A new state law allows residents to register to vote on Election Day. The San Diego registrar of voters proposed spending $900,000 to open four satellite offices, and to get the word out to voters trying to register that day to go to those offices.
County Registrar Michael Vu warned that if the county didn’t do this, it could end up with piles of provisional ballots that would take a long time to count and could endanger the registrar’s ability to certify elections in time.
He needed four of the five county supervisors to agree. Three did. But Supervisors Jim Desmond and Kristin Gaspar did not.
This week on the podcast, hosts Scott Lewis, Andrew Keatts and Sara Libby break down the real impact from the vote about voting — and dissect Gaspar’s reaction to her colleagues’ maneuvering after a second meeting in which the plan did pass, this time with a simple majority.
Backlogged Kits Yield Dozens of Hits
SDPD has long contended that testing all rape kits is not appropriate. Police leaders argued that the more efficient approach was to investigate a case first, then determine whether the kit would become a useful piece of evidence later.
But many victims rights groups disagreed. And in 2017, the City Council allocated $500,000 to the department to test the backlogged kits. The results of those tests suggest that the investigate-first approach might not have been the best after all.
Keatts discusses what the backlogged kits have revealed.
Between late 2017 and November 2018, the department screened 313 backlogged kits — 121 of which yielded a viable DNA profile that was uploaded to a federal database. Thirty-eight of those profiles matched to one already in the database, generating a possible lead.
See You Next Week!
Next week we’ll have a live show from Mission Brewery in East Village. Get your tickets now.
Carol Kim, political director for the Building Trades Council, and political consultant Ryan Clumpner will join the show. See you there!