The Brief

Calling “shotgun” to ride in the front seat may no longer be an option for small-sized California middle and high schoolers.

Citing crash statistics that show small-framed children, regardless of age, are disproportionately hurt in crashes when not in the back seat or using a booster seat, traffic safety advocates are pushing for a controversial bill that would ban teens up to 16 years old from sitting in the front seat if they’re not tall enough.

The bill would require all children younger than 10 to use booster seats and bar all those under 13 from sitting in the front seat. The pending measure also would require children as old as 13 to use a booster seat unless they meet the same size criteria.

Current California law requires children to use booster seats until they turn 8 or reach a height of 4 foot 9 inches, though the California Highway Patrol recommends all children younger than 13 sit in the back.

Last week, the Assembly Transportation Committee voted to advance the new, more restrictive booster rules, Lori Wilson’s Assembly Bill 435, which has support from some child and automotive safety and health care groups. Violators would face tickets of $20 for a first offense and $50 for each subsequent offense.

Wilson, a Democrat representing Suisun City, told the committee she remembers “being a child calling shotgun” so she could ride in the front seat.

But she said alarming numbers of kids are getting hurt or dying in crashes because safety belts and airbags aren’t fitted for their small bodies.

“God forbid something happens, we want our children to be safe,” Wilson told the committee.

Under Wilson’s bill, beginning in 2027, a child would need to pass a “five-step test” to be able to ride in the front seat or move out of a booster seat, depending on the child’s age:

1. Does the child sit all the way back against the seat?

2. Do the child's knees bend comfortably at the edge of the seat?

3. Does the belt cross the shoulder between the neck and arm, resting on the collarbone?

4. Is the lap belt as low as possible, touching the thighs?

5. Can the child stay seated like this for the whole trip?

The CHP, AAA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the California Department of Public Health, the California Hospital Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups promote the use of the five-step test to determine if a child is ready to use a seat belt instead of a booster seat, according to the bill’s proponents.

Wilson said Louisiana and Minnesota have enacted similar laws.

Another opportunity for racial profiling?

All 12 Democrats on the transportation committee voted to advance the measure, though some, including Rhodesia Ransom of Stockton, had concerns.

Noting that she has “a 23-year-old, height-challenged child whose legs often don’t go over chairs,” Ransom, who is Black, said she was worried the bill would give police an excuse to pull over people of color like her.

Wilson, who’s also a member of the Legislative Black Caucus, acknowledged Ransom had a point.

“A police officer could profile them … and say, ‘I’m going to use the five-point test,’ ” she said. “Hopefully that is rare.”

The four Republicans on the committee did not vote on Wilson’s bill, which counts the same as voting “no.” As CalMatters has reported, the widespread practice of dodging tough votes allows legislators to avoid accountability.

Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey, a retired CHP officer representing Palmdale, told the committee he worries the bill would be hard to enforce.

“Determining the age of children is very difficult to do when you have no verifying identification at that age level,” he said. “So you’re going to have to trust the parents.”

He added that parents won’t want an officer reaching into their vehicle and touching their child’s thigh to make sure the seat belt is properly fitted.

A child sits in a pick-up truck at a Walgreen’s parking lot in the San Fernando Valley, on July 17, 2021.

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Assemblymember Heather Hadwick, a Republican representing the rural northeastern corner of California, was concerned that Wilson’s bill didn’t address cab-only pickup trucks that many of her constituents drive. Wilson told her not to worry.

“Since this law has been incorporated in other states, I’m positive that we can find a solution,”
Wilson said.

Other ‘nanny state’ bills have failed

San Joaquin Valley Republican David Tangipa, who recently was a tight end on Fresno State University’s football team, asked how a child-sized booster seat would have worked with his large-framed Polynesian family.

“When I was about 12 years old, I was 6 foot and 210 pounds,” he said. “I’m the smallest out of my siblings.”

Jennifer Rubin, an advocate for Safe Kids Greater Sacramento, told Tangipa that he and his siblings would have passed the five-step test earlier because they were tall.

Rubin’s group is a lead supporter of the bill. No group formally opposed it.

The bill now moves to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Democratic-authored bills rarely fail to advance out of their first committee. But from there, the most controversial bills that become “nanny state” fodder for conservative media can sometimes get watered down or killed.

For instance, last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped in to kill a bill that would have prohibited young children from playing tackle football. Proponents of the legislation said young children suffer too many head injuries playing the sport.

Newsom also killed proposed legislation last year by San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener that originally would have required “speed governors” to be installed in any new car in California. The devices would have blocked motorists from driving more than 10 mph over the speed limit. The bill was amended to have cars make a “brief, one-time visual and audio signal to alert the driver each time they exceed the speed limit,” according to the bill’s analysis.

Newsom vetoed that bill in September, saying the federal government is responsible for implementing such regulations, not California.

