Educating Voters - Defending Democracy | |
The VOTER Newsletter
September 2026
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Salinas General Meeting
Wednesday, August 26th, 6-8:00 PM
At Sacred Heart Church, 22 Stone Street
Salinas, CA (map)
Topic: Why Vote?
Celebrate the power and importance of voting with speakers:
- Chris Barrera, President of LULAC Salinas,“The Ballot Box: Our Most Powerful Civil Right,” and
- Steve Hughes, Emeritus Professor of Politics and Public Administration at CSU Stanislaus and popular OLLI instructor, “The Power of One Vote.”
The League will host light refreshments at 6:00, and the program will run from 6:30 to 8:00pm. Off-street parking is available behind the church, and English to Spanish interpretation will be provided. Friends and family are welcome.
-- Pam Looney, Arlene Guest, Jane Meade-Roberts,
Heather Visscher and Elizabeth Hall
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Lunch & Learn
Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
at the Unitarian Universalist Church
490 Aguajito Road, Carmel CA 93923
Topic: Just Say “No”
to Prop 39
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Carol Moon Goldberg is immediate past president, and current vice president, of the League of Women Voters of California (LWVC) and its related Education Fund. Her current position on the Board involves the advocacy and legislative work of the League. She will be the featured speaker for the September 9 Lunch & Learn meeting of the League of Women Voters of Monterey County. Her topic is “Just Say ’No’ to Prop 39.” Join us to learn what is behind the California ballot initiative popularly characterized as “voter ID” and why the League of Women Voters of California strongly recommends a “No” vote on the proposition.
-- Tama Olver
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President's Message
Welcome to the first edition of The VOTER in its new, online format. Presenting The VOTER online allows us to experiment more easily with content and format to best meet the needs of our members. Over time, an online format supports our goal to increase our outreach and education beyond our membership to the community at large. Please watch for continuing evolution of The VOTER as we learn and grow.
For more than 15 years, Regina Doyle conscientiously edited The VOTER in its paper format with loving care, persistence, and a commitment to quality that went far, far beyond any reasonable expectations of a volunteer. Thank you, Regina, from the bottom of our hearts, for your role in inspiring readers of The VOTER to think more deeply about our democracy and to act in support of our mission. It’s our privilege to see your legacy continue in the newly online pages of The VOTER.
-- Dennis Mar & Tama Olver, Co-Presidents,
League of Women Voters of Monterey County
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The League of Women Voters of Monterey County was founded in 1926 to support women who had in 1920 won the right to vote through passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
100 years later LWVMC continues to serve the community with an expanded mission to empower all voters and defend our precious democracy. We will celebrate the anniversary at our September Lunch & Learn event and throughout the year.
– Tama Olver
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The Voter Service Team Gets Ready
for November!
The Voter Service Committee took a brief break after the June primary but we’re in full swing now preparing for candidate forums, pros & cons forums on the ballot propositions, VOTE411 behind the scenes work, voter registration drives, and poll work organizing. In the lead up to the primary and even more since then, I’ve been bowled over by the number of members (and friends of members) who have stepped up and asked to help. And the ENTHUSIASM is contagious!
We meet every Monday evening over zoom and anyone is welcome to join us or volunteer for any of the ongoing activities: Voter Registration, VOTE411, Candidate Forums, Pros/Cons Forums, staffing the polls. So much going on....
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Candidate Forums - Can you Help?
Several members are currently working on candidate forums, for which Dennis Mar is the overall organizer. For each forum, we need several volunteers to help. This is a fun way to meet and work with others in the League. A great way to start out is to volunteer to be a timer: you get to hold up warning signs so the candidates know how much time they have left to answer and when time’s up, you hold up the STOP sign. We also need someone to collect the questions written on index cards from the audience and several people to make sure the questions are legible, appropriate, and not duplicative. Please contact either me (at arleneguest@gmail.com) or Dennis (at DennisRMar3@yahoo.com) if you can help out at any of these forums (all are in the evening).
