The most obscure California partisan elected office is Board of Equalization. The state is divided into four districts, each of which elects a member to the State Board of Equalization, which deals with taxes.
As of Monday morning, November 12, Mike Schaefer, a Democrat, has 49.8% of the votes against his Republican opponent, State Senator Joel Anderson. California still has millions of uncounted ballots, and there is a strong tendency for the late-counted ballots to be more Democratic than Republican. It is quite likely that when all the ballots are counted, Schaefer will have won the election.
Schaefer has been a champion of write-in voting. In 1986 he was the attorney who won a decision from the California Supreme Court, Canaan v Abdelnour, that both the U.S. Constitution and the California constitution protect the right of voters to cast a write-in vote. He had sued San Diego, which did not permit write-ins in city run-off elections, and he won the case 6-1.
But, that win for voting rights was wiped out by the California Supreme Court in 2002, in another case Schaefer handled, Edelstein v Nishioka. San Francisco, in its last Mayoral election before switching to ranked choice voting, barred write-ins in its December 1999 Mayoral runoff. A write-in candidate sued and won in the State Court of Appeals in 2001, but the next year the California Supreme Court reversed, and wiped out the Canaan precedent. That is why California has been able to ban write-ins for Congress and partisan state office in general elections.
Schaefer also won a landmark qualifications case, when he represented himself in Schaefer v Townsend. In that case, the 9th circuit ruled in June 2000 that Article One of the U.S. Constitution does not permit states to require congressional candidates to be registered voters. Schaefer at the time wanted to run in a special congressional election in California, but he was barred from the ballot because he was not a registered California voter. He couldn’t register in California because he was a resident of Las Vegas at the time. California asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Schaefer’s win, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s appeal.
Schaefer’s likely win in this month’s election has received little press attention so far. He is 80 years old, has run for other elected office dozens of times over the last few decades in Maryland, Nevada, and California, and had not come close to winning. He had been elected to the San Diego city council when he was in his 20’s, but had not won an election since then.
