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Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Volume 161 No. 27 WWW.SJSUNEWS.COM/SPARTAN_DAILY
SERVING SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSITY SINCE 1934
VANESSA REAL | SPARTAN DAILY
A student addresses attendees during the continuation of a Democrat vs. Republican debate regarding various issues at San José State University's campus on Monday evening.
Students talk policies and politics By Vanessa Real STAFF WRITER
A political discussion at San José State between Democrats at SJSU and the College Republicans at SJSU was held on Monday in the Student Union to debate current issues. A moderator presented a prompt and any student could respond and share their ideas. Students decided whether they were neutral, for or against supporting the prompt. The Democratic and Republican students’ conversation included discussions of former
president Donald Trump’s recent indictment. Some attendees said Trump’s indictments were legitimate, while other students argued that the indictments were blown out of proportion. James Demertzis, political science junior and a member of Democrats at SJSU, said he was excited to discuss Donald Trump and his indictments. “When I look at the situation and what's happening with Trump, I see it as very objective coming from a legal standpoint,” Demertzis said. “So the fact that there's a lot of disagreement
when it comes to it heightens my emotion on the topic and I feel like I have to voice my opinion on it.” Annette Lees, kinesiology junior and the president for the College Republicans, said one of the topics she was eager to cover and discuss was also Donald Trump. “I am definitely a Republican and a conservative, but I still just don’t align with Trump,” Lees said. Lees said she felt that everyone needed to have more evidence to back up their claims because people couldn’t
cite the information they sourced for the various discussions. “In the future, if we had the exact topics at hand (before the debate), and people could research and bring sources with them, that would help a lot,” Lees said. “(Someone) didn’t know how many charges were against Trump. If we knew the details of that, then I feel like we could more effectively debate.” Chima Nwokolo, political science junior and vice president for Democrats at SJSU, said it was a productive discourse and also said it’s beneficial to be able to peacefully disagree.
“It’s nice to be able to talk to people who are (from) different political sides from your’s,” Nwokolo said. “We should be able to converse and share their viewpoints because we’re all Americans, and in this country, we all have free speech.”
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Newsom addresses rules on voting By Nikita Bankar STAFF WRITER
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 969 on Oct. 4 to limit the ability of local governments to manually count ballots, according to an Oct. 5 article from ABC 7 KRCR. The bill will prohibit any election officials from performing a manual vote 154 days in advance of an election if there are more than 1,000 registered voters eligible to participate, according to the California Legislative Information. The bill also prohibits a county’s board of supervisors from terminating an existing voting system contract without a transition plan and a replacement contract in place, according to Legiscan. Gail Pellerin, State Assembly Member in the 28th Assembly District, wrote the bill and said every state in California has gone through the process of purchasing a state-qualified federally certified voting system that adheres to voting system standards. “It’s a lot more secure, accurate, transparent, accessible and complies with the Help America Vote Act,” Pellerin said. “There’s a lot more things we vote on now compared to 50 years back, and to do a hand count of a county the size of Shasta is time-consuming, costly and inaccurate.” The Help America Vote Act, signed on October 29, 2002, by President Bush, helped in creating
a new federal agency to improve election administration and replace outdated voting systems. Pellerin also said AB 969 will keep the status quo and democracy safe, and will ensure that voters in California are using a system that has gone through testing. “We’re in the 20th century today where we have technology that we use in every aspect of our lives,” she said. “I think it’s critically important to be continuing to use it and the delivery of a voting system.” The bill comes less than a year after Shasta County's governing board left its contract with Dominion Voting Systems to tally up results by hand, according to the same ABC 7 KRCR article. Brazil and India stand at number five and seven for the largest countries in the world according to World Atlas. Brazil shifted to electronic ballot technology in 2022 and India switched in 2019 according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. In the 2018 presidential election, Brazil announced the winner two hours and 16 minutes after the polls were closed, according to the same site. Shasta County's Board of Supervisors, which is controlled by a conservative majority, voted in January to get rid of the voting machines it used to tabulate hand-marked ballots for its nearly 111,000 registered voters, according to a Sept. 8 article from ABC News.
County supervisors said there was a loss of public confidence in the machines from Dominion Voting Systems, a company at the center of discredited conspiracy theories since the 2020 presidential election, according to the same site. Sarab Multani, public health and business junior and Associated Students president, said there might be drawbacks from certain representatives throughout the bipartisan system because of the bill being passed. “I can imagine this being of conflict to Shasta County resentatives specifically since representatives this assembly bill was made in ponse to the decisions of their response ervisor,” Multani said. supervisor, he fight over voting machines The has divided Shasta County, a ely rural area whose most largely ulated city is Redding with populated 000 people, according to the 93,000 samee article by ABC News. Multani also said Shasta unty’s new plan lacked an County’s roved vendor to accommodate approved ers with disabilities and also voters ated uncertainty on whether created the county would conduct future tions in compliance with elections tion laws. election This may be a way to reassure “This ifornia voters that the California tion process is legitimate and election sistent,” he said. consistent, stevan Guzman, political Estevan nce sophomore science and ociated Associated Students ector of Legislative Director airs, said he Affairs, nks the reason thinks
for initially canceling the voter machine contract was because of rumors during Donald Trump’s presidency. Guzman said the bill will ensure that elections progress in a timely manner without wasting resources, and said counting thousands of votes can be laborintensive and time-consuming. “We’re entering the electronic era, so this bill will speed up the voting process by simply scanning your document and uploading your vote,” he said. Guzman also said rather than waiting overnight, the election process will now be sped up, and
GRAPHIC BY NIKITA BANKAR
will be called within a few hours rather than the day after. Since this bill will not take human labor, Guzman said the vote-tallying process will not be as time intensive and will instead ensure that elections will be as accurate as possible. “While machines do make mistakes, sometimes it is not at the level that humans make mistakes,” he said.
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