Petition by Marin ‘election integrity’ group rejected by judge

In a ruling on the eve of Election Day, a federal judge denied a watchdog group’s attempt to have the court intervene in Marin County’s elections process.

Members of the group, dubbed the Marin Election Integrity Committee, filed the lawsuit last month, accusing top county and state elections officials of failing to remove ineligible voters from registration rolls before the election on Tuesday.

The defendants are Lynda Roberts, Marin County’s registrar of voters, and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

“I am very happy the work can continue to move forward without delay,” Roberts said Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment on the matter because it involves litigation.

Francis Drouillard, chair of the Marin Election Integrity Committee, said the plaintiffs are evaluating U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer’s ruling.

“Nothing can be done about this election, but we remain concerned about the ineffective voter roll maintenance for future elections,” said Drouillard, a Novato resident. “They’re definitely failing to clean the rolls despite following the process.”

In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged that the defendants’ failure to move ineligible voters from the county’s voter rolls would “allow votes that dilute the votes of eligible voters, infringing plaintiffs’ rights to participate in a fair election.”

To support their claim, the plaintiffs alleged that 1,162 out-of-county and 337 out-of-state registered voters remained on the county’s voter rolls during the 2024 general election season. Drouillard last month said that his group compared the county’s voter rolls to the U.S. Postal Service change-of-address database.

In a Sept. 27 letter, Roberts responded to the plaintiffs’ findings and said their report had inaccurate information. She said that the report took outdated voter roll data from December 2023.

Drouillard countered that 994 people who moved out of the county were still listed as registered voters in Marin as of late September. In response, Roberts said that she did not comprehensively review the entire list of names submitted by Drouillard, but she said that many names were labeled by the elections staff as canceled or inactive.

For the election on Tuesday, ballots were mailed to registered voters in Marin starting on Oct. 7. The county had 172,304 registered voters in the general election, and 85,083 of them had cast their ballots as of Tuesday night, according to the county’s election department.

The plaintiffs applied for a temporary restraining order on Oct. 24 to require the county elections staff to intercept or sequester ballots returned by ineligible voters and to not count those ballots.

On Monday, Breyer ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing and did not meet the requirements for a temporary restraining order. Breyer said the plaintiffs failed to prove they suffered an injury from the defendants’ alleged failure to remove ineligible voters from the county rolls.

“Plaintiffs’ assertion of injury here — that their ‘constitutional right to vote is impaired by the dilution of their vote resulting from counting votes of ineligible voters’ — is plainly inadequate,” Breyer said.

He also wrote that the plaintiffs waited until last month to file their lawsuit and to seek a temporary restraining order. He noted that the court could not hear the case before Monday.

“As of today, Marin County has already processed many mail-in ballots,” Breyer wrote.

Noting that 63,389 ballots had been accepted as of Oct. 30, Breyer said it was too late for the court to stop the defendants from opening the envelopes of ballots returned by ineligible voters.

The lawsuit is scheduled for a case management conference in January.

Drouillard, a Republican, says the Marin Election Integrity Committee is nonpartisan.

Drouillard ran for the Division 3 seat on the North Marin Water District board in the election on Tuesday. As of Wednesday, Drouillard had 1,884 votes while his opponent, incumbent Michael Joly, had 2,027. The elections office is still counting mail-in and provisional ballots.