SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Two Republican Assembly members in California have introduced an amendment to the state constitution designed to take partisan politics out of election administration.
In California, candidates for secretary of state run under a party label, they campaign on partisan issues, and while in office they oversee their own elections as well as the elections of party candidates they may support on the campaign trail.
The ballot may be nonpartisan. Campaigns run under the state’s Top Two open primary system. But the office isn’t— something critics argue presents a clear conflict of interest.
Republican Assemblymembers Josh Hoover (AD-7) and Natasha Johnson (AD-63) want to at least separate the office from party labels. On August 10, they introduced ACA 23, which adds “secretary of state” to the list of offices required by the state constitution to be nonpartisan.
Offices already required by law to be nonpartisan are “judicial, school, county, and city offices, including the Superintendent of Public Instruction.”
No public statements have been released yet by either Assembly member on the amendment. IVN reached out to Assemblymember Hoover’s office for comment and will update the article with any remarks.
Hoover was recently appointed by Assembly Republican Leader Alexandra M. Macedo to be the Minority Floor Leader. He is a member of the California Legislative Problem Solvers Caucus and has built a reputation for working across the aisle in Sacramento.
Under ACA 23, when candidates file to run for California’s top elections office, a party label won’t appear next to their name on the ballot and candidates cannot be nominated by a political party or party central committee.
Because it is a constitutional amendment, the issue will go before voters if it gets approval from two-thirds of the state Assembly and the Senate.
This is not a new idea in Sacramento. A nearly identical measure, ACA 10, was introduced in the 1999-2000 legislative session with the same goal of making the secretary of state's office nonpartisan.
It failed then. However, at a time when public opinion polls show broad concern over partisan influence in elections, there may be higher demand for this type of reform.
For example, Gallup released new survey findings at the end of July that found that 67% of US voters are concerned “a great deal” or “a fair amount” that political leaders will try to pressure election administrators to manipulate election outcomes.
“States should definitely be thinking about reforming the secretary of state, but more is needed than just making their election nonpartisan,” said Kevin Johnson, founding executive director of the Election Reformers Network.
“That reform could be combined with nonpartisan qualifications like those for the Citizens Redistricting Commission, and preventions against a secretary of state running for a partisan position after they leave office.”
The Election Reformers Network, founded in 2017, has studied this issue for years. Johnson argues that electing a partisan official to oversee a state’s elections makes the United States a global outlier among democracies.
No other developed democracy in the world gives political parties such control over elections.
The concern is straightforward: When candidates loyal to a party are in charge of elections, including their own party’s contests and their own re-election bids, it is like letting the players of a baseball team officiate the rules of their games.
This is a concern not restricted or confined to a single party and has been identified by bipartisan commissions in the past as an area that needs reform.
The 2005 Carter-Baker Commission–co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker–recommended nonpartisan selection of key election officials and conflict-of-interest standards designed to insulate election administration from partisan political activity.
On page 50 of the commission’s report, it explicitly calls for “nonpartisan election administration” and says states should consider transferring election authority from elected secretaries of state to a chief election officer who would serve as a nonpartisan official.
It even proposes that such officials be approved by a two-thirds legislative majority to encourage bipartisan support.
ACA 23 doesn’t go that far, but it does address one of the biggest concerns tied to election administration in the US.
For now, the amendment has just been introduced.
The path to becoming law includes clearing committee review, securing two-thirds votes in both the Assembly and the Senate, and then winning approval from California voters as a statewide ballot measure.
Each of these steps is a significant hurdle on its own, and the last time a nearly identical proposal was floated, it did not survive the process. Whether ACA 23 is more successful remains to be seen.
Stay tuned to IVN for more on this story.