In a community lecture held on June 22 in Costa Mesa, Orange County, the President of the California Election Integrity Project (EIPCa), Linda Paine, who has been in office for 15 years, discussed election-related issues and lawsuits and fundraised for ongoing litigation.
“We see that people across the country are not voting because they have lost confidence in the elections,” Paine started by talking about voting as a basic right of citizens, stating that federal, state, and local governments have a responsibility to encourage people to exercise this right. She mentioned that “discriminatory and unfair voter registration/election procedures” have a destructive impact on voter participation. Paine emphasized that EIPCa is committed to maintaining accurate and up-to-date voter registration files and effective election certification, having trained over 20,000 volunteer election observers from 2009 to the present.
Paine announced that EIPCa has partnered with organizations such as the United Sovereign Americans (USA) for the first time. This organization focuses on election irregularities and has either filed or will file lawsuits in several states in the USA.
California has approximately 27 million registered voters, Paine said, “Our team has examined and processed data from the years 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024, discovering over 5 million instances of ineligible or uncertain registration irregularities; over 2 million ballots cast by ineligible or problematic registrants; an excess of 120,000 votes compared to actual voters; and more than 2 million obvious irregularities that surpass the accuracy standards set by the federal election system.”
“We will send encrypted lists containing millions of unqualified registered voter names to the Secretary of State to ensure that these individuals will not participate in the November 2024 election,” Paine stated.
However, according to an article published by “politifact.com” in 2021, the claim made by EIPCa that “over 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible citizens were found in 28 of California’s 58 counties” is incorrect. This discrepancy arises as the Secretary of State’s office only reports the number of active voters, which lags behind real-time county data, whereas EIPCa aggregates active and inactive voters from county voter rolls to compare the numbers.
In November 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that EIPCa and congressional candidates have the right to challenge the constitutionality of California’s election laws, rules, policies, and procedures because these laws undermine the fairness of the electoral process. Over the past decade, various regulations and orders adopted by California have resulted in numerous election violations, according to EIPCa. The organization received over 700 sworn statements from observers, including instances where election workers failed to adequately verify signatures or counted unsigned ballots. EIPCa and its co-plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit against Governor Newsom, the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and election officials in 13 counties.
“This lawsuit is significant because it is the first challenge to the constitutionality of California’s election laws and procedures,” said Mariah Gondeiro, Chief Attorney of Advocates for Faith and Freedom. “If successful, California will be required to implement secure unified voting and counting procedures.”
Paine stated in a press release, “We see that California-style laws have caused similar issues across all states in the United States, problems that have been witnessed and documented by our observers in California over the years.”
In July 2023, U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. dismissed the lawsuit, stating that the plaintiffs “sought to challenge election irregularities arising from California’s expanded mail-in voting laws and regulations,” but lacked supporting facts. EIPCa has expressed its intent to continue with legal proceedings.
On May 1, 2024, the Judicial Watch organization and the Libertarian Party of California also filed lawsuits, demanding the court to compel California to take reasonable measures to clean up the voter registration rolls by removing deceased or out-of-state ineligible voters.