The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters started hosting workshops on Oct. 2 and will continue through Oct. 26 in a variety of languages aimed at educating voters about the upcoming Nov. 7 special election, according to a post from its Instagram.
The mission of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters is to protect and ensure the community’s right to participate in fair, inclusive, accurate and transparent elections, according to its website.
Paulo Chang, election division coordinator of Precinct Operations, said the special election is not a county-wide election in the English Voter Language Workshop on Oct. 2.
“Only a specific quantity of voters in a specific area will be eligible to vote, and that's about over 70,000 voters,” Chang said.
Chang said the San José-Evergreen Community College District and Los Altos School Districts are eligible for the election, and will be voting on a parcel tax measure.
A parcel tax is a property tax levied on owners of parcels, according to Ed 100. Unlike ordinary property taxes, parcel taxes are explicitly not based on the value of a property or its use.
The Los Altos School District proposal is for a $295 parcel tax — a renewal of the existing $223 parcel tax and an increase of $72 — for eight years, according to an Oct. 8 article from Local News Matter.
Chang said on election day voting centers will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and will be open through lunchtime, dinner time, break time and other meal breaks. “This is why we stock our vote centers with a good amount of election officers, so they can take breaks, and they can help the voters as needed,” Chang said.
Established by Senate Bill 450 (2016), the California Voter's Choice Act (VCA) allows voters to choose the location and time to cast their ballot by mailing one to every voter, according to a website from the California Secretary of State.
It also expanded in-person early voting and allowed voters to cast a ballot at any vote center within their county, according to the same source.
The law also required local counties to provide secure ballot drop off locations throughout the county, according to the same website from the California Secretary of State.
Grace Sullivan, bilingual election specialist of both English and Tagalog, said voters can choose to vote by paper, touchscreen or audio in nine languages during the Tagalog Voter Language Workshop on Oct. 10.
“The languages available are English, Hindi, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese,” Sullivan said.
All voters will now automatically receive a Vote by Mail (VBM) ballot, according to a website from the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Office.
Ballots will be mailed about a month before each election, giving voters time to mark and return their ballot when it is most convenient for them, according to the same source.
Chang said while the purpose of the workshops is to provide information about voting options, he hopes everyone attending becomes both a partner and collaborator in the voting process.
Evelyn Mendez, Public and Legislative Affairs Manager at Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, said the county has been creating these multilingual workshops in 14 different languages, after following the Voter’s Choice Act in 2019.
“We are required to have at least one meeting 10 days before an election and we provide assistance in languages other than English,” Mendez said.
Mendez also said having these online workshops is important for the local community.
“Sometimes people are not as comfortable asking questions in English and instead ask it in their language, which is why we have staff on those workshops who speak those specific languages,” Mendez said. “People need to get the current information for every election, and we provide that.”