- Tuesday, Sep 15 Pacific Grove Mayor & City Council
- Monday, Sep 21 Monterey Mayor & City Council
- Tuesday, Sep 29 Seaside Mayor and City Council
- Wednesday, Oct 7 Salinas Mayor and City Council
– Arlene Guest, Voter Service Committee Chair
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LWV Makes a Difference
Through Litigation
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A membership in LWV supports not only the work of our local chapter, but also advocacy and litigation engaged in by LWV California and LWV US. You can track progress and successes in that litigation through press releases at the lwv.org and lwvc.org websites.
An example of a recent success is League of Women Voters of Massachusetts vs. Trump which succeeded this month in securing an injunction against implementation of an illegal Executive Order seeking to seize control of election administration from Congress and the states. The EO would require the Post Office to create a list of “approved” mail voters and refuse to deliver ballots from voters not on that list. It also directs use of out-of-date and unreliable information from federal databases to verify citizenship, which would almost certainly lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters.
You can learn more about the litigation, including the full timeline of press releases, at https://tinyurl.com/3r8xejcz.
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Fourth of July Parade
A colorful and enthusiastic group of marchers represented LWVMC in Monterey’s Fourth of July Parade, which was especially well-attended as dozens of groups celebrated the 250th anniversary of our democracy and we celebrated the 100th anniversary of our chapter. We were surprised to find that the parade received national coverage on
C-Span. Look for us at about 14 minutes and 45 seconds into the recording. (https://tinyurl.com/53hpuh6y).
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Voter Registration and Youth Voter Education Ramping Up Again!
In early August a group of 18 volunteers met at Jane Meade-Roberts’ home to “paint Reminder Rocks,” learn of new tabling procedures and share in hands-on training with our latest Google Sheets scheduling tool. Joined by Co-President Dennis Mar, we all enjoyed a productive afternoon. Rock painting efforts created fun red-white-and blue small rocks by the dozens, a fun way of enticing children to our voter registration table to choose a rock. Volunteers can inquire of their parents as to whether or not they are registered and urge them to choose their own Reminder Rock and vote!
| | May Higuera, Sue Landesman, Mike Roberts, Natalie Silva and Lynn Hamilton painting Reminder Rocks to accompany voter registration tabling kits. | | | |
Opportunities ahead to join us include:
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August 24th - Voter Registration Form Training (1-hour for tabling)
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August 26th - Salinas General Meeting - Why Vote? (see above article)
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September 10th at 5:30 p.m. - Voter Registration Form Training (1-hour after-hours training for tabling)
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September 15th - National Voter Registration Day, coordinating mini voter registration tabling across the county. Some of us will be tabling from our portable ironing boards, in the manner of the Suffragettes! We want to register or re-register voters and broadly share LWV information to help voters understand the 14 statewide propositions on the November ballot.
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High School Voter Presentations - on-going
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Preparing to Vote in November
The next issue of The Voter will be published about a week before mail-in ballots for the November 3, 2026, election are mailed to California voters.
When I speak to people who are not members of the League about LWV, the most common thing I hear is “I always use the League of Women voters to help me decide how to vote.” We can be proud that Vote411 (https://www.vote411.org) and Vote with the League are trusted resources for voters to understand nonpartisan issues and campaigns when other sources, such as political advertising, can be confusing and misleading.
There are already recommendations from LWVC for California ballot initiatives at https://lwvc.org/ballot-initiatives/. The presentation by Carol Moon Goldberg at the September 9th Lunch and Learn, “Just Say NO to Prop 39,” will focus on a proposed voter ID constitutional amendment. Prop 39 is the work of special interests who are exploiting disinformation about the integrity of elections to raise unnecessary barriers to casting an in-person or mail-in ballot. The barriers would disproportionately affect elderly and disabled voters as well as people of color and women. Prop 39 is a blatant attempt to get around national legislative reluctance to pass the SAVE act in all its forms. The League of Women Voters is part of a coalition, No on Prop 39 https://noonprop39.com, that is fighting back. You can help by spreading the word, specifically by getting educated on the position and talking about it with family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, your barber or hairdresser, that friendly clerk at the market … in other words, anyone who might succumb to a well-funded campaign to suppress the vote in California.
