At our recent general meeting, I mentioned an important development regarding Santa Barbara County’s effort to prohibit new oil and gas wells. I wanted to share an update and highlight IOV’s involvement.
In April, Indivisible Ojai Valley joined other community and environmental organizations in supporting Phase 1 of the proposed Oil and Gas Ordinance amendments. This phase prohibits permits for new onshore oil and gas wells and prevents previously abandoned wells from being restarted, while allowing the county’s 1,039 active wells to continue operating.
Following approval by the Planning Commission, the amendments moved to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors.
On September 15, the Board voted 3–2 to approve Phase 1. The ordinance will return for a second reading before final adoption.
This is a meaningful step in a process that IOV and many other organizations have supported. It’s also a good reminder that when local groups come together and make their voices heard, we can be part of decisions that shape the future of our communities.
California Common Cause, the Asian Law Caucus, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area run a nonpartisan poll monitoring program every election, and they need volunteers across Southern California for Tuesday, November 3.
As a poll monitor you’ll visit 3 to 5 polling places over a 4-hour shift, fill out a short questionnaire at each one, and help make sure voters aren’t being harassed or intimidated. They provide the training and send you a poll monitor package in the mail.
Oct. 3–14 — required 90-minute Zoom training (pick one session)
Oct. 13 — last day to sign up, and spots are limited
More than 4,000 people joined Indivisible’s Election Protection 101 training on August 19 as part of the Hands Off Our Vote program, the national effort to make sure every eligible voter can cast a ballot and every ballot gets counted. The full recording is up:
Action Items
1. Check your registration. Then check it again. Voter roll purges are the tactic being used right now to block eligible voters, and a purge can happen late. Californians can verify their status or register and update an address with the Secretary of State. Indivisible also built a text tool: text VOTER to 59798, reply with your state, and you get the official link for wherever you live. Put a reminder in your calendar to check again in a month. Flex it: a table with a few printed signs at the farmers market or a community event is all a “check your registration” action needs.
2. Make an early-vote plan and put the date in your calendar. Voting early protects your vote against everything from a sabotage attempt to getting the flu on November 2. Look up your state’s dates at 866ourvote.org, then pick the earliest day you can actually commit to. Flex it: vote together. A group trip to a vote center, or an afternoon where everyone fills out and drops off their ballots and then goes to lunch, does more for turnout than any post.
3. Volunteer locally. Every county has its own needs, and the organizations already doing the work know them best. Indivisible points to Ground Control as the clearinghouse for vetted local opportunities: rides to the polls, bilingual helplines, poll worker sign-ups, filtered to where you live and updated often. Locally that means the Ventura County Elections Division, which recruits and trains poll workers for every election. You’ll want to know the difference between:
A poll worker is an official, nonpartisan election staffer employed by the county.
A poll monitor, watcher, or observer is stationed by a party, campaign, or organization to watch for irregularities. The rules for the second category vary a great deal by state.
4. Talk to the people who run our elections. The more our county and state officials know that people are paying attention, the less room there is for quiet changes to voting.
And when local election workers do the job well (clear information, easy access) say so publicly. It is a hard job, and they are the people who make an election run. Thank you Michelle Ascencion!
On how we talk about this
Messaging researcher Anat Shenker-Osorio presented findings from Indivisible’s research and made two points worth carrying around.
The first is a correction. The claim that “they’ll just cancel the election” is both wrong and counterproductive: it does the work of anyone who wants people to stay home. There will be an election. Be vigilant for a government that keeps the forms of democracy while reshaping the rules underneath them.
The second is about what actually moves people. Naming a policy is not enough: most people do not translate a policy into its effect on their own ability to vote. Say the effect plainly: they are trying to keep people from voting, so they can control the outcome of elections and hold on to power. And do not soften the ending. In her research, hearing about attacks on voting made a solid majority more determined to vote, not less. People turn out against this kind of thing out of defiance.
Next Step:
Watch: Election Protection 201, the follow-up training covering the higher-stakes period of the weeks right before, during, and after the election (it was held on Wednesday, August 26).
About 5,100 people joined Indivisible’s Election Protection 201 training on August 26, the second half of the Hands Off Our Vote program. Where 101 was nuts and bolts, check your registration and make a plan to vote early, 201 is about what to do when something goes wrong. The recording is up:
Action Items
1. Download the toolkit. The Hands Off Our Vote Toolkit has the “what to do now” checklist, plus how to plan a local action and how to reach out to press. Read the now section this week, not in October.
2. Check your registration, then help someone else check theirs. Text VOTER to 59798 and reply with your state. Californians can verify their status with the Secretary of State. There is a ready-made toolkit for passing that along by text or social media, and a second one of election protection messages.
