California’s elections chief, the secretary of state, is on the ballot. Here’s our advice

Shirley N. Weber’s father was a sharecropper in Arkansas. When he got into a dispute with a white farmer and a mob threatened to kill him, he moved the family to south Los Angeles.

It was there that Weber was first exposed to the importance of voting.

“Our living room became a polling place on Election Day,” she told McClatchy’s California editorial boards.

In December 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom nominated Weber to become the first Black woman to serve as secretary of state, California’s top elections official. Confirmed by the Legislature a month later, she is one of three Black women holding the position nationwide.

One of Weber’s first duties was to oversee the attempted recall of the man who nominated her. When Newsom’s attorneys missed a key deadline for turning in the paperwork required to identify him as a Democrat on the recall ballot, Weber decided she could not allow his party affiliation to be listed. He sued to get the decision overturned, but a judge upheld Weber’s determination.

In July, Weber determined that a drive to raise the minimum wage failed to get enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot. She made that finding despite being sympathetic to the measure’s goal.

Ensuring that the democratic process is conducted with fairness and impartiality is the key responsibility of California’s secretary of state, and Weber has done that well since being appointed. Voters should elect her for a full term to continue her oversight of this important state agency.

Political testing

Weber, a Democrat, served four terms in the state Assembly representing the San Diego area and was just starting her fifth when Newsom called to offer her the secretary of state post. She leads a staff of about 600 and manages a $168.2 million budget.

On taking over from Alex Padilla — whom Newsom appointed to finish Kamala Harris’ U.S. Senate term — Weber told NBC News it was her time “to make good on the civil rights era — that they had fought for us and given us so much. This was going to be this generation’s time to basically continue to struggle and continue to fight.”

Influenced by her family’s history in the Jim Crow South, Weber sought to expand voting rights as a legislator. She was a co-sponsor of a measure that extended voting rights to parolees.

Besides overseeing the state’s elections, Weber is in charge of registering businesses, maintaining campaign finance and lobbying data, protecting critical documents like the California Constitution and Great Seal, and maintaining the state archives.

Pledges transparency

Former President Donald Trump went after secretaries of state in key battleground states following the 2020 election, pressuring them to change results. Since then, other Republicans have echoed Trump in questioning the legitimacy and trustworthiness of elections and those who run them.

Weber said the integrity of California’s elections is solid.

“No system is used without going through a series of tests,” she said.

Weber added that her office’s processes are open for scrutiny and that she has worked hard to make voting as easy as possible.

“Even in the wildfires of recent years, we have had portable voting places for people to vote,” she said.

Rob Bernosky, her Republican opponent and a corporate finance officer from Hollister, says on his campaign website that he wants to strengthen voter confidence in elections. But he does not go into much detail about how he would do that, and he did not participate in an endorsement interview.

In the June primary, Weber captured 58.9% of the votes to Bernosky’s 18.8%. Even if he picks up votes of Republicans who supported other candidates in the primary, Bernosky faces difficult odds.

A challenger must have a compelling argument to unseat an incumbent. Bernosky offers no such case. Weber has put in a strong performance in a short time and deserves the chance to lead her office for the next four years.

This story was originally published September 30, 2022 at 5:30 AM.