Padilla must honor transparency talk. Election integrity matters.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla campaigned on transparency. As California’s chief election officer, he has shined a light on the way our political system works.

That’s why his secrecy and evasion is so disturbing when it comes to problems in California’s Motor Voter registration program.

Padilla is stonewalling The Sacramento Bee’s request for emails between him and his chief of staff regarding serious errors with the program. In October, an audit revealed Department of Motor Vehicles staff had mishandled at least 23,000 voter registrations.

In addition, another 1,500 people who weren’t eligible to vote may be registered as voters due to errors by the beleaguered DMV. Some of them may be non-citizens. These problems led Padilla to threaten a complete suspension of the Motor Voter program unless the problems were identified and fixed immediately. So far, so good.

But things took a strange turn when reporter Bryan Anderson requested correspondence between Padilla and his staff regarding the Motor Voter problems. Padilla’s office released 268 pages of documents in response. Many of these were third-party newsletters that referenced the errors, not the requested material. Padilla’s office, clinging to a flimsy legal interpretation of the law, said he could keep real records secret.

So much for transparency.

We strongly disagree with Padilla’s weak legal logic. If he wants to keep his reputation as a champion of transparency, he must reconsider this ill-conceived effort to hide the truth from the people he was elected to serve.

Karl Olson, an attorney for The Bee, responded to the secretary of state’s refusal: “[T]he core purpose of the Public Records Act is to ‘uncover corruption, incompetence, inefficiency, prejudice, or favoritism,’ and seeing how the secretary of state did or didn’t handle registration errors is a matter of intense public interest.”

California’s Motor Voter program is a great idea in principle. It allows the DMV to automatically register Californians to vote when they get a driver’s license, obtain a state ID or change their address. The program went into effect – over loud objections from Republicans – in April 2018.

Human errors and complications with new programs might be understandable. But the public has a right to know details any time the integrity of our election system might be compromised.

President Donald Trump and Republicans have done everything they can to hurl false accusations at California’s robust voter participation efforts. The Motor Voter foul-ups, coupled with Padilla’s newfound desire for secrecy, will only help fuel such conspiracy theories.

At a time when voter rights are under attack by orchestrated efforts in other states to suppress registration and turnout, California sets a shining example of pro-voter policy.

California allows counties to mail voters their ballots up to 28 days before the election. Voters also have a choice of multiple locations where they can drop their ballots. Would-be voters can register to vote all the way up until Election Day. In addition, 16 and 17-year-olds can now pre-register to vote when they turn 18.

Padilla has enthusiastically supported these efforts, which promote access, accountability and transparency and bolster democracy and good government. His uncharacteristic decision to suppress Motor Voter documents makes us wonder what he’s afraid of.

Mr. Secretary, what are you hiding?

This story was originally published December 11, 2018 at 3:17 PM.