3. Vote early, and if you vote by mail, mail early. Every California voter gets a ballot in the mail. Get it back as soon as you can, or drop it at a drop box or vote center. Most sabotage gets saved for Election Day itself, so the more of us who have already voted, the smaller the target.
4. Learn the 100-foot rule before you need it. In California, Elections Code 18370 bars electioneering within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place, an elections official’s office, or an outdoor drop-off site. That is a rule about advocating for a candidate or measure, not a general ban on standing there, but know the number and check anything else with Ventura County Elections.
5. Build your call list now. Who would you actually phone if a polling place closed with two days’ notice? Local groups already doing voter protection, faith and business leaders, a reporter, county officials. Write it down while nothing is happening.
Rapid Response
Molly from Indivisible made the case plainly: half a dozen people outside a local elections office with a few signs, a few hours after something happens, does more than a bigger protest after the news cycle has moved on.
The kinds of things worth responding to:
Openly biased poll workers, or voter ID demanded unevenly
Misinformation about where, when, or how to vote
Aggressive voter roll purges, or polling places closed at the last minute
Election workers or local voter registration groups being targeted
Federal officials deployed at polling sites
What to do: document it on video if you can do so safely, notify local and national press, and tag Indivisible in anything you post so it can be coordinated and amplified. Report it to 866ourvote.org or 866-OUR-VOTE, which is tracking incidents and building the record for any legal follow-up.
One hard line from the training: violence or the threat of violence is never yours to handle. Call emergency services, get yourself safe, and document from safety.
Two principles worth carrying around. Center the people most affected and follow their lead, and check whether someone local is already on it before planning your own response. And stay alert without assuming doomsday: tens of thousands of election workers and volunteers have spent decades making sure people can vote.
The People Who Have Done This Before
The guest was Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, who pointed out that almost nothing in the current playbook is new. Show me your papers, seized ballot boxes, officials who win and then cannot get the keys to the office: he and his co-founders watched all of it in Alabama’s black belt and the Mississippi Delta long before it was national news. What is new is the scale, and that the federal government is now on the wrong side of it. Familiar tactics mean the ways to counter them are familiar too, and there is a role in this for everyone, not just the seven battleground states. When something is stolen in Georgia, part of whether it stands is how the rest of the country responds.
He also named the line we have to walk in talking about it: get people appropriately afraid, but not so afraid they decide the system is rigged and there is no point fighting. “There is more of us than there is of them.”
ICE at the Polls
Real, but unlikely. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has refused to rule it out, saying agents would be sent only if a “threat” arises, and nine state attorneys general have asked him to put a no-ICE-at-the-polls policy in writing. Sending immigration agents to polling places would violate federal and state law. The uncertainty is the point: it is meant to make Black and Latino voters think twice about showing up.
What Indivisible is asking people to do:
Confirm your registration at least a month out, not the week of
Plug into your local immigrant rapid response network
Vote early, so that if something goes sideways there is still time to fix it
Vote with other people, and arrange an escort through Ground Control if you want one
Carry your ID and registration card even in a state that does not require it, because Black and brown voters are far more likely to have their eligibility challenged
If you are challenged or harassed, do not take the bait. The people outside a polling place do not get to decide who votes. Call 866-OUR-VOTE and document everything.
Expect the “non-citizens voted” claim after the election. It is already being tested. In July, DHS claimed more than 250,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in four states, and named California as the largest at 190,832. States asked for the methodology and the actual list of names. DHS never provided either. Neighbors here will hear that number about California specifically. The research on disinformation is consistent: one real conversation with someone you know does more than a hundred perfect social media posts.
The Mail Ballot Fight Is Still Moving
This one changed three times in the week of the training, which is the most useful thing to know about it.
The Supreme Court lifted one injunction against Trump’s mail-voting executive order on Monday, August 24. Coverage made it sound like the Court had blessed the order. It had not: the ruling was procedural, about the timing of the lawsuit, and the Court said explicitly it was not addressing the plan’s legality. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”
Then on August 26 a federal judge lifted the last nationwide block, and two days later she froze the Postal Service from implementing the rules while she weighs a permanent ban. Votebeat is tracking the status, and it has probably moved again by the time you read this.
Preparation, not panic. Do not overindex on any one day of it. Nothing has changed for you as a voter: if you are eligible to vote by mail, you still can. Mail it early or drop it off.
Ballot Curing
Every election, thousands of ballots get rejected over small mistakes, such as a signature in the wrong box on the envelope. Many states, California included, have a legal process for contacting those voters in time to fix it. That is called curing, and it runs on volunteers making phone calls in the days after an election. It is one of the highest-value things you can do, and the opportunities show up late. Watch for them.
If They Refuse to Concede
Indivisible is saying out loud that if the administration refuses to hand over power, the response is sustained mass mobilization: an ongoing in-person presence at a significant location until every vote is counted and the winners are seated. Not a two-hour march on a Saturday. Not something that ends on November 3.
