• Santa Barbara County Registrar of Voters announced that official vote-by-mail ballots will be mailed to all county registered voters by Oct. 10. Registered voters are asked to check their mailboxes for their ballot and related voter information guides, which should be received within the next five to 10 days, according to a Santa Barbara County statement. The vote by mail packet will contain the voter’s official ballot and voting and ballot return instructions. Ballot return envelopes will come with a unique barcode that allows the Elections Office staff to verify the signature of the voter on the envelope with the voter’s registration record. This may be the signature on the voter registration card submitted by the voter or the signature on the voter’s driver’s license if they registered to vote at the DMV. It is important that the voter verifies that their name is printed on the envelope, signs the envelope, and encloses the ballot in the return envelope. If a voter receives a ballot for a person who is no longer living at the address, mark the box on the bottom left corner of the outgoing envelope and return the packet, or write “no longer at this address,” on the outside envelope and return it to a mail carrier. Ballots may be returned by mail postmarked by Election Day (Nov. 8), or returned in-person to one of the three county election offices, to an official drop box, or to any polling place on Election Day. A list of polling places and official drop box locations can be found at sbcvote.com by clicking on the Nov. 8, 2022, “general election” link under “current activities.”
• U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) introduced the Fight for the American Dream Act legislation that creates a pathway for participants of the Deferred Action for Childhood Act (DACA) program to join and serve the United States military, according to an Oct. 4 statement from Carbajal’s office. Currently, DACA recipients are barred from joining the U.S. military. Secondly, the act creates a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients who are honorably discharged. “When my parents brought me to this country as a young child, I was granted the opportunity to get a good education, serve my country in the military, and call the nation I volunteered to protect my permanent home. America’s DACA recipients, young Americans who know no other country to call home and work every day to support that home, deserve that same opportunity,” Carbajal said in a statement. “I’m proud to join my colleague and fellow veteran Congressman Gallego to introduce this common-sense and straightforward bill to give our DACA recipients a clear pathway to serving their nation and the security to call that nation home in the course of their service.”
• U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) joined a bicameral group of nearly 100 legislators calling on U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to extend the limited Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) wavier deadline until July 1, 2023, in order to ensure all public servants with federal student loans are able to benefit from the historic waiver until the Department of Education’s new loan forgiveness regulations take effect, according to a statement from the senator’s office. Since the waiver was announced last October, more than 189,000 public servants have had their student loans forgiven through the program, and roughly 1 million recipients have received an average of one additional year of waiver credit. According to the Student Borrower Protection Center’s estimates, only 15 percent of the 9 million public service workers with student debt have filed paperwork to track their qualifying payments under PSLF. “To date, the waiver has been overwhelmingly successful in reducing barriers for borrowers to receive PSLF relief, as the waiver accounts for almost all (91 percent) of the borrowers who have received forgiveness through the PSLF program through July 31, 2022,” wrote the lawmakers. “The limited waiver [has] also [been] a lifeline for Federal Family Education Loan borrowers who—for the first time—have seen their payments acknowledged in the PSLF program.”
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2022.
