Excerpt:

On Tuesday, polls will be open to voters in eight states, including California, which holds gubernatorial primaries among many other national, state, and local elections.

Under California law (Section 2194 of the Election Code), voter data (name, address, phone, age, party affiliation) is supposed to be "confidential and shall not appear on any computer terminal... or other medium routinely available to the public."

However, there's a big exception to that law: this data can be made available to political campaigns, including companies that provide digital analysis services to campaigns. In other words, candidates and their contractors can get voter data, but there's little definition in the law about how those parties are required to be custodians of that data and how that data ought to be secured.

Excerpt:

With Monday’s deadline for registering to vote approaching, Nancy Kops was getting a little anxious. All her friends already had received their mail-in ballots. But although she’s voted in every election since moving to San Jose 10 years ago, her ballot still hadn’t come.

The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters office said Friday that an employee error resulted in Kops being unregistered to vote.

“This error was caused by a member of our team incorrectly resolving a duplication in registration records,” registrar spokesman Eric Kurhi said.

Kurhi added that “we are not aware of any other voters whose records were canceled in error,” and that the registrar’s office is happy to assist voters to confirm that they are registered to vote.

May 21 is the deadline for registering to vote in the June 5 primary election.

Excerpt:

Neighborhood polling places are history in five California counties: Sacramento, Nevada, Napa, San Mateo and Madera.

They are being replaced by one-stop vote centers, drop boxes and voting by mail. The changes are part of the Voters Choice Act, designed to give Californians more choices on how they can vote. 

At the Sacramento County Elections office, hundreds of ballots are arriving each day. 

“We’ve received nearly 8,000 vote-by-mail ballots voted and back in house,” said Alice Jarboe, interim Registrar of Voters for Sacramento County. “And that’s a record for this time period prior to any election that I’ve been involved with in the past 20 years."

It appears there’s a surge in voter turnout at a time when Sacramento County is going through some big changes. 

Excerpt:

Improving voter confidence in the elections process is part of Kim Alexander's mission at the nonprofit California Voter Foundation.

"When they say the Russians are going to come back, I don't think they're kidding about that," Alexander said.

Despite the threat of hacking in the 2018 election, Alexander said California is much better protected than other states because of paper ballots.

"The combination of a paper-based voting system and routine auditing of election results means that if something happened to our vote count and someone tried to intervene with the election, we would likely detect it," Alexander said. "And we would be able to recover from it."