I have spent a lot of time up San Luis Obispo California and have often considered moving there. It’s one of my favorite places in the world, wine country, beautiful beaches, nice people. I can’t tell you how much it hurts my heart to see that Trump cultists and their friends from out of state have turned what was once a sort of centrist/liberal Democratic enclave into one of those grotesque racist towns that ended up running a formerly popular election official out of town because of Trump’s inane Big Lie.
In a surprise move, San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Tommy Gong on Friday announced he’s resigning his position and leaving the area — exactly one month after enduring hours of election misinformation and racism at a Board of Supervisors meeting.
[…]
Gong first began seeing signs of election misinformation spreading locally in March, when he received a request from the Republican Party to perform an audit of the county’s voting system.
This would have involved “providing physical access to the county’s voting system components and imaging the hard drives,” a May 4 county staff report said.
Residents can request recounts up to five days after elections are certified, but Gong didn’t hear from the Republican Party until months later.
“There were already telltale signs of what was going to happen, you know, leading up to (May 4),” Gong said. “Certainly you know we had the request for the forensic audit. And I would say even in the discussions with them — a little bit threatening is not the right term — but it was, I guess, (they) attempted to try to sound a little bit intimidating, so I knew something was coming, I just didn’t know what.”
[…]
After he declined to allow the audit, Gong started hearing local Republican Party radio ads spouting conspiracy theories and mentioning him by name, telling voters to call into the May 4 Board of Supervisors meeting and express their concerns about the county’s election system.
Many of the issues the party brought up — including voter identification laws and limiting mail-in voting — were things controlled by California lawmakers, not county clerk-recorders.
“Here I am driving to work one morning this spring and this comes out,” Gong said. “Oh boy, you know, they’re really on a rampage for this. And, you know, again, nothing that I have any control over, but yet they’re trying to make a big stink about this. But that’s what made it disparaging in that way.”
During the meeting, Gong and his staff sat through hours of calls from voters reading scripted comments full of conspiracy theories and pushing for state-level changes he can’t implement. Some even called for hand-counting of ballots, which hasn’t occurred in the county for more than 60 years.
“I don’t have any control over that,” Gong said. “So yeah, this is disheartening to, to educate and guide their followers on something that I don’t have any control over, and yet I’m held accountable to it. So that’s the unfortunate thing as part of just the misinformation that’s getting circulated around.”
[…]
During the meeting, one caller made an explicitly racist comment asking if Gong is “a member of the Chinese Communist Party.”
“It was interesting because we were hearing all of the scripted comments and everything, and your mind kind of goes numb as you’re listening,” Gong said. “That one did stick out, I will say. I was like, ‘Did I hear that right?’ You know, (it) was a little surprising. And my staff was with me, and it was like, ‘Oh yeah, wow.’”
Gong grew up outside of Modesto, where his family ran a local chain of grocery stores. When he was going into kindergarten, Gong’s mother warned him that children may “call you names” or make racist comments.
Hearing the racism at the meeting made Gong think back to that time.
“When I ran for public office and was elected, the first Asian American to be elected to countywide office in SLO, it brought me great pride and a glimmer that we were progressing as a society,” Gong said in an email. “When that comment was made during the (Board of Supervisors) meeting, it brought me back 50 years ago with the pettiness, questioning if we actually made progress or not.”
It’s happening everywhere, not just in red states. I keep hoping that all this craziness is some sort of temporar reaction to the pandemic and Trump but I just don’t know.
Gong says that he he’s leaving to be nearer his family in the Bay Area and I assume that’s true. You can’t blame him wanting to have them near when this stuff is going on.