Excerpts:

President Joe Biden’s hopes to standardize some of what Americans can expect at the polls reached a hurdle when the Senate wouldn’t allow the For the People Act to be fully debated.

Audits of last fall’s federal election are ongoing and the torrent of other efforts to prove the legitimacy of the results have not subsided, even in the face of repeated court decisions to the contrary.

Kim Alexander, the founder and president of the California Voter Foundation, joined Sonseeahray to talk about the state of voting in the U.S. and the foundation’s recent study about the harassment of election officials

Exerpts:

An analysis released Thursday projects the recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom will cost at least $215 million, less than what elections officials initially estimated but a large enough price tag that local governments across California will need the state to pick up the tab.

Legislative leaders quickly seized on the estimate provided by the state Department of Finance as fulfilling a mandate under state law to fully assess the costs of the recall — potentially speeding up by some two months the special election in which voters could oust Newsom from office.

Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) said Thursday that they will include the projected cost in the state budget that must be enacted by the end of the month.

Excerpts:

Californians shouldn’t look at voter suppression as something happening only in faraway states, like Georgia, Texas and Florida. A more subtle, insidious form of the fallout from Donald Trump’s big lie about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential race is permeating California.

The lie is gaining enough traction to alarm voting officials, starting with California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. She’s met with nearly every county registrar of voters since taking office in February, and many told her that right-wing agitators are making their job more difficult.

“They’re attacking almost every registrar of voters that I have in the state of California who is trying to do their job,” Weber told the Black Caucus at the California Democratic Party convention recently.

Exceprts:

It’s well known that elections have consequences. They also have price tags.

With signs pointing to a special election this fall at which voters could remove Gov. Gavin Newsom from office, local officials from across California believe the cost of conducting the election could run as high as $400 million.

The estimate is four to five times higher than rough guesses bandied about in recent months and is equal to a cost of about $18 per registered voter — more than double what local elections officials say was spent on California elections in 2018.

It’s a price they say counties, which are struggling to cover pandemic-related costs for health and human services programs, will need the state to cover.