Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift to mail ballots and made it possible to participate from home in City Council debates and traffic court hearings, it’s not yet clear which changes are here for good.
While voters have overwhelmingly switched to casting their ballots by mail, many local government agencies are eliminating online testimony at meetings, and state officials have declined to make video court hearings a permanent option.
But some smaller boosts to civic participation that were spurred by the pandemic — and by the temporary shutdowns of in-person operations that came with it — do appear to have stuck.
During elections, most candidate forums in local races now get videotaped and posted online, expanding the audience from a few dozen who attended in-person to hundreds or even thousands who can watch later from home.
And the city of San Diego, which began using language translation tools during the pandemic to help people testifying by Zoom, has made the feature permanent so anyone can watch city meetings in their own language with the touch of a button.
In-person candidate training sessions, where city clerks explain to people running for office how to file forms and report donations, have been replaced in some cities by video versions posted online in perpetuity.
And mandatory mail voting in the 2020 general election helped hasten the shift away from in-person voting— a shift that Cynthia Paes, the county registrar of voters, notes was already well underway.
A year later, county supervisors accelerated that process by moving to embrace a new state model that required every voter to be mailed a ballot and let them cast it at any vote center in the county.
But one key pandemic-spurred change that seems to be on shakier ground is the introduction of public comment made by phone and internet at meetings — a change that became necessary after shutdowns prevented attending in person.
The pains of public comment
Most cities around San Diego County eliminated online comment sometime after the return of in-person meetings, and the small number of cities and other government agencies that still allow it have continued to wrestle with it.
Allowing online testimony widens the range of voices heard by government agencies by making participation possible by people who can’t attend because of health, disability, parenting duties or other challenges.
But critics say online comments drag out meetings and slow down progress on important business. They also contend online comments are often less civil and more combative, and that in some cities, a small group of people abuse the privilege by speaking on nearly every agenda item, giving often irrelevant testimony.
The issue has prompted fierce debate in cities around the county — most recently in National City, whose leaders last month rejected a proposal to do away with online testimony after a long and spirited debate.
Mayor Ron Morrison was the strongest proponent for eliminating it, contending that the longer public hearings it creates make it harder for the City Council to get through its agendas and effectively handle city business. He said it makes sense to reward people dedicated enough to show up, and that such dedication a big part of the public process.
Morrison argued it’s much easier for larger agencies with full-time councils, like the city of San Diego, to accommodate online comment because their meetings begin in the morning, whereas most small cities meet in the evenings, allowing people who work during the day to attend in person.
“It’s not a fair comparison,” said Morrison. “We can’t go that long because our brains as humans don’t work past about 10:30 after you’ve been doing it for a few hours.”
But Councilmember Marcus Bush and his council colleagues pushed back. “I think we should allow more access, not less,” Bush said.
A member of the public who testified online also made the case for continuing to allow such participation. “It would be quite prohibitive for people with young children, like myself, to raise our voices of concern,” said Madison Rapp. “I want the voice of a young mother to be heard.”
San Diego officials had a similar debate last summer with the same result. Then-Council President Sean Elo-Rivera tried to eliminate online testimony and then retreated after a public backlash.
Elo-Rivera said he strongly supports hearing a wider range of voices at City Hall but stressed that priorities must be weighed against each other.
“Unfortunately, a small group has been abusing virtual public comment to hinder the City Council’s work, causing delays and fiscal impacts, and preventing council members from spending more time in their communities,” he said last summer.
‘Democracy is messy’
One of Elo-Rivera’s arguments for eliminating online testimony at San Diego public meetings? Most other cities across the state have already done so.
Among California’s largest cities, San Francisco, San Jose, Long Beach, Sacramento and Fresno have eliminated online testimony. But Los Angeles still has it.
Locally, the county’s five largest cities after San Diego — Chula Vista, Oceanside, Escondido, Carlsbad and El Cajon — have eliminated online testimony.
But Vista, Coronado and Del Mar still allow it, along with National City. So do the county government, the San Diego Association of Governments and the Metropolitan Transit System.
Common Cause, a government watchdog group that advocates for transparency and more opportunities for public participation, has been lobbying government agencies to retain online testimony.
