| (CaliforniaForever works on Carl Wood's Assembly campaign)
Carl Wood, the former PUC Commissioner that ended those rolling blackouts is now the Democratic contender for the 65th Assembly District seat, most of which lies in Riverside County. On June 15th it was reported in the Press Enterprise that a communications mix-up between the Riverside ROV and the USPS allowed 12,563 absentee ballots that were mailed on time to remain in the custody of the post office past their due date. The law is that the ballots cannot be counted unless they are in the ROV office on Election Day, June 8th. In a press release dated June 17th, after the fiasco became public, Carl Wood proposed a simple solution to prevent the disqualification of valid ballots in future - use the postmark to determine the timeliness of absentee ballots.
Two weeks after Wood took the lead, neighboring Republican Assemblyman Brian Nestande has followed according to an article in The Desert Sun, by introducing legislation to, you guessed it, allow postmarks rather than arrival time at the ROV to determine whether the ballots are on time. Of course it is possible that Nestande did not know that Wood had introduced the idea two weeks prior. Success, as they say has a thousand fathers.
Where was Carl Wood's incumbent opponent on the electoral travesty? So far Assemblyman Paul Cook is a no show on the thousands of uncounted ballots. If the AWOL incumbent ever decides to address the loss of voting rights to thousands of voters in his district, he may be hard pressed to avoid supporting the policy solution of his fast-acting opponent, Carl Wood. Perhaps in this case success will have only 999 fathers. |
