Tommy Gong and SLO County elections office did not deserve abuse at supervisors meeting

The San Luis Obispo County Republican Party has descended so deeply into its hole of disinformation — and has so misplaced intellectual honesty in the process — it will need several tall ladders on top of a stack of books on top of a booster seat to climb out and find it again.

This is the only conclusion we can reach after the party deployed hundreds of loyal partisans to parrot a script of bogus talking points questioning the integrity of elections in SLO County.

Tuesday’s barrage at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting even included a racist slur, when one caller accused Clerk-Recorder Tommy Gong of being a member of the Chinese Communist Party.

Throughout the onslaught, the most troubling thing was how willingly people attacked Gong and his staff, painting them with a broad brush of unjustified scorn while trying to portray public servants as villains.

The collective impact was so shameful, it angered Supervisor Bruce Gibson to the point he opened the board’s discussion with a challenge for each member to declare their unwavering support for the Clerk-Recorder’s Office.

“I don’t care, right now, whether there are people out there who have concerns, because those concerns have been fed by lies and misinformation,” Gibson said. “But I would like each of us to make a clear statement. I personally have no concerns about the integrity of elections conducted in San Luis Obispo County. I would ask each of my colleagues to similarly state that.”

But board Chair Lynn Compton shut him down, essentially questioning his audacity at demanding his colleagues defend the good people who serve on the front lines of our democracy.

Election workers deserve respect for upholding the sanctity of our vote, and it would be nice to see Compton back them up with the kind of passion she displayed in rebuking Gibson.

For Gong’s part, we can only marvel at his poise and patience.

He didn’t flinch at the criticism and did his level best to clarify just what he is and isn’t allowed to do within state law, while providing straight facts in response to the unrelenting propaganda.

At one point, on the question of hand counting all votes, he gave a brief history of the ballot systems used in SLO County’s recent past, while providing an off-the-cuff estimate of the time and resources it would require to pull off such a time-consuming manual count.

Suffice it to say, such an undertaking would be both onerous and unwarranted.

“I’m not even sure when hand counting was taking place in San Luis Obispo County,” Gong said, but he estimated it would require 160 people in 40 teams over 20 days, which should have effectively ended this discussion.

Yet even that simple reality wasn’t enough to deter Supervisor Debbie Arnold from lobbying for further consideration of the matter.

Yes, in 2021, your elected officials are honestly discussing the merits of counting every single paper ballot by hand, spurred by requests from Luddites who don’t trust any type of voting machine — never mind that voting machines in some form have been around for decades. Or that those evil machines still have delivered several victories to local Republicans, including three of the five supervisors.

At least Arnold did endorse mail-in voting and John Peschong dismissed claims that the Dominion tabulation machines are untrustworthy.

Yet Peschong also spoke out against same-day registration and early voting and favored requiring voters to show ID — so much so that he asked the board to consider adding those items to the county’s legislative platform.

Even more troubling, Peschong, Arnold and Compton failed to correct many of the false narratives from their constituents.

Several of those constituents spoke of the need to restore a faith in our elections that wasn’t missing until manipulators with ulterior motives undermined that faith themselves. Unfounded claims repeated often enough become a kind of alternate reality and are then used to justify fixes for a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s a painful spiral of circular logic.

We got to hear falsehoods about Dominion Voting Systems, fear-mongering about dead people and non-citizens casting ballots, and rampant condemnation of a vote-by-mail effort that produced an 88% turnout in November in the middle of a pandemic.

The only creativity here was the order in which they chose to a) vilify the hated “machines,” b) demand return to a horse-and-buggy method of tallying votes from a time no one can remember c) call for mandatory photo IDs to vote.

Frankly, every discussion on this issue should begin and end with one goal: how to get as many people to participate in American democracy as possible.

Then figure out the best way to do that in a secure manner based on data and facts.

All of these other distractions are nothing more than a scatter-shot attempt to limit participation in contests Republicans fear they are increasingly unable to win.

That is where we are suffering a lack of integrity — not in our elections.

This story was originally published May 6, 2021 at 5:00 AM.