GOP lies......

Marin Republicans say 'dead' people are voting. The county says they're alive

By Anabel Sosa

The chairman of the Marin County Republicans sounded alarms this week about possible voting by dead people during the special election last November. During a Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, John Turnacliff requested that the county’s registrar of voters look into the matter.

“I, along with others on our committee, have been dissecting Marin County voter rolls for over three years,” Turnacliff said during the public comment portion of the meeting. “ ... And based on our analysis of the ballots that were returned for the Prop. 50 special election on Nov. 4, we found 73 people, 73 dead people had voted in that election.”

Asking Natalie Adona, the county’s registrar of voters, to review those numbers, Turnacliff said, “In summary, dead people are voting in Marin County, and we would like to know why.” 

The question around voter rolls comes a few months after Prop. 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s measure to redraw California’s congressional map, won 64.4% of the vote statewide. The measure overwhelmingly passed in Marin County, with 80.68% of the vote cast in favor.

Adona told SFGATE in a phone call that state law does not require her to look into inquiries like Turnacliff’s, but she said she chose to do so anyway.

“I did tell this group a gentle reminder that, look, I really have no lawful basis to look at this, but I’m doing it anyway because I take stuff like this seriously, and I want them to know that I take it seriously. I didn’t just want to ignore it,” she said.

Adona said she found that in the list provided by the Marin GOP, there were “four or five” deceased people — but there is no record of them voting since they died.

Adona explained to SFGATE that any person who dies or moves residences is taken off the voter roll. She said the Marin County Elections Department relies on records from the Department of Health to be informed if a person dies, and that sometimes there can also be delays in updating the voter roll if a person does not inform the elections office that they changed residences. 

David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told SFGATE that “amateur sleuths” who try to find these gaps in voter lists should know the data is more accurate than ever before because of new technologies and more comprehensive government data. 

“Election officials like Natalie have seen a huge increase in false claims of large numbers of dead people or non-citizens on their voter lists,” Becker said. His organization seeks to restore trust in American elections through educating the public on election procedures. “There’s always going to be some dead people on a voter list, there’s always some data lag, but that's usually worked out within a month or so.”

He added, “It’s an extremely easy thing to find and happens extremely rarely.”

Adona said she understands the public’s anxiety around elections, but it is often unfounded.

“I’ve seen lists like this before,” she said. “In my prior county, we’d see stuff from national groups, and after the 2020 election, quite a bit of sending of lists and saying, ‘You need to take care of these voters.’”

Mindy Romero, a nonpartisan researcher from the University of Southern California, also told SFGATE in a phone call that the number of inquiries around voter rolls has increased in recent years.

“I cannot find an election official who hasn’t faced increased scrutiny,” Romero said. “This is a democracy where we should be questioning our elected officials. I’m not saying it’s wrong but the degree and intensity, and the tone and approach we hear, is aggressive or very accusatory.”

In 2024, the Marin Election Integrity Committee, which is part of the Marin Republican Party, sued the previous registrar of voters as well as the California secretary of state, whose office oversees state elections, alleging those officials had failed to remove ineligible voters from the roll and therefore infringed on the integrity of the elections. At the time, Frank Drouillard, a Marin resident who was listed as a plaintiff, alleged that a number of people who moved out of Marin were still receiving ballots. The case was ultimately dismissed.

Drouillard, the treasurer for Marin County Republicans, helped compile the data for this latest inquiry by Turnacliff into dead voters. He told SFGATE that the prior lawsuit was “a learning experience” and that the judge was “very fair” in the end. “We’re not anxious to sue again,” he said.

Drouillard alongside Marin GOP inquired of Adona about voter registration rolls last October as well. The group sent another letter, obtained by SFGATE, dated Feb. 2, that brought attention to alleged dead voters and other possibly ineligible votes.

“While it is unlikely that these potentially ineligible voters affected the outcome of the single-issue special election, their numbers are large enough to influence local races in the upcoming primary election,” the letter read.

Chris Carpiniello, the chair of the group’s election integrity subcommittee, wrote the Feb. 2 letter. The leaders of the group told SFGATE in a phone call that the party’s “primary goal” is to gain voter trust ahead of the June primary election. There is a 90-day period ahead of a federal election in which voter rolls cannot be changed, according to the National Voter Registration Act, and the party asked for any changes to the voter roll to be made before then.

“We are not disputing the election at all,” Turnacliffe said in a call with SFGATE. “Our focus right now is on the voters. We think if we get these voter rolls cleaned up, the confidence in our election results will be much, much higher.”

When SFGATE informed the Marin GOP of the registrar’s findings, Drouillard said it’s possible they got it wrong. He said he will look back into his methodology.