Orange County Superior Court docket Decide Nico Dourbetas delivered a decisive win for election integrity, rejecting California’s lawsuit towards Huntington Seaside and upholding the town’s voter ID regulation.
The voter ID initiative, generally known as Poll Measure 1, was handed by Huntington Seaside voters in March with a strong 53.4% majority.
The measure authorizes metropolis officers to require voter identification, broaden in-person voting areas, and improve monitoring of poll drop packing containers—commonsense measures designed to revive belief within the electoral course of.
Governor Gavin Newsom, in a thinly veiled act of retaliation, signed a state regulation geared toward preempting native voter ID measures. Lawyer Common Bonta and Secretary Weber shortly adopted go well with, submitting a lawsuit that now stands defeated in court docket.
This ruling empowers the majority-Republican metropolis to implement voter identification necessities in native elections, hanging a blow towards the relentless overreach of California’s Democrat-led state authorities.
“It’s an enormous black eye to the state of California,” Metropolis Lawyer Michael Gates mentioned of the ruling, in keeping with AP.
“And what the state of California must know, in the event that they haven’t discovered already, is Huntington Seaside isn’t going to be intimidated or deterred.”
Orange County Register reported:
Huntington Seaside officers proclaimed victory Friday when an Orange County decide dominated that the town’s new voter ID regulation was authorized, a setback for the California lawyer basic’s workplace, which warned that voter ID might quickly throw the town’s 2026 elections “into chaos.”
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The ruling issued Friday isn’t prone to finish the dispute. The state nonetheless can amend its lawsuit, and through oral arguments on Thursday the attorneys and Decide Nico Dourbetas acknowledged that regardless of how the case performs out in trial court docket it was absolutely headed for appeals.
Nonetheless, Dourbetas dominated in favor of the town’s authorized objections to the state’s lawsuit.
“The Metropolis’s Constitution is permissive … and thus presently presents no battle with state elections regulation,” Dourbetas wrote in his ruling.
Huntington Seaside Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark celebrated the ruling as a profitable protection towards “assaults by Governor (Gavin) Newsom and the State.” However she, too, acknowledged the authorized combat is much from over.
“We won’t again down and can proceed to combat for the Metropolis,” Van Der Mark mentioned in a ready assertion.