“The public should be allowed universal remote public access,” said Sean McMorris, who leads transparency and ethics efforts for the nonprofit’s California chapter. “It’s been significantly beneficial to public participation.”
McMorris balked at complaints that online testimony leads to longer meetings and makes public meetings less civil.
“The bottom line is that democracy is messy, and sometimes it’s extremely time-consuming,” he said. “Sometimes you have to tolerate seemingly inappropriate or irrelevant comments.”
He also pointed out that state law gives city leaders the option of moving some public testimony to the end of a meeting, to prevent it from delaying more time-sensitive city business.
A survey of city clerks across California by Common Cause showed strong support for retaining online testimony, with most of the clerks saying they don’t believe the negatives outweigh the positives.
Diane Fuentes, city clerk for San Diego, agrees the positives outweigh the negatives. “I’m glad so many people now get a chance to participate,” she told The San Diego Union-Tribune.
While most cities began allowing online testimony during the pandemic and then eliminated it, El Cajon is in the unusual position of essentially having never allowed it.
City Clerk Angela Cortez said efforts to use testimony by Zoom and by phone went so poorly that she quickly abandoned those options in spring 2020.
“It was such a mess,” she recalled last week. “Calls kept being dropped, and Zoom was delayed, and there was skipping.”
With Zoom and phone calls off the table, Cortez was forced to read all the emailed testimony into the record during meetings. But that become impossible just a couple months into the pandemic when the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota prompted more than 3,000 emails to the El Cajon City Council.
So she and the city attorney decided she would sample the emails.
Whether to allow online testimony doesn’t get discussed any more in El Cajon, Cortez added. “We’ve slowly gone back to our norms,” she said.
’20 years in 20 weeks’
The changes in access to California’s court system, and in the mechanics of elections, have so far proved more durable.
Court officials say the initial pandemic shutdowns forced them to modernize. They scrambled in spring 2020 to increase the number of courtrooms equipped with cameras — it has risen from four back then to more than 160 now.
During the height of the pandemic, judges were in the courtroom, while attorneys and defendants appeared remotely. These days, many attorneys and defendants now appear in person — but others still appear remotely for various reasons, streamlining court business and saving money.
“COVID moved the courts 20 years in 20 weeks,” San Diego Superior Court Executive Officer Michael Roddy said last week.
Locally, online participation in court hearings is most often used in traffic court and civil and family courts. About 40 percent of people contesting a traffic citation participate in their hearing online, while about 80 percent of law enforcement officers testifying in such cases choose the online option, Roddy said.
But the future of remote access isn’t certain. Authorization for remote hearings had been slated to sunset a couple times in the last few years but was recently extended again to 2027.
Earlier this month, California Supreme Court Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero thanked state lawmakers for “listening to our pleas” to grant the extension. She said remote proceedings “have been universally praised by both court staff and court users” for saving them time and money, estimating they eliminate 1.5 million trips to courthouses each year.
Fuentes, the San Diego city clerk, said the pandemic also spurred other changes that might be less noticeable to much of the public than online testimony at meetings.
Using the translation tools on Zoom made Fuentes and her colleagues explore other opportunities to make translations more available in San Diego, where so many residents use English as a second language. They found a way to have public meetings immediately translated into multiple languages.
“Now you don’t have to contact our office — you can participate in real time in your own language,” Fuentes said. “It was a happy accident.”
Some of those changes may seem like no-brainers today. But Fuentes doesn’t believe they necessarily would have come eventually absent a pandemic.
“I’m not sure we would have gotten there on some of these changes without COVID,” she said.
Similarly, videotaping local debates and posting them online may seem like an obvious move — but the local chapter of the League of Women Voters didn’t start doing it until the pandemic made it necessary.
Jane Andrews, the chapter’s voter empowerment chair, said the shift has made a big difference.
One candidate forum the league hosted last fall in the race for the 79th Assembly District drew only about 40 people in person — but more than 700 watched online. And the chapter’s signature event each election cycle, a forum where every local and state ballot measure is evaluated, was viewed by several thousand people each in 2022 and 2024.
Before, the audience was limited to the few dozen people who attended in person.
“We are trying to adjust to the modern era,” Andrews said.
Staff writers Teri Figueroa, Gary Warth, Tammy Murga and Phil Diehl contributed reporting.
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