– Tama Olver
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Oversight of the Sheriff’s Office -
A Win for Monterey County!
After working with a coalition spearheaded by the Monterey County ACLU for three years, the LWV of Monterey County is pleased to see one of our top priorities, civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Office, finally come to fruition. On July 7 the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Kate Daniels’ motion for appointing an Inspector General AND a Civilian Advisory Panel, as authorized by AB 1185. In the same motion, the Board of Supervisors ended the contract with the SCAAP Program which provided funding to the jail for incarcerating undocumented people as long as the Sheriff’s Office provided certain information to ICE.
Thank you to all the League members who showed up at multiple meetings in person or via Zoom, or who sent emails and letters to the BOS advocating for civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Office. You made a difference.
| | Natural Resources Committee Update | |
The Committee has been following Builder's Remedy projects. The application for the 90 units at the Airfield in the Village has lapsed. It is unknown if the applicant will reapply.
The 74 unit project on Val Verde Drive with two of the parcels in the flood plain was approved by the Planning Commission.
For more information, contact Janet Brennan, brennan_janet@comcast.net.
| | | Salinas High School Video Contest winner | Alice Uchida-Dohrmann with twin sister Erin and their mother Michelle. Both girls are headed to UCLA in the fall. | |
Last spring, we recognized our Greenfield High School student team for their outstanding video in the category of “Ready, Set, Vote”.
In the category of “Voting is Democracy in Action!,” Alice Uchida-Dohrmann of Salinas High School won the grand prize with her video entitled, “I Vote.” In late May, league member Candy McCarthy honored Alice with an acrylic memento and certificate from the League and a certificate from the Salinas City Council.
Congratulations Alice!
-- Sandy Hoag, Shelley Sweet,
Marianne Gawain,
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Defending Democracy
Committee Update
Members of the Defending Democracy Committee have continued to table at events and experiment with venues to evaluate how well they help us both interest people in learning more about LWVMC and advocate for calls to action from the state and national League. Over the summer we tabled at the Pacific Grove and Monterey farmers markets, a NO KINGS event on May 2 and a Good Trouble event in the spirit of John Lewis on July 18. Thanks to Kate Egerton, Sandy Hoag, and Branham Rendlen for helping with one or more of the events.
In addition, letters or emails on behalf of the board were sent to responsible officials to oppose additional federal funding for ICE, to oppose the federal Voter ID Act and SAVE Act suite of bills, to oppose US Postal Service rule changes affecting mail-in ballots, to support CA SB 1105, the California Rights Act, and to ask Governor Newsom to commute all death sentences in California. You can learn more about the LWVUS and LWVC positions that were supported by these actions at https://my.lwv.org/node/5833/all-action-alerts https://lwvc.org/contact-your-representative/#action-alerts.
-- Tama Olver
| | Picture: Bev Kreps, Branham Rendlen, and Tama Olver tabling at the May 2, 2026, NO KINGS event. | |
Welcome New Members!
Mark Newman
Aromas
Karen Shaffer
Seaside
Ken Fritto
Seaside
Joy Smith
Pacific Grove
Marvalee English
Spreckels
Gordon Houtman
Monterey
Mary Roberts
Pacific Grove
Desiree Millikan
Carmel
New members are always welcome!
Bring a friend to the next in-person general meeting or watch a Zoom presentation online together.
Change of Address? Send updates to DennisRMar3@yahoo.com.
Donate to our General or Scholarship Fund or give a friend a gift membership.
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MEMBER PROFILE: TINA RAU
I interviewed Tina Rau at Bookworks in Pacific Grove (PG), which is within walking distance of her home. I find her a person of action, and passionate in uplifting democracy. She feels an urgency seeing the erosion of reason and rules in the political situation.
Tina ran for a council seat in the city of Pacific Grove in 2022 and lost by 53 votes. This inspired her to run again in 2024 and she is now a proud member of the PG City Council.
| | The Celebration of Life for Kalah will be Saturday, August 29th, 11:00 - 1:00 pm in the parish hall at St. Paul 's Episcopal Church at 1071 Pajaro St., Salinas 93901. A light lunch will be available. | | | | |
