Six months ago, Newsmakers asked county elections chief Joe Holland what preparations he was making to secure this year’s elections, given Donald Trump’s ceaseless rumble of threats and intimidation about meddling in the midterms.
No big deal, Holland shrugged.
“We’ve been doing this for years, this is nothing new with regards to what Trump or anybody else might do in this election,” said the 68-year old voter registrar.
All righty then.
One week before the Nov. 3 election, Trump’s Department of Justice has followed through on his bully-boy rhetoric, demanding that state officials set aside 20,000 ballots from voters they allege — with scant evidence — are in the U.S. illegally, and sending legal threats to every one of the 58 county registrars in the state, threatening legal action against them personally unless they comply with the order.
Over the past 72 hours, as Santa Barbara County officials — not to mention local journalists — desperately sought more information about the menacing letter and the shadow it cast on the election, Holland was incommunicado. He not only failed to respond to repeated efforts by reporters to reach him, but also ignored multiple entreaties from senior county officials to engage with the crisis.
Late yesterday, a federal appeals court rejected the Trump DOJ’s bid to intervene in the election, and County Counsel Rachel Van Mullem’s office was coordinating a legal response in collaboration with other counties and the Secretary of State. Tom Schultz has details over at the News-Press.
As county registrars up and down the state made high-profile public and media appearances to issue assurances that every vote would be counted and the election would be carried out in regular order, however, there was not a peep from Santa Barbara County’s elections chief.
So it was left to Supervisor Laura Capps, who sounded the alarm over the DOJ demand that the ballots of scores of local voters be sequestered, to reassure the public.
“These 11th-hour intimidation tactics are exactly what we expected and prepared for,” she said in a prepared statement. “I encourage our Elections Division to remain undeterred by the political demands of the Trump administration and continue doing what they have always done: uphold the law, protect confidential voter information and count every legally cast ballot.”
A few weeks after our interview with Holland last spring, voters ousted him from the office he had held since 2002, in large part because of revelations that he had been working from home for the past two years. Stricken by multiple sclerosis, Holland was managing his $22 million, 100-employee department via Zoom — a chief argument successfully wielded by his chief deputy Melinda Greene, who triumphed with a landslide win.
Unfortunately, Greene does not take office until January.
Holland’s vanishing act in the face of Trump’s assault on California elections is a sad final scene for a stalwart public servant who served for two decades with efficiency and competence, until ill health and age caught up with him and the political times passed him by.
Press clips. Last December, SB Independent reporter Christina McDermott disclosed for the first time the identity of the architect working to construct an eight-story “Builders Remedy” apartment tower at 505 Los Olivos Street, adjoining the Mission — the most universally reviled project in recent memory.
Last week, in its annual, much-ballyhooed “Best Of” edition, the Indy pronounced the firm — Bildstein Architecture and Planning — the best architect in Santa Barbara.
Ouch.
The discomfiting episode caused some red-faced internal consternation at the paper — a case study of the eternal contradiction between the editorial and business sides of a news organization. The widely read “Best Of” issue is not just a popular feature but, more importantly, a major revenue stream for the advertising department, while its news-side journalists have no say in who gets honored.
The winners are decided by a blind online readers poll — open to anyone and everyone, it is both a popularity contest for local businesses and a clear invitation for said businesses and their fans to manipulate the voting.
What made Bildstein’s “Best Of” triumph notable — beyond its involvement in the Mission Monstrosity project — is that this is the first time in the contest’s history that local architectural wizard Jeff Shelton, whose whimsical and quality creations highlight architectural walking tours, did not win.
Nobody at the paper was very eager to discuss the matter publicly, but the incongruity of a company tied to the most maligned project in town capturing “Best Of” status in the liberal paper raised suggestions that online ballot shenanigans — known in Silicon Valley-speak as “vote brigading,” “freeping” or “techbro stuffing” — may have been behind the shocking result.
Kevin Boss, a downtown business owner who has been a high-profile supporter of reopening State Street to cars, shared with local reporters a sharply worded email he sent to Indy editor Marianne Partridge.
In it, Boss not only complained about the award but also pointed a j’accuse finger at Bildstein employee Sullivan Israel, who is the public face of the local chapter of the lefty Strong Towns organization — a group with a large, swarming digital footprint that has been used effectively in the group’s crusade to keep the downtown corridor closed to traffic.
“Could the Strong Towns relentless letter-writing machine have been behind the ‘Best Of’ campaign?” Boss wrote to Partridge.
Israel, in an email to Newsmakers, pleaded innocent to stuffing the Indy’s digital ballot box.
“The ‘Best Of’ award came as a complete surprise to our firm,” he told us. “We never asked anyone to vote for us and didn’t even know the contest was happening! We did not apply to it.
“No one in (Strong Towns) was ever told about the contest or asked to vote,” Israel added. “We’ve done a lot of great work for a lot of people in the region, and some of them must have voted for us because they appreciate what we’ve done for them.”
In its mandatory “Best Of” paean to Bildstein, an Independent writer gushed that the firm is skilled at navigating city permit bureaucracy while “keeping the creative spark lit.”
Heaven help us.
Buckley vs. Buckley. Mega-kudos to citizen journalist and City Hall gadfly Bonnie Donovan, who brought the receipts in challenging some of the hyperbolic claims being made in the Santa Barbara mayor’s race — and amplified in the Montecito Journal’s brass-band endorsement of Kristen Sneddon.
Bonnie’s earnest and conscientious local government reporting is a rare bright spot in the Santa Barbara Current newsletter, a Trump propaganda organ that more often traffics in MAGA swill and Christian nationalist detritus.
The back story made her sharp critique of the MoJo endorsement extra delightful: the Current was co-founded by Jim Buckley, the former owner and editor of the Montecito Journal, who sold it several years ago to a group of investors led by current editor Gwyn Lurie.
When the sale went through, Buckley’s son Tim stayed on as MoJo publisher, even as Lurie shifted the paper’s editorial slant left-of-center from Jim’s hardline right-wing politics — all of which gave an intriguing Buckley vs. Buckley subtext to Donovan’s vigorous attack on the MoJo’s Sneddon endorsement.
There were no injuries.
Image. Reddit.
Holy cow! You can’t make this stuff up
A tragedy of errors , what fools we mortals be, etc.
And only SB Newsmakers could lay it out like this.