That would be a rapid response, not a pre-planned event, so the ask right now is simply to be reachable. The commitment to nonviolence is firm, and the training made the case that it is strategic and not only moral: nonviolent movements are how this has actually been beaten elsewhere.
Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin has published a short piece, “Our Strategic Logic For the Next No Kings”, explaining the thinking behind the next national day of action on October 17. It is a quick read with a two-minute audio version if you’d rather listen.
His argument, in brief: the earlier No Kings days showed the movement’s scale, and the next phase should turn that energy toward protecting the election itself. Two goals stand out: driving early voting so the results are clear and hard to dispute, and building the local, nonviolent capacity to respond calmly if the process is disrupted. He suggests each local event should fit its state’s voting calendar, leaning into get-out-the-vote where early voting is already underway.
The League of Women Voters of California has published its recommendations on all 14 statewide measures on the November 3 ballot. Five yes, eight no, and one where the League decided it could not take a side.
These are the League’s positions, not ours. The League is nonpartisan, takes no position on candidates, and bases its measure recommendations on program positions its members adopted through study and consensus. Every recommendation below comes with published reasoning you can read and argue with, which is why it is worth passing along.
Support
Prop 1 — Veterans & Affordable Housing Bonds. $10 billion for affordable housing and homeownership, plus $1.25 billion for veteran home loans through CalVet.
Prop 2 — Save for California’s Future Act. Builds a larger rainy-day fund and requires the state to save more when capital gains revenue runs unusually high.
Prop 3 — Children’s Education & Health Care Protection. Keeps current income tax rates on the top 2% of earners rather than letting them drop in 2031, which the League says would reduce state revenue by an estimated $5 billion to $15 billion a year.
Prop 4 — California Fair Elections Act. Lifts California’s near-total ban on public campaign financing and lets state and local governments create voluntary programs if they choose to.
Prop 5 — Recall Election Reform for Statewide Officers. Takes the replacement candidate off the recall ballot, so a successor is chosen the way any other vacancy is filled instead of by whoever leads a crowded field.
Oppose
Prop 37 — Loan Program for Middle-Income Buyers of New Homes. The League’s objection is that it helps a family buy a home without making it affordable to keep, since the down payment help is a second mortgage repaid monthly, on terms voters would not know before approving it.
Prop 38 — Bonds for Immunology Medical Research. $8.4 billion in borrowing for roughly 20 years of debt payments. The League’s position is that bonds suit buildings, not ongoing research, and that this locks billions into one field.
Prop 39 — Prohibits Voting Without Government-Issued ID. The League calls it “a partisan power grab to further President Trump’s voter suppression efforts,” and points to Texas, where a comparable rule led to one in eight mail ballots being rejected.
Prop 41 — Limits New State Taxes & Requires Special Tax Audits. Puts revenue from new state taxes under the Gann Limit spending cap. The League opposed the original Gann Initiative in 1979 for the same reason.
Prop 42 — Limits New State Taxes on Personal Property. Writes a broad ban on taxing stocks, business interests, retirement accounts and other personal property into the state Constitution, where changing it later takes another vote of the people.
Prop 43 — Limits Voters’ Ability to Raise Revenues for Local Government Services. Requires a two-thirds vote for local special taxes proposed by initiative, which lets a minority block what a majority wants.
Prop 44 — 90% Health Care Spending for Nonprofit Safety-Net Clinics. Clinics currently report spending about 80% of revenue on care. The League’s concern is that clinics that miss the 90% line would owe the state the shortfall and some could close.
Prop 45 — Modifies Environmental Review for Certain Projects. The League has supported streamlining CEQA before and says this one goes too far, with timelines that would produce rushed studies and less public participation.
Neutral
Prop 40 — Billionaire Tax. A one-time tax of up to 5% on billionaire wealth, with 90% of the revenue going to health care. The League found strong arguments on both sides: the need is urgent and the federal government is walking away from it, but the measure locks the money into an earmarked fund, is a one-time fix for ongoing costs, and rests on a few hundred people. It takes no position.
Three That Interact
Props 40, 41 and 42 are on a collision course, and the League flags it under both 41 and 42. Each of those two is drafted to prevail over a conflicting measure on the same ballot. If 41 or 42 passes with more “yes” votes than 40, a court could find them in conflict and stop Prop 40 from taking effect even if a majority approved it. Read all three together before you mark any of them.
We wrote about Prop 39 separately. It is the measure on this ballot that goes directly to whether eligible people can vote.
If You Want It Without the Recommendations
The League’s education fund runs CaVotes.org, which publishes a plain explanation of each measure with no position attached. There is also a printable “Vote with the League” flyer, a one-page PDF of the recommendations above, made to be handed to people.
For candidates and the state Supreme Court retention election, which the League does not cover, see our post on the CalMatters 2026 Voter Guide.
