The Voter Services team is out celebrating Democracy, as we work together to educate and register voters for the November 2022 General Election. 

• Over the last two weeks LWVDV members joined Dawn Kruger and Karen Tedford from the County Elections Office to register voters at Antioch High and Los Medanos College.  It was a fun time -- talking with many students, registering a few, sharing information about Voter’s Edge as a tool to find good reputable information, and offering flyers about signing up to be a poll worker. Working the polls is a wonderful opportunity for young people to engage in the election process and get a sense of the democracy at work.  Be sure to share with anyone in your family who is sixteen and older that they can earn $125 for a day spent helping voters exercise their rights. They may also get extra school credit or community service credits.
• Emily Hopkins has spent numerous days at Trinity Center talking to people and registering.  Trinity Center also celebrated democracy with a Friday ice cream social.
• The director of student activities at Carondelet High School invited the League to do voter registration last week.  Again, we had an amazing fun time talking to students.   
• The San Ramon United Methodist Church in Danville and the Antioch Soroptimist Club invited the League to provide their members with current voter information.  Both of these groups were lively and interested in the election updates about voting, casting ballots, and the additional security measures our county election office has worked to put in place. 
• This past week LWVDV offered a voter education PowerPoint presentation to Atria Senior Living Center in Walnut Creek. While this turned out to be a small group, they were very engaged and so appreciative of the League’s work.
• Dr. Zahra Ahmed, a government professor at St. Mary’s College, invited LWVDV to give a presentation, "Why Vote?" to her class.  The most amazing part of that visit was that 100% of the students were registered to vote and a few had been out doing voter registration on campus.
• Upcoming events:
• “Leaguers” are returning to Carondelet on October 7th for a couple of hours between 10:30 am and 2:30 pm. If you are free, come join in the fun!
• Another tabling opportunity for anyone to come and enjoy the sun with fellow League members is on October 22nd, when we will share a voter registration table with Walnut Creek MoveOn at the Walnut Creek Eco Festival.  The time is still TBD.

These are exciting times for candidate forums and televised roundtables. We partnered again with LWV West Contra Costa County, the Elections Department, and CCTV for taping "Election Preview" roundtables over three days. Special thanks go to Marian Shostrom, Shawn Gilbert, Nancy Thursby, Kathleen Ottaviano, and Suzan Requa for their dedicated staffing to make these roundtables possible.

Diablo Valley was responsible for two  of the three days of roundtables, planning 12 contests and inviting 42 candidates. As it turned out, two contests would have been "empty seats" events, because only one candidate could attend; so those two were cancelled.   KTVU’s Claudine Wong, KCBS’s Bob Butler, and Contra Costa Information’s Alan Wong served as our moderators.  It was quite an adventure!

Upcoming forums will be live, with some of them also recorded. See the growing list here.  We have a few more requests, which we may co-sponsor if we can find volunteers and if they meet our nonpartisan criteria.

If you’d like to help with any of these forums, we are still looking for volunteers! Email voter.services [at] lwvdv.org (subject: Helping%20with%20candidate%20forums) .

by Janet Thomas 

LWVDV PROS AND CONS Presentations Have Begun!

The LWVDV prides itself in offering well-researched information about ballot measures to its members and the broader community.  As such, we provide a program to educate voters about California’s ballot propositions during the General Elections, called “PROS AND CONS”.  The pro and con explanations of the ballot propositions are usually given as part of a voter education program to groups. In presenting Pros and Cons we strive to be nonpartisan and offer both supporting and opposing arguments.  The arguments come from many sources and are not limited to those presented in the Official Voter Information Guide.

The Pros and Cons team has been busy studying the seven ballot measures, writing scripts for presenters, and creating PowerPoint slides to accompany the scripts. There are a number of presentations scheduled during the month of October. Some will be live in-person presentations, some Zoom presentations and some video presentations. The videos have been produced by St Mary’s College film students, with St. Mary’s actors reading our LWVDV scripts with our PowerPoints in the background. Our scripts, PowerPoints and the videos have also been offered to other local Leagues throughout the state for use during this election season.  

The information given in our presentations includes description of the propositions, background information, the pro and con arguments, names of organizations and individuals supporting and opposing the propositions and funding sources.  At the end of each presentation audiences are encouraged to continue to do their own research, as information changes, by using VotersEdge, Ballotpedia, and CoCoVotes, among other resources.

Many thanks to our 2022 LWVDV presenters Kay James, Janet Hoy, Sue Brandy, Carole Woods, Martha Goralka, Shawn Gilbert, Gail Chesler, Susan Hildreth, and Karen Dolder.  And special thanks to Paul Derksen, for his behind the scenes help, to Diane Bianchi and the Contra Costa Library for facilitating the Community Conversation, and to St. Mary’s professor Jason Jakaitis and the St. Mary’s film students for their wonderful production of the videos.  A schedule of most of our presentations can be found here and a link to the videos will be posted soon.

And Shawn sums it up:

Between Candidate Forums, Pros & Cons presentations, voter registration tabling, voter information PowerPoint presentations, and Mis/Disinformation presentations, it’s going to be busy right up to November 8th !