Voter Registration

Three weeks away from the state's hotly contested recall election, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has taken a lead over his Democratic challenger among likely voters, a new poll shows. Looking ahead to November, President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney have moved into a dead heat, 46%-46% among likely voters in a state that is crucial to Democratic hopes, the poll by Marquette University Law School showed. Obama led Romney 49%-45% in the university's previous poll, taken at the end of April.

Three weeks away from the state's hotly contested recall election, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has taken a lead over his Democratic challenger among likely voters, a new poll shows. Looking ahead to November, President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney have moved into a dead heat, 46%-46% among likely voters in a state that is crucial to Democratic hopes, the poll by Marquette University Law School showed. Obama led Romney 49%-45% in the university's previous poll, taken at the end of April.

Gov. Pete Wilson is at it again. This time he's defying the law of the land by refusing to implement the National Voter Registration Act, commonly called the "motor voter" law. Mandated to go into effect Jan. 1, this law facilitates voter registration by making sign-up possible through the mail and at government offices, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles. Virtually all of the other 49 states were poised to implement this sound legislation. But not California.

A "super PAC" created by an influential labor organization will focus its efforts on motivating voters on the ground, rather than financing television commercials. "It's not going to be about FEC deadlines, television ads or the usual super PAC activity. It's about building a new way for workers to connect,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer for the AFL-CIO, at a news conference Thursday morning detailing the super PAC's strategy. Unlike past union efforts, the Workers Voices super PAC will be able to reach out to all workers, including nonunion ones.

With less than two weeks to the qualifying deadline, preliminary voter registration figures from California counties critical to Ross Perot's hopes of creating a new national political party indicate that so far, the Texas billionaire's effort is falling far short of the goal. To qualify in California--the first, and perhaps most critical, test of the proposed new party's appeal--Perot and his supporters must register 89,007 new party members by Oct. 24. But on Tuesday, voter registrars for Orange and San Diego counties reported that only 437 people had signed up as new members of the proposed Reform Party.

For the last 30 years, there's been a steady decline in voter participation in California. Only one in four eligible voters went to the polls in this year's March primary. This is an embarrassment to our state. We must do more to protect the integrity of the election system and encourage every eligible citizen to vote. One of the best ways to do that would be to approve a measure on the November ballot--Proposition 52--that would allow same-day voter registration.

In what might be a first step toward changes in California voting laws, new Secretary of State Bill Jones asked elections experts Wednesday to help him identify problems and suggest remedies for issues ranging from voter fraud to eliminating dead people from registration lists. At what he labeled a one-day summit of local elections officials, county prosecutors and independent experts from throughout California, Jones found no shortage of issues, opinions and solutions. Almost immediately, Beatriz Valdez, Los Angeles County registrar of voters, challenged the notion of massive fraud in voter registration.

The city of Vernon has launched an investigation of questionable voter registrations, weeks before its first election since a series of government reforms were enacted. The city, which was nearly disincorporated last year after a series of corruption scandals, has received several complaints about a surge of new registered voters, said John Van de Kamp, the former state attorney general who is acting as Vernon's ethics advisor. County records show there are nine registered voters — with six different last names — at one small home owned by the city.

The deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 2 election is Oct. 18. Voters may register by mailing in one of the forms available at most Ventura County government buildings as well as city halls, fire stations, libraries and post offices. For more information, call the Ventura County Registrar of Voters at 654-2781 or visit the registrar's website at www.ventura.org/election/Registration.htm.

SACRAMENTO — Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher coulda been a contender, to borrow the classic Marlon Brando line from "On the Waterfront. " He could've been somebody. He still could, conceivably — somebody who wins the prize of high public office, a senator, a governor — but it apparently won't be while wearing the Republican colors. He tossed them. We'll never know, but many believed the San Diego legislator — young, photogenic, articulate, an Iraq combat vet — had the potential to help lead the California GOP out of the darkness, out of its deep funk.

The city of Vernon has launched an investigation of questionable voter registrations, weeks before its first election since a series of government reforms were enacted. The city, which was nearly disincorporated last year after a series of corruption scandals, has received several complaints about a surge of new registered voters, said John Van de Kamp, the former state attorney general who is acting as Vernon's ethics advisor. County records show there are nine registered voters — with six different last names — at one small home owned by the city.

Filing has closed, the candidate lists are final and the curtain has risen on California's reconstructed political stage, where the contests for 153 congressional and legislative seats will play out for the first time under new rules and in altered districts. Look for intraparty fights that will last into the November runoffs, a likely lack of third-party candidates on the fall ballot and, possibly, a larger number of contested seats, compliments of a new primary system and a redrawing of political maps that did not seek to protect incumbents.

As the Republican candidates argued onstage over one another's conservative merit badges, Francisco Heredia balanced a laptop on his legs, waiting patiently to tweet. At any moment, he thought, they'll try to show who is toughest on illegal immigrants. But when Wednesday night's debate got to illegal immigration, some Latino activists found the rhetoric muted. "I expected it to be more heated," said Heredia, 29, a community organizer involved in Latino voter registration. "For it to be in Arizona, it was like they talked about it for 10 minutes and it was over.

A new study by the Pew Center on the States concludes that 24 million voter registrations in the United States - about 1 in 8 - are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million dead people are listed as active voters, and 2.75 million voters have active registrations in more than one state. At first blush, these findings might seem to shore up those - mostly in the Republican Party - who argue that voting fraud is endemic and must be combated by stronger enforcement measures, such as a requirement that voters carry photo IDs. But the authors of the study don't draw that conclusion, and reforms to address inaccurate records need not impose burdensome identification requirements that disproportionately disadvantage minorities and the poor.

Spurred by interest groups with an ax to grind, voters this week pushed aside sharply partisan laws or the legislators identified with them — charting a rebellious, if centrist, course heading into next year's election. In some cases, Tuesday's results flowed from the voter purges well-known in California and now apparently spreading to other states. Several of the targets were politicians who had ridden into office on a similar tide of dissatisfaction just one year ago. "The voters have been sending a message, time after time after time, and that is, 'Look, we want you to listen to us and not to the powerful elite,'" said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster.

Lisa Howard switched her voter registration from Republican to Democratic in 2008 so she could caucus for Barack Obama, so impressed was she by the fresh-faced candidate's calls for hope and change. While the 50-year-old supports Obama's efforts to fix the economy — the top issue here and everywhere else — she doesn't know if she'll be supporting him again in the 2012 presidential contest. The real estate agent plans to survey the GOP field, though to be honest she has been too busy staying afloat to get involved.

Though Rep. Anthony Weiner's district is solidly Democratic, its working class Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods are not the worst place for New York Republicans to dream of pulling off an upset. Democrats have a 130,000 voter registration advantage and the district has been represented by a Democrat for decades. Weiner was first elected in 1998 and has enjoyed a number of easy victories since. Still, the Brooklyn part of the district voted for Republican Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential election and Weiner faced one of his toughest reelections last year, when Republican businessman Bob Turner spent more than $100,000 of his own money to campaign.