The California Secretary of State reports that more than 1.5 million of the 2024 Election Day no-shows were in California.

The more than 1 million registered voters in Santa Clara County are voting by mail at the pace of about 20,000 per day. The 26 voting centers open this weekend for in-person voting, with 13 days until the polls close.

The primary turnout in the county in 2022 was just under 36 percent, and this year’s county tally is likely to be under 30%, based on this week’s trends.

If you are not sure if you are registered to vote, you can check your status at voterstatus.sos.ca.gov.  

In San José, despite a hotly contested mayoral contest, just 17 percent of the more than a half-million eligible voters had returned ballots one day before the election.

Eligible voters have until midnight tonight to become registered to vote in the upcoming general election.

While a growing number of states across the country are taking measures to make it more difficult to vote, Gov. Jerry Brown just made voter registration in California a breeze.

As a former civics teacher and principal who championed the role of student government, the lack of voter turnout in last week’s Board of Supervisors election concerns me. The race was well covered by the media and more than $1 million was spent to reach voters. And yet, only 20.77 percent of registered voters in District 2 participated in the election.

The Santa Clara County Democratic Party is attempting to make the political battlefield a bit more familiar this weekend with probably the largest day of action it has held since the 2008 election cycle. In particular, the event, which is taking place Saturday at the Labor Temple between 10am and noon, is going to focus on voter registration in “historically disengaged communities.” In other words, the county party is teaming up with local, community-based Democratic chapters to focus on Hispanic outreach in East San Jose.

A couple weeks back, I received some troubling news from the California Moderate Party. After three years of toiling in the weeds of The Golden State’s political fringes, Ash Roughani finally decided to throw in the towel on his latest effort to establish a genuine, grassroots third party. As a Democratic activist, it would seem odd for me to lament the loss of what could only have amounted to another siphon of progressive votes at a time when the left is so fractured that we can’t capitalize on our own victories. But the failure of the Moderate Party is just another symptom of the slow death of the political party system as a whole.