Category: Verbatim
Jerry Brown Has Won More Elections Than Meg Whitman Has Voted in
Jerry Brown has won more elections than Meg Whitman has actually voted in since she’s been in California.
– Political strategist Chris Lehane
Almost 9 million Californians cast ballots in the 2003 special election that swept movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger into the Governor’s Office.
Meg Whitman wasn’t among them.
The billionaire businesswoman now running for governor herself in 2010 didn’t vote in that special election, even after Business Week listed her among a group of top executives with “worse than spotty voting records” in a 2000 magazine story, public records show…
For much of the 1980s, she lived in San Francisco as a management consultant at an investment firm, Bain & Co.
The San Francisco County elections office no longer retains records prior to 1992, but said that had she been registered and voting, her registration information would have been transferred to the current system. They have no record of her registration.
Similarly, Los Angeles County has no record that she registered or voted between 1989 and 1992, when she worked for Walt Disney Corp. as a senior executive…
Whitman returned to the Bay Area in 1998, when she was hired to be eBay’s first chief executive officer and take the company public.
She told delegates at the convention that she had “been a registered ‘decline-to-state’ voter since 1998.” The Bee was unable to find any public record of that registration.
The first registration record The Bee found, in San Mateo County, was dated Sept. 12, 2002.
At that time, she told San Mateo elections officials that she had been registered in San Francisco County, a county official said, after reviewing electronic records.
Yet San Francisco County officials, whose database records active registrations as far back as 1992, said they had no record of voter registration for Whitman at either of her two San Francisco addresses during the period…
In an interview, Whitman said she was registered as a Republican before coming to California, but declined to say where the public record might be found.
“Go find it,” she said.
After she registered in San Mateo in 2002, Whitman then missed half the local, state and federal elections held until 2007.
She didn’t vote in the recall election that swept Schwarzenegger into office or the special election he called in 2005.
Voters that year defeated measures to roll back teacher tenure and curb state spending and boost the governor’s budget-cutting powers, among others.
Whitman has been a far more active voter in recent years, as she prepared to leave eBay, co-chaired Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and embarked on her own political career.
She re-registered as a Republican in 2007 and cast ballots four times in 2008, including presidential and statewide elections. She voted in the state’s special election in May this year.