Fresno City Attorney to monitor Prop. 50 special election, too

The federal government won’t be the only ones monitoring Fresno County polling sites next week on election day. 

During a late Thursday news conference, Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz said his office will dispatch staff to also monitor local polling sites in Fresno — and ensure that laws aren’t broken.

 “I can tell you that my staff will be looking for any type of intimidation, any type of blocking of entering into any of these polling locations,” Janz said at the Thursday news conference. “We’ve seen in other elections across the country, folks show up in masks intimidating voters that are standing in line trying to get in.”

Janz said he couldn’t get into more specifics but said his office will be operating in collaboration with California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office, who announced this week that his office will also be sending election monitors, too. 

“If anything illegal happens within a polling site that is being run by the county, the sheriffs probably have jurisdiction,” Janz said. “If something illegal happens on the sidewalk, which is a Fresno sidewalk, Fresno PD would have jurisdiction. If there’s anything else that’s a little bit more complex, the Attorney General would probably have jurisdiction. It would really depend on the types of situations that we’re going to see.” 

Late last week, the U.S. DOJ announced that it would send federal election monitors to five California counties including Fresno during California’s Nov. 4 statewide special election. 

While it’s unclear how the U.S. DOJ selected the five California counties, it received a letter from the California Republican Party calling for election monitoring just a few days before the federal agency announced its intention to do so. 

It’s not exactly unusual for the U.S. DOJ to conduct election monitoring — its civil rights division is in charge of doing that. Harmeet Dhillon, who was a top leader in California’s Republican Party for years, is in charge of U.S. DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

During a Thursday afternoon closed session, the Fresno City Council voted 6-0 to dispatch city staff for election monitoring next week. At the news conference, Councilmember Nelson Esparza said the measures were taken in response to concern among the community after last week’s surprising announcement from the U.S. DOJ. 

“I want to be clear that this is not a partisan effort,” Esparza said. “This is an effort to ensure transparency and an attempt to quell, again, the concern and anxieties by Fresno residents in this great time of uncertainty.”

“Like my colleague said, I think there’s a lot of confusion, angst and anxiety for me, for the residents that reached out to me,” Fresno City Council President Mike Karbassi said at the news conference. “We just want to ensure people do exercise their rights to vote, that they’re more confident about that process.”

When asked whether city staff would be monitoring the federal election monitors, Karbassi said that could be a possibility. 

“I think everyone’s going to be. They’re going to be watching us. We’ll be watching them. We’ll be watching the elections department and how they run elections, but not interfering,” Karbassi said. 

Next Tuesday is a big day for California, and also the country. 

California voters will have to make a decision on Proposition 50, which would allow California to be gerrymandered in the middle of a decade with Democrat-drawn boundaries designed to flip five out of nine Republican-held seats in Congress. 

California’s Prop. 50 emerged after Texas state officials gerrymandered their congressional districts at the order of President Donald Trump in an attempt to flip five Democrat-held seats in Congress. Unlike California, Texas did not pose the question to voters; its state officials just went ahead with gerrymandering their congressional districts.

There will be 26 voting centers where Fresno County residents can fill out their ballots. Janz said his office will be dispatching observers at 13 of those polling sites — with all but one located inside Fresno city limits.

At the Thursday news conference at Fresno City Hall, Karbassi took an opportunity to bash a political opponent, blaming Fresno County Clerk/Registrar James Kus for why there’s federal scrutiny over Fresno’s electoral process. 

“What we don’t want to do is play the blame game, because if you ask me, I’m going to say we are targeted because of the performance of the county administering elections,” Karbassi said. “That’s my opinion on it.”

Karbassi is currently running for Fresno County Clerk/Registrar and is seeking to beat Kus, the incumbent. 

In a Thursday phone call, Kus told Fresnoland that the reason why Fresno is among the five California counties under federal scrutiny is because the California Republican Party wrote a letter to the U.S. DOJ asking for federal monitors. 

“I think that’s really what it comes down to,” Kus said. “The California Republican Party said, ‘Hey, we want you to take a look at these.’”

All observers have the same view on election day

Kus said the City of Fresno, along with anyone else in the public, are allowed to observe the electoral process. 

“I think it’s great that the city of Fresno is expressing an interest in elections and coming out to see how well we conduct our elections and how open we are and accurate and how our processes work,” Kus told Fresnoland. 

Kus clarified that access to the electoral process for federal, state and city election monitors is no different than what the average member of the public gets to observe. They all watch the process from the same place, and no one gets preferential treatment or better access than the next person. 

“All observers, wherever they’re coming from, have the exact same access as an election observer in Fresno County,” Kus told Fresnoland. “If you get into some of those federal rules, there is a situation where a federal observer could have more access, but we’re nowhere near that — that takes court orders.”

Kus added that if anything in particular were to happen at a polling place, he would be relying on local law enforcement depending on jurisdiction, which ranges from local city police to the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office. 

“Preventing someone from voting, disturbing their voting, damaging their ballot or otherwise damaging voting equipment — that’s all illegal under California law,” Kus said Thursday. “We will work with our legal partners, our law enforcement partners, to make sure that our facilities stay safe, secure and comfortable voting environments.” 

More specifics on what federal election monitors will do

Kus said that he was able to have a conversation with a U.S. attorney in California to get specifics on what exactly the U.S. DOJ will be doing when it sends staff to monitor Fresno’s election next week. 

“They’ve indicated that they will send a couple observers, so probably two. Probably not too many more than that because it sounds like they’re not getting paid,” Kus said, referencing the ongoing federal government shutdown which has put on pause millions of paychecks for federal workers since Oct. 1. 

Kus added that he doesn’t know exactly at which polling sites the federal election observers will be, but knows they’ll be in town next week, including on election day. They have the option of observing polling sites or a downtown facility where vote by mail ballots are counted. 

He added that election observers from the California Attorney General’s Office are sending about the same number of people for a couple days next week. 

The last day to vote in California’s Prop. 50 special election is Nov. 4.