the CVR, he said, was Dupuis’s fault after he used a conservative legal understanding of SB1328 to compel the Board of Supervisors to revisit the topic later. Carson’s patience waned during one back-and-forth where Dupuis pleaded with Carson for his caution regarding SB1328 despite Bradford’s clarification.
“Don’t daddy me!” Carson said to Dupuis’s, referencing a phrase used by a father to a pleading child. “Don’t ever daddy me.”
Supervisor Lena Tam then questioned why Dupuis described publishing the CRV as so complex when the San Francisco Election Commission stated the file could be published within hours. The correspondence indicated that the county’s election vendor, Dominion Voting Systems, automatically created a CVR file upon completion of an election.
“Contrary to popular belief, it’s not automatically created,” Dupuis said, noting Alameda County’s large population, ranked-choice voting in certain elections, and the importance of protecting voters’ personal information. “To say that the cast vote record is an easy record to put together is downplaying the sophistication of the system.”
The board of supervisors became exasperated with Dupuis over the afternoon, with Carson asking if the task of publishing the CVR was “completely impossible” before the election. Dupuis again pointed to a short-handed staff and limited time before the election.
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The board then advised Dupuis to seek help from the San Francisco Election Commission and Dominion Voting Systems to cull together the CVR. But Dupuis said rushing the publication could imperil voters’ privacy in select precincts, hurting the county’s efforts at transparency and increasing public distrust.
The board did not amend its motion and it passed unanimously. Despite Dupuis’ concerns, the board moved forward with the motion. Just before the vote, however, Dupuis interjected, stating he received correspondence that Dominion would not be able to assist his office in preparing the CVR file.
“The motion that’s on the floor right now – I’m just telling you – Dominion is saying that they cannot assist us with this. That is going to be challenging with your motion,” Dupuis said. “Do you want to modify it to give me some flexibility?”
Ultimately, the board voted unanimously to give Dupuis until Oct. 17 to update the Alameda Elections Commission on the progress of publishing the CVR, with a final deadline by Nov. 5.
“If we’re talking about transparency, this helps us in that regard, and that’s what’s sorely needed,” Carson said. “To totally just dismiss that, I think, is problematic.”