Asked last week about the teen booster seat bill, Newsom spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor declined to comment, saying the governor doesn’t typically comment on pending legislation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California is among several dozen states that have thus far resisted the Trump administration’s demands for access to sensitive information, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers, about tens of millions of voters. Earlier this month, a federal judge in L.A. dismissed the administration’s lawsuit against California, saying the federal government doesn’t have a right to the personal information of the state’s 23 million voters.

But that’s unlikely to be the end of the battle: the Trump administration has nearly identical lawsuits pending against 22 other states and the District of Columbia.

In the most recent episode of the LAist podcast Imperfect Paradise, we examined what’s behind the Trump administration's quest to collect voter data. What could be done with that information? And why are election officials in California and around the country resisting the federal government's demands?

Here are some highlights of that conversation, edited and expanded for clarity, between Imperfect Paradise host Nereida Moreno and LAist correspondent Jill Replogle.

Before we dive in, what’s the topline here? 

The U.S. Department of Justice says it needs states’ complete voter files to make sure states are preventing voter fraud. But critics worry the government has other motives, including trying to amass a national voter file that could be used to attack political opponents, and cancel the registrations of legitimate voters.

Jill, you've reported on local politics in Southern California for years. How and when did this battle between California and the federal government over sensitive voter data begin? 

I'm based in Orange County and I've covered quite a few elections there. Orange County's election system and the Registrar of Voters is really top-notch and super well-respected around the state.

But recently a couple of very big things happened in Orange County that election integrity skeptics would say confirmed their suspicions that our election systems are not as secure as officials make them out to be.

Let's talk about those. What happened?

Well, the most scandalous one was the voting dog. A woman in Costa Mesa named Laura Yourex registered her dog Maya to vote and then actually voted for the dog in the 2021 recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the 2022 presidential primary.

Just to be clear, did the dog walk into a polling place or, like, how did they vote?

No, but fair question. Yourex just registered the dog to vote and then she turned in the ballots that were sent out in the dog’s name.

Yourex essentially turned herself in last year. She was ultimately charged with five felonies and she could face six years in state prison. She said she did it to expose flaws in the election system.

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer talks about election security at the county registrar's office on Feb. 26, 2024.

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And what was the second thing that happened that fueled these concerns about voter fraud? 

We have to back up a little for this one. Michael Gates, the former city attorney of Huntington Beach, was contacted by a resident in October 2024 who said that their father-in-law, who was not a U.S. citizen, had received a ballot.

A few months later, Gates gets a job in the Trump administration's Department of Justice, and one of the first things he does is request records from the Orange County Registrar of people removed from the list of registered voters because they weren’t citizens.

Page, the Registrar, gives him 17 records of people removed since 2020 because they didn't meet the citizenship requirement. But he redacts sensitive information, including their driver’s license and Social Security numbers, per state law on elections and privacy.

And then the DOJ sues the Registrar to get access to that redacted, sensitive information. Soon after, the DOJ sues California for its entire, unredacted database of registered voters, about 23 million people. To date, the federal government has sued 24 states and the District of Columbia for their voter data. The Brennan Center for Justice is tracking the issue.

In California, federal Judge David O. Carter recently ruled that the federal government is not entitled to that data. A judge in Oregon made a similar, tentative ruling. But all the other cases are still pending.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page outside of the main office in Santa Ana.

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Why are states pushing so hard against this request for their voter data?

I think, in part, it speaks to the increasing partisan divide in everything, including how we run our elections. There are some states that have handed all of this data over willingly to the federal government. They're all red states.

Most, but definitely not all, of the states that have resisted handing over the data are blue states.

The states that are resisting have several main reasons. For one thing, the Constitution grants states the responsibility to determine how they run elections, not the federal government. Elections are very clearly a state power.

Another thing is that California law and similar laws in many other states prohibit those states from sharing private information about their voters.

Also, these states say federal election law, and the federal Privacy Act, prohibit the federal government from collecting this kind of data without providing a very specific reason. Under the Privacy Act, the government also has to give public notice before they collect data, they have to say how they're going to use it, and they have to provide an opportunity for public comment.

Elections experts and voting rights advocates have also weighed in on the debate. What have they told you about the federal government’s push to collect this data?

One of their major questions is, what does the federal government plan to do with the data? The Trump administration hasn't clearly answered that question. According to critics, a big suspicion is that they want to use it for immigration enforcement.

Bob Page, the Orange County Registrar of Voters, explains election operations to a group of reporters on Feb. 26, 2024.

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Officials have gone back and forth when asked if they plan to share this data with the Department of Homeland Security. But here's how that could work. There's a database run by the Department of Homeland Security called SAVE that's essentially a citizenship check. They could run all this voter data through that system to try to crosscheck whether there are non-citizens voting.

But there are questions about the accuracy of SAVE. In fact, one of our NPR colleagues recently reported on naturalized citizens who have been improperly flagged in this system as not being eligible to vote and have had their registrations canceled.

