Santa Barbara County’s Election Czar Stayed Silent When DOJ Threated Election

HANDS UP: It’s one of those questions that hits when I’m walking the dog. Why do we clap a big hand over our mouths when zapped by a sudden gust of grief? What are we trying to keep from climbing out? Is this reflex common to people of all lands? Is it learned behavior or hardwired at birth? Humans are interesting.

Either way, there’s a lot of it going around these days. Little wonder Joe Holland refused to pick up the phone when I called — maybe more than 10 times — over the last few days. Since 2003, Joe has been the county’s reigning election czar, an elected position in its own right. With maybe a month and a half left of what’s been a long career, Holland now finds himself in the crosshairs of a federal criminal indictment threatened by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Based on the rhetoric thrown around, jail time might be more than a theoretical possibility. Not exactly the grace note on which anyone wants to fade into any sunset. Or maybe it should be.

Last Friday, the DOJ sent Joe and the other 56 California county election czars a note designed to void even the most stubborn of bowels. You have 48 hours, Holland was notified, to verify the citizenship of 180 names of “likely” election fraudsters we are sending you. These individuals, Holland was told, are suspected of being noncitizens illegally registered to vote, and they must be stopped before November 3, the consummation date for this fall’s midterm elections. Those who fail to cooperate, the letter added, were guilty of aiding and abetting the commission of a serious federal crime. They would be held criminally responsible as fraudsters themselves. 

The signatory of this letter — a man named Bill Essayli — showed up in federal court Tuesday to deny he was threatening anybody. Maybe he even believed it. 

Heed should have been taken. But Essayli, the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, is on a suicide mission. He takes his orders from Donald Trump to wreak maximum havoc upon California’s upcoming election. In reality, Essayli is the ultimate political monkey wrencher acting in naked bad faith, demanding the most technically untenable solutions under the most impossible of deadlines to problems 1,000 percent entirely of his own making. And I am not even exaggerating.

So, no wonder Joe Holland didn’t answer my calls. No wonder he waited so long before notifying the county supervisors or the county executive or the county counsel that the Essayli letter had been delivered. No wonder he is not holding a press conference under the courthouse arches, punching his fist at the sky and vowing to protect the sanctity of the election process, the eucharistic moment in the Great Experiment we in America like to call democracy. 

Yes, he should have told Essayli to go pound sand. Read the Constitution, he could have thundered with stentorian force under those magnificent arches. After all, that document explicitly vests states with exclusive authority over determining the time, place, and manner in which federal elections were to be conducted — unless Congress were to pass an actual law intervening and superseding it in some fashion, which it hasn’t. Absolutely zero latitude is written into the Constitution — like the Bible, more revered than read — allowing the executive to horn in. Then as now, people had reason to worry about kings. Holland’s moment beckoned; he resisted.

I would have loved it if he explained just how ridiculously impossible Essayli’s demands were. It all started this summer, when Essayli first notified California’s Secretary of State that he had the names of 252,000 likely undocumented residents registered to vote. In the next notification, the DOJ’s number had slipped to 190,832. Most recently, it dropped to 20,000. First, Essayli expressed “high confidence” in the accuracy of his numbers. Today, he uses “likely” instead. 

Our Secretary of State Shirley Weber was dubious from the start. Homeland Security, who does investigating spadework for the DOJ, made similar demands in Nevada, claiming it had a list of 16,000 undocumented residents illegally registered. When Nevada officials asked for verification, the number suddenly dropped to 185. When they drilled down further, they discovered all 185 were U.S. citizens. In Iowa, claims of 2,176 illegal voters evaporated to 277 and now 35. 

When Secretary Weber demanded that Essayli show them his math, he went radio silent. Crickets. Then, on October 13, Essayli gave California the 20,000-name list. On October 23, he gave the state’s election czars a 48-hour deadline to verify the citizenship of all 20,000 names. They were also commanded to set aside any ballots cast by nonverified citizens. 

Forty-eight hours? By that time, 23 million ballots had been mailed out to all state voters. By that time, 331,000 ballots had started to come back in and were being processed. In other words, the time to change the complex machinery by which millions of votes are to be counted is not after an election has already started. This obvious common-sense notion, by the way, is codified in federal election law.

State elections departments are not engineered to conduct citizen verifications. Such investigations, more than one judge has noted, might exert a profoundly chilling effect on voter participation. Duh! That, of course, is the whole point.  Joe could have said all that. He could have gone out in a blaze of righteous glory. I would have liked that. The elections czar up in San Luis Obispo — not to be confused with any hotbed of progressive radicalism — did just that. But then, I’m not the guy with Essayli’s target imprinted on his back. Joe is.

He’s got a whole lot of reasons to clamp his hand over his mouth. Grief might be one of them.