As California’s elections face greater scrutiny, voters will get to select their secretary of state, Democratic incumbent Shirley Weber or Republican Don Wagner. Below, Weber discusses how she plans to defend voters’ rights and the state’s voting system. Wagner says the state can speed up vote counting without disenfranchising voters.

Guest Commentary written by

Shirley Weber

Shirley Weber

Shirley Weber is California’s Secretary of State and is running for reelection.

Whether we agree politically, or whether we couldn’t disagree more — your vote is your sacred responsibility and right. 

Recently President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security claimed to have identified hundreds of thousands of illegally registered voters in four states. These claims were lies, as is slowly being revealed to the public. 

Next door in Nevada, they claimed to have identified 278,000 illegal registrations. They’ve since walked that number back and admitted that 99.94% of those were fine. And they still haven’t provided any meaningful proof of a single improper registration among the remainder — just unproven accusations. 

It’s a common pattern, and one they often use to attack California’s voting system. 

The reality is that voter fraud is incredibly rare in America. Every serious investigation into the issue comes to the same conclusion: Voter fraud simply does not happen at a large scale. California has robust systems in place to catch wrongdoers, but the simple fact is that very, very few people intentionally try to commit voter fraud. 

In my current term, we’ve run smooth elections with high turnout. Californians vote in record numbers because we make it easy to vote. 

Universal vote by mail is convenient and accessible, and we allow voters time to cure their ballots if they run into issues. For instance, if a voter’s signature doesn’t match, we run it down and try to contact the voter to ensure we count every valid vote, while still providing a check against those who want to abuse the system. 

Our system works. 

Being Secretary of State requires putting politics to the side and doing what’s right. I’m willing to make hard decisions, like in the 2021 recall election, when I refused Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request to improperly change his party label on the ballot, despite having been appointed by him just months earlier. 

For me, the current fight over voting rights is personal. I was born in the Jim Crow South. My parents couldn’t vote until they fled Arkansas and moved to Los Angeles. They cast their first ballots here, and they raised me to treasure my right to vote. My mother even opened up our living room to serve as a polling place.

America is the only nation in the world where within one generation a family can go from being denied the franchise to vote to running the largest state election system in the country. I take that honor seriously, and I will do everything in my power to protect your right to vote.