IOV is part of 805 EPIC, the Election Protection and Integrity Coalition: more than 40 nonprofits in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties working to protect our elections from interference.
Know Your Rights
Having a problem voting? Ask for an election worker or site supervisor. Then call or text the 805 EPIC Rapid Response Network at 805-870-8855, or the national Election Protection hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683). En español: 888-VE-Y-VOTA.
Monday, Oct. 19, 6 pm, Franklin Neighborhood Center, 1136 E. Montecito St., Santa Barbara. Protecting Your Right to Vote, in Spanish with English interpretation.
The ACLU’s Organizing to Protect Democracy training series helps volunteers build real organizing skills, grow as leaders, and take part in community-based defense of civil liberties.
The next session is Tuesday, October 13, at 5 p.m. Pacific on Zoom, with ASL interpretation, live captioning, and Spanish translation.
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.
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.
Trump is doing what all fascist losers do in the lead-up to a catastrophic electoral wipeout: he’s preparing to sabotage the election. And repression of civil society and activists is a key part of the playbook. In this episode, Leah and Ezra run through four real-world scenarios pro-democracy organizers may face in the coming months and explain what your rights are and how to exercise them. Then it’s lots of live Q&A on election sabotage, scam PACs, Democratic messaging for the general election, and more!
