Francesca Bay

Gail Pellerin, Santa Cruz County Clerk. Oct. 2020. Photo by Shmuel Thaler.  An Interview with Santa Cruz County Clerk Gail Pellerin,  On the Eve of 2020 Election Results It's a very close election. Today is Wednesday, November 4, and I know you were up really late last night counting votes because I was here with you! Let’s get right to it. How difficult is it to secure the votes in an election?  It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I can speak to California, where we have a very secure system. We are a state that is an enfranchisement state. We want people to have access to voting. We don’t put up a lot of barriers. We have same-day voter registration, so they can still register and vote if people miss the deadline. We have provisional voting for people whose signature doesn't match their vote-by-mail ballot. We have a seventeen-day postmark period, so if a voter mailed their ballot on or before November 3 and it gets to us by November 20, we can still count it. ...

Walking in Rome from Janiculum Hill, a quiet residential neighborhood, to nearby Trastevere, with its restaurants and nightlife, can be challenging. You must walk through a forest path and  down two hundred stairs,  where you reach a dilapidated trolley that may or may not be on time to take you the final distance. That's an hour to Trastevere, which is only a mile away, as the corvo flies.  In August, when the heat soars into triple digits, it can feel like the Italian sun is searing your flesh; going anywhere by foot can be excruciating, especially with grandparents and kids in tow. Taxis can be hard to find on  Janiculum Hill , particularly on Sundays. The bus may or may not come.  Hence, most Italians are home taking siestas.   Throwback photo, Gia cooling off at a fountain in Rome, Italy. 2010 Or, you can Uber to Trastevere in six minutes.   Ubering around Rome is expensive, but we were not doing it forever, and we were on time and fr...