A lawsuit by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and a group of independent voters against election officials is just a headline-grabbing “political stunt” unsupported by any evidence, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said Tuesday. The suit “cynically aims to undermine the legitimacy of our election, and to further a political narrative that has zero basis in reality,” said Herrera, whose office represents San Francisco elections Director John Arntz in the case. The lawsuit accuses election officials of providing independent voters with misleading and confusing information about their right to vote for a partisan presidential candidate in the June 7 primary. The suit seeks to extend Monday’s voter registration deadline to election day.
Herrera said San Francisco provides accurate and complete information to prospective voters, which his legal staff described in detail to the plaintiffs’ lawyer before the suit was filed.
But the lawyer, William Simpich, said San Francisco’s ballot material included varying deadline dates for submitting crucial change-of-registration applications, as well as information that was distributed to some voters and not to others. “What we’re asking for is uniformity,” both countywide and statewide, Simpich said.
The federal court suit was filed Friday against the state and elections officials in San Francisco and Alameda counties by a group called the Voting Rights Defense Project, along with the American Independent Party and two individual voters. They argued that vote-by-mail application forms posted on both counties’ websites contained incomplete or misleading information about the right to register without a party affiliation, and about the rights of independent voters to request presidential ballots for the Democratic, American Independent or Libertarian parties.
Full Article: SF city attorney slams Sanders’ backers’ voter registration suit – SFGate.