On June 8th, the city of San Jose asked a judge to reopen a peculiar lawsuit from last month. In this lawsuit, Santa Clara Superior Court Judge Peter Kirwan ordered that the city San Jose must pay for the recount of nearly 100,000 signatures. This could cost an estimated one million dollars.
The lawsuit was originally filed in mid-April by the Santa Clara Registrar of Voters Shannon Bushney against San Jose City Clerk Toni Taber. The lawsuit sought to reverse the decision Bushney made herself two months prior claiming there were not enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. While unprecedented, Bushney believes there were many erroneously rejected signatures on the county level that led to her decision to reject the signatures validity.
In a supplemental court document, the county’s election division coordinator laid out a long list of the errors made by their own department. These errors included incorrectly saying that some signers registered to vote after signing, identifying voters at incorrect addresses, and failing to identify some voters within their own system. Additionally, Taber is accused of losing nearly 3,000 signatures.
“Simply put, the policy of preserving the right of initiative leads to this court’s conclusion that Registrar has the right and duty to correct her errors and issue a new, corrected certification upon discovering those errors,” Judge Peter Kirwan wrote in his declaration.
There has been much debate between who should have to pay for the recount. However, Kirwan ultimately acknowledged the hefty price but ruled that state law obligates the city to pay for the verification process of ballot initiatives.
This new of the recount is welcomed by supporters of the initiative, which is a controversial labor-backed measure to move mayoral races to the same year as presidential elections. The Fair Elections Initiative hopes this would booster voter turnout and also places a cap on certain campaign contributions.
