Yesterday, the Outpost caught up with Juan Pablo Cervantes, the county’s new Clerk-Recorder/Registrar of Voters, to see how his tenure in the office has gone so far.
Cervantes spoke with the Outpost’s John Kennedy O’Connor about a wide range of subjects, including ranked-choice voting, campaign finance reform and how he’s managing the clerk-recorder section of his bifurcated office — a relatively blank area of his resume, which garnered him some criticism on the campaign trail last year.
Video above. Transcript below.
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JOHN KENNEDY O’CONNOR:
Well, I’m really pleased to welcome to Lost Coast Outpost.com Juan Pablo Cervantes, who’s the County Clerk Recorder and Registrar of Voters. Actually very new in the position: Last time we spoke you were actually in the election process, so congratulations on winning that election.
Now during that election your opponent did make a bit of a campaign issue with the fact that you had a lot of election experience but you didn’t have much in terms of the County Clerk Recorder. So how has that side of it been going for you since you’ve been elected?
JUAN PABLO CERVANTES:
It’s been great. Going well. One of the other candidates in the race early on, Ben Herschberger, was promoted as interim manager. And so he’s been overseeing the day-to-day operations. I help when it comes to the vision or the broader outlook of where the office is going and how it’s transitioning. But a lot of my work right now is catching up in those places. I have a pretty strong confidence in my knowledge here [in the Elections Office]. It’s picking up where I’m weak, which is over there.
O’CONNOR:
Now, there was an election last week, actually, in the southern part of the county, but there’s a lot of elections coming up. So what’s coming up in the future?
CERVANTES:
So there’s potential elections. There’s a November district election that tends to not go to election because there’s not enough candidates for the special district or school board seats. And so that’s potentially coming up in November. And then beyond that, it’s election season 2024. Presidential. And so we’ll have a party primary and then a general.
O’CONNOR:
Now, the City of Eureka did pass what’s called the Ranked Choice Voting Ordinance in 2020 ,but it wasn’t able to be implemented since we didn’t have the technology. Has that situation changed now?
CERVANTES:
Yeah, we’re working with the … the technology is currently being certified by the Secretary of State so our vendor, Hart Intercivic, based out of Austin, Texas is working on a tabulation component of it. Now, tabulation is is the math part of election. So we have a hardware and software that does everything but the math part of it. That’s at the end. That’s the thing that will generate results for us. And so they’re currently working with the Secretary of State to certify the system to do so.
O’CONNOR:
So will it be implemented for this year’s election cycle?
CERVANTES:
That’s the goal. We’ll know shortly.
O’CONNOR:
We saw it actually in practice last week at the Board of Supervisors meeting. It didn’t go particularly well, because I think they were very confused. So is there going to be an education process that people will really understand, voters will understand exactly how it really works?
CERVANTES:
I’m hoping to coordinate with the city of Eureka on that. I’m open to administering almost any type of election process, so long as it’s legal and it doesn’t disenfranchise voters. Ranked choice voting is one of those things that I could go either way.
And the thing that makes the difference is the education component of it. Voters need to not be surprised when they get their ballot. The instruction booklet that we give them with their ballot should not be how they learn how to use ranked choice voting. It’s critical for us to start developing an educational campaign today. And that can involve every stage of the process. We need to be out in schools and talking to the high school kids that are going to be first-time voters. We need to be out in the community. We need to be looking at the local stakeholders, communities of interest. And we need to be out there showing them the process, doing mock elections, just making it something that people are comfortable with when the time comes for them to cast their one vote.
O’CONNOR:
It may not be indicative, but at the Board of Supervisors, when they finally got the result, they just simply didn’t understand how it had got there. So I think that may be an issue that people really do need to understand.
CERVANTES:
Absolutely. In order to … when you make something more complicated, everybody on board needs to understand how those complications work. Otherwise it could seem like your vote is being manipulated. We need to avoid the appearance of Calvin Ball.
O’CONNOR:
Now, talking of which, and I know this is something that when we last talked you were very confident it’s not an issue, but it seems to keep going on nationally in a discourse that people are worried about voter fraud and so many national figures claim elections are being stolen because of voter fraud.
Now, you’re very confident it’s not an issue here in Humboldt County, but how can you reassure voters who may be on the side of “oh no, it’s all rigged,” that that’s just not the case?
CERVANTES:
So I only ever speak with certainty about Humboldt County. It’s the county that I have any say in how it gets administered, it’s the county that I’m familiar with.
I think a lot of those principles are true statewide, but speaking for Humboldt County, we have the gold standard of the process. We use paper ballots that you can verify. When you put your paper ballot into our ballot box, you can see and read and understand what’s going on with that ballot. And it’s an auditable paper trail for your voting. And so we use optical scanners which check that human-readable ballot. We have a 1% manual tally where we have people do a hand count of 1% of all ballots randomly selected. And so we’re checking that equipment.
And this whole process is open to the public and transparent. We invite the public to be a part of that process and work with our partners and Access Humboldt to make that more accessible to people. And I think those endeavors in being transparent and acting in such a way that ego isn’t involved, that you’re open to a process that checks your work. I think that’s key. I think when people see that, when they participate in that, I think they believe.
O’CONNOR:
I think you’re right, absolutely, that’s what Humboldt Today viewers want to know as well.
Now just very quickly, because you came hot foot to talk to us today from the Board of Supervisors meeting where campaign finance was on the agenda today. That’s an issue that you have some thoughts on as well.
CERVANTES:
Yeah, I mean, I have some thoughts. One of the privileges of my position is that I don’t create legislation, I just administer it. And so the stress is on the board of supervisors to make those kinds of calls. But the topic of campaign finance came with contribution limits. And so the board’s looking at reducing the $1,500 contribution limit to $500 or anywhere in between that. That’s their decision, and I don’t have much of an opinion on that officially.
The other bit is that there’s a special circumstance in the county ordinance where that contribution limit could get increased to $5,000 based on independent expenditures. And it gets really complicated from there. An independent expenditure is an expenditure by a party separate from the candidates without coordinating with the candidates. And if they do that above $10,000, that limit increases to $5,000. And so it’s a piece of the ordinance that may have made sense at one point, but at this point is just very confusing. So the board is seeking to clarify that.
O’CONNOR:
If they do that, what impact does that have on your work and your office?
CERVANTES:
If they remove it, it makes things simpler, because we’re who gets called to explain that piece of ordinance. And so it makes it easier for us to have that conversation with somebody running for office for the first time. That’s the only impact it has on our office.
O’CONNOR:
Well, Juan Pablo, it’s great to see you again. Congratulations again on winning the election. Good luck with the election season this year, and we’ll be in touch again very soon, I’m sure.
CERVANTES:
Thank you.
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