California must cancel secretive voter outreach contract with firm linked to Biden
What is California Secretary of State Alex Padilla hiding?
His decision to award a $35 million contract to a public affairs company connected to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign raises serious questions about Padilla’s judgment — and about whether his office is breaking the law.
One big problem: Padilla’s office is hiding the contract from public view.
Padilla’s office gave SKD Knickerbocker, a well-known Democratic firm, a taxpayer-funded contract to conduct a statewide advertising campaign to educate voters about the safety and security of mail-in voting. This seems like a noble idea. So, why the secrecy?
Even the California State Controller’s office, which is in charge of issuing payments to state vendors, hasn’t seen the contract. The state’s Department of Finance, which must approve a fund transfer for the contract, has yet to do so. Padilla’s office initially told The Sacramento Bee the contract had been “delayed.” Yet, despite the lack of official approval, ads produced by SKD Knickerbocker for Vote Safe California are already on the air.
“Although voters are seeing the ads, the contract has yet to be seen by key state departments or the public,” wrote The Sacramento Bee’s Lara Korte. “It also appears Padilla’s office failed to secure the necessary authority to spend the money.”
“Finance has not authorized a transfer of funds under this provision,” said H.D. Palmer, deputy director for external affairs at the state Department of Finance.
Further complicating the issue: Padilla’s office says it acted on behalf of California’s 58 counties when it signed the contract with SKD Knickerbocker. That’s apparently news to county supervisors.
“We have spoken to several county supervisors, and we have yet to find a single county that asked the Secretary of State to do this work on their behalf,” wrote Republican legislative leaders Shannon Grove and Marie Waldron in a letter to Republican supervisors.
Padilla’s strange and secretive behavior has provided Republicans with a political opening in the middle of the 2020 campaign. By awarding the $35 million contract to a Democratic firm that advertises itself as part of “Team Biden,” Padilla’s office appears to have further politicized the vote-by-mail process.
President Donald Trump and other Republicans have attacked the legitimacy of mail-in ballots as part of an apparent effort to cast doubt on the results of the upcoming 2020 election. California’s once-great Republican Party is so desperate for support that it has sunk into the fever swamps of conspiracy theory, with the California GOP endorsing three candidates who appear to embrace the debunked QAnon hoax.
Just as the California GOP appeared set to chase its own tail into paranoid conspiracy oblivion, however, Padilla handed them a real scandal. By using an expedited process to hand a $35 million voter education contract to a Biden-linked firm — and trying to keep the details secret — the secretary of state has done a great disservice to California voters.
Padilla’s hidden contract quagmire also threatens to pull in other California Democrats, like Gov. Gavin Newsom, who revealed that even he is in the dark on the contract’s details when asked about it during a press conference on Monday.
“I just don’t know the details,” Newsom responded when questioned by Bee reporter Sophia Bollag.
Nobody’s allowed to see the contract — not even state officials charged with approving it or the taxpayers who are funding it.
Maybe that’s all we need to know.
Padilla, who is clearly salivating over the possibility of taking Kamala Harris’ place in the U.S. Senate if she becomes vice president, has allowed this partisan-tinged scandal to tarnish our election system. To restore voter trust, California must scrap this secretive and illegitimate contract.
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California must cancel secretive voter outreach contract with firm linked to Biden."