Santa Barbara County Supervisors Talk ICE and Elections

Sheriff Bill Brown sought to assure Supervisor Laura Capps and anyone watching the supervisors meeting this Tuesday that federal ICE agents would not seek to crash the June 2 elections by showing up at any of Santa Barbara County’s 61 polling places and scaring away would-be voters. Brown told Capps that he’d been in communication with three federal law enforcement agencies — he did not specify ICE by name, however — and said they understood their presence at a polling place on Election Day would be a violation of the law, unless they happened to be there to vote.

“Their awareness was refreshed,” Brown said. 

Capps convened a public discussion at the board in response to community fears that ICE might show up at polling places, intimidate would-be voters, and otherwise disrupt the sanctity of their ballot. County elections czar Joe Holland — working from home and up for reelection this June — declined to show up via Zoom, so his second in command, Martin Cobos, played the role of relief pitcher. Cobos said he’d never heard any concern expressed by anyone that they were worried about ICE. 

Capps, who has been in close touch with immigration rights activists who have been bird-dogging ICE’s enforcement actions, said the community fear is widespread and not unreasonable. President Donald Trump has made clear he regards mail-in ballots as a form of election fraud even though he himself uses mail-in voting. He has issued an executive order seeking to ban it. Many people, Capps said, are afraid to go shopping, go to church or even go to school because of ICE’s enforcement actions. Capps expressed surprise that Cobos had not heard similar concerns.

Without meaning to, Cobos inadvertently made the case that ICE agents would be wasting their time if they wanted to disrupt elections by showing up at polling places. When he first started working elections 20 years and 50 elections ago, he noted, 70 percent of all ballots were cast in person at polling places. Today, he stated, 90 percent of all county ballots are cast by mail. Some other small percentage is dropped into locked drop-off boxes. 

Cobos urged voters to vote early and not wait until Election Day. The post office can no longer be relied upon to postmark every ballot cast on Election Day the way it used to; without the postmark, mail-in ballots will not be counted. Late voters and other stragglers, he said, can drop their ballots off at any one of the 18 ballot boxes strewn throughout the county. If they insist on using the post office, he said, they should take their ballots to the front desk and see to it that their envelopes are postmarked. Under state law, ballots can be counted within seven days of the election date but only so long as they’re postmarked on Election Day or sooner. 

There are 61 polling places throughout the county he noted, one — coincidentally — for the name of every candidate on the ballot running for governor. Another 18 are running for lieutenant governor. That’s a lot of information to sift through. Voters should not wait until they get in the voting booth to figure out who they like. While this was helpful — 2,670 votes were not counted last November because they were turned in late — it was only peripherally to the point Capps was hoping to explore.

Cobos also noted that in his 20 years working on county elections, he could remember not a single instance of voter fraud. “This is a good community,” he stated.