The Wild Truth About SLO County’s Election Skeptic Supervisor Debbie Arnold
SLO County continues its rapid descent down the election rabbit hole.
Shortly after revealing her nearly decade-old story of verbal assault by two county supervisors — and currently and contemporaneously failing to corroborate her account — District 5 Supervisor Debbie Arnold decided to inject herself in the news cycle once more as an election denier.
At the July 19 SLO County Board of Supervisors meeting, Arnold cast a protest vote against approving this year’s primary results, ambiguously citing problematic “changes to our election process,” which “created so many vulnerabilities that the public is losing confidence.” She mentioned vote-by-mail ballots, drop boxes and ballot tabulations as examples of these “changes” that made the election “less secure.” Arnold doesn’t explain how these particular components of our local election suddenly and inexplicably made the results more suspect.
Though Supervisor Arnold was the lone vote against approving the election results, this is the first time we’ve seen baseless conspiracy theories about our local election influencing a county supervisor’s vote. That’s a red flag.
New Times’ Peter Johnson was the first to report on Arnold’s vote and how that parlayed into her own political party’s efforts to…