Your guide to the California secretary of state race: Weber vs. Wagner

California voters will decide this November whether incumbent Shirley Weber will be reelected as secretary of state of California or her challenger, Republican Don Wagner, will replace her.

The secretary of state is in charge of administering statewide elections, providing information about ballot measures and candidates to voters and overseeing campaign financing. The office also handles business licensing and filings.

Weber, a former state Assembly member, is seeking another term after she initially was appointed to the role in 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom and elected by voters in 2022 with about 60% of the vote. Weber is the first Black woman to hold the role.

Wagner is a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors and former mayor of Irvine. He also is a Republican member of the state Assembly.

California’s general election takes place on Novemer 3. Learn about L.A.’s city and county races as well races for state office.

Weber attended UCLA and became a professor at San Diego State University, teaching Africana studies for 40 years. She was born to sharecroppers in Arkansas during the segregationist Jim Crow era, and her father couldn’t vote until he was in his 30s. Weber was a member of the San Diego Board of Education and while in Assembly served as chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus.

“I know the position,” she said. “I have worked in this before but equally important, I understand democracy and the importance of democracy and more than ever at this time, we see an administration that does not respect the rights of every Californian and every person in this nation and is attempting to manipulate the data and the opportunity for people to vote.

“I think because of my experience, not only academically and legislatively but personally, the passion that I have for elections and for voting is critically important, so that those who want to vote need to have a person who’s unafraid and who will fight for them and who stands up for them.”

Wagner served more than a decade on the South Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees before he was elected to the state Assembly. He argues that the secretary of state office should be “nonpartisan” and that the state should ensure that voters can have trust in the system.

“I believe that there are things wrong with how we were running our elections currently and that we can do better,” he said. “I’d like to bring forward some of those ideas and that willingness to grapple with those problems.”

A hot button measure on the ballot is Proposition 39, which would require voters to present government-issued identification, such as a state driver’s license, every time they vote in person. The initiative would require election officials to verify that all registered voters are U.S. citizens.

Voters who use mail-in ballots — the most popular method of voting in California — would be required to write a four-digit number, or a PIN, on their ballot envelopes. The PIN would come from ID such as a driver’s license or could be provided by the county.

Wagner supports Proposition 39 and believes that the legislature should “fix” ballot harvesting, which refers to collecting completed absentee ballots from voters and delivering them to polling places.

“We ought to do a more thorough job of cleaning ghost voters who don’t belong on the rolls any longer. Either they passed away or they moved away,” he said. “Things can be done when the office of the secretary of state is willing to do them. I’m willing to do it and the incumbent isn’t.”

According to a September poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, 52% of likely California voters oppose voter ID at the polls, while 39% support it and 9% are undecided.

“It’s patronizing, the idea that people have a difficult time getting a driver’s license,” Wagner said. “Even the Democratic Party when it had its convention, all of the delegates had to show identification. The idea that IDs are hard to come by is silly and patronizing and the initiative would give you one for free so that shouldn’t hold anyone up.”

Proposition 39 would require the state to provide a voter identification card for free to voters who request one. Supporters of the measure say that it would prevent election fraud while critics say that the requirements would reduce voter participation.

Under California law, voters aren’t required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail. The state requires ID when registering to vote, and residents must swear under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen and are eligible to vote.

Weber opposes Proposition 39 and compared it to the literacy voting laws in the South, which largely denied the vote to Black, Latino and indigenous populations and eventually were overturned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“When my parents were in the South, no one really was opposed to people having literacy as a standard for you to be able to vote, but it was how literacy standards were implemented in a very discriminatory fashion,” she added. “That gave those in charge the ability to pick and choose who would vote and who would not vote based on their perception of standards.”

Weber pointed out that voter fraud is minuscule in U.S. elections and that voter ID laws could be used to deny certain Californians the ability to vote.

“These things are put out there just to get everybody frenzied and concerned and focused away from the real issues, which is they’re trying to take away your vote,” she added. “It’s like a sleight of hand. We have voter ID and if the voter ID law passes, it would take a tremendous amount of time and people would be very frustrated when they discover what may happen as a result of this law.”

After the Trump administration tried to get the state to turn over sensitive voter data last year to the Department of Justice, California successfully pushed back.

Orange County leaders did as well. However, Wagner urged the board to comply with the federal government’s request to turn over voter registration records of 17 people who were ineligible to cast a ballot but had appeared on the county’s voter registration rolls.

“When you change your address, you stay on the voting rolls in California unless you give notice to the state and most people don’t do that,” Wagner said. “The feds have those records, they can cross reference who is voting or is on the voting rolls. The state and federal law almost requires us to clean the voting rolls, and that means take off people who have moved and people who don’t belong there, and we aren’t doing that.”

“If the feds want to come and clean the voting rolls, I’ll take the help,” he added.

Weber has called handing over voter rolls to the feds “unconstitutional.”

“They’re trying to figure out how they can get lists of individuals who in their minds may not be qualified, but they don’t have any standards to determine that,” she added. “We do not by law have to give them our list.”

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Summer Lin is a reporter on the Fast Break Desk, the Los Angeles Times’ breaking news team. Before coming to The Times, she covered breaking news for the Mercury News and national politics for McClatchy’s publications, including the Miami Herald. An East Coast native, Lin moved to California after graduating from Boston College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Lin was among The Times’ staff members who covered the Monterey Park mass shooting in 2023, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in breaking news.

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