So there's a concern about voter suppression, and about people who actually are eligible to vote being removed from voter rolls improperly.

It’s important to note that state election officials and county election officials are constantly removing people from registration rolls who died or moved out of state. They're adding people who are registering to vote. They're changing people's addresses. It's a super dynamic system. And some experts, including Eileen O’Connor with the Brennan Center, expressed doubt that the federal government could do that better than individual states:

O’Connor and others also told me they worry that the federal government could use the data to promote false claims about election fraud, and to target political opponents.

A glimpse at part of the ballot counting process at the Orange County Registrar of Voters

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There’s also a big concern about amassing that much data, right?

Yes, from states and from privacy experts. If the federal government is, indeed, trying to compile a national voter file, that's something like 75% of Americans (of voting age). Just imagine what a gold mine that would be for a hacker.

And there have been some questions about how seriously the Trump administration takes data security. The Washington Post recently reported that a DOGE employee improperly shared Americans’ private social security data with an outside political group, with the aim of overturning election results in some states. The Justice Department admitted to this in a court filing in a whistleblower case.

Earlier this month, Judge Carter agreed with California in his ruling dismissing the government's demand for voter data. What did he say in his ruling? 

Judge Carter essentially scolded the Justice Department for trying to use legislation intended to prevent voter suppression during the civil rights era to try to “amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data.” He largely agreed with many of the concerns laid out by California and other states, and voting rights advocates. And he said further:

Carter also echoed some of the deeper concerns expressed by critics of this effort by the Trump administration, including that the government could use the data to spy on everyday Americans. The Privacy Act was actually put in place in response to Watergate and counterintelligence programs, where the government was spying on folks like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the Black Panthers, on anti-war protestors, on Black Americans, in general.

Carter said the Trump administration’s demand for California voters' data violates the Privacy Act.

What is likely to come next in this battle? How does this get resolved?

Judge Carter said from the beginning that he wanted to make a ruling quickly under the assumption that the case would be appealed and could eventually make it to the Supreme Court. If that happens, the Supreme Court could have the final decision on whether the federal government gets access to voter data from California and all the other states it has sued.

Can we go back to those 17 people in Orange County who were removed from the voter rolls. That incident kinda kicked off this whole battle for voter data, at least in California. How did those people get registered to vote in the first place if they weren’t citizens? 

Most people in California register to vote through the DMV. In fact, you are automatically registered to vote when you get a license or change your address unless you opt out, or indicate that you are not eligible to vote.

Basically, you have to check a box saying that you are a citizen. You attest, under penalty of perjury, to being a citizen. That’s required under federal election law. But you don’t have to prove it.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has vowed to root out voter fraud and "make our elections great again."

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These 17 people removed from the rolls, all but one self-reported that they were ineligible to vote. So it’s possible they made a mistake at the DMV. (The one who didn’t self-report, a Canadian citizen, was charged with four felonies for casting ballots in the primary and general election in 2016.)

Still, some people argue that checking a box attesting to citizenship is not a serious enough safeguard against people who are not eligible to vote actually registering to vote, and perhaps voting. And President Trump has put some of the most vocal critics in positions of power.

Well, how big of a problem are incidents like the 17 non-citizens registered in O.C. and the voting dog? 

On the one hand, 17 people out of about two million registered voters in the county is not a lot. On the other, some elections are won by very slim margins.

Still, many well-respected experts on elections, including Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor, say there’s no indication of widespread election fraud. Yes, we could put in more requirements to guard against fraud, but it would likely come at the expense of shutting out, and at the least, making it more difficult for eligible people to register and vote. Levitt has this analogy he likes to make to put it in perspective:

If we do decide we want more safeguards, Congress could pass a law. In fact, there’s a bill in Congress right now that would amend the National Voter Registration Act to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in a federal election.

But there's still a really big debate about how expansive, how easy versus how hard we want to make it for people to vote. There's a history in this country of making it very difficult for certain people to vote, especially Black Americans.

After the civil rights era, federal rules were put into place to try to encourage participation, to make it easier to vote. And so there's a big question of whether we want to go backwards.

California voters might get a chance to weigh in on this debate in the fall, when we're likely to have a voter ID measure on the ballot. That measure is asking people whether we want to require people to show a photo ID when they vote, or to include the last four digits of a government issued ID on their mail-in ballot.

It also would require the state to try to verify people's citizenship. So that'll be a real test of how Californians feel about this issue.

After the horror epic Sinners made Oscar history Thursday by garnering 16 nominations — including Best Director for Ryan Coogler and Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan — Angelique Jackson, senior entertainment writer at Variety, told LAist's AirTalk the director was "completely blown away."

Jackson said she spoke with Coogler and his co-producers after the news of the nominations broke.

“They were just completely blown away by the number of nominations, especially getting a few first-timers in there for some of their stars, like Michael B. Jordan,” she said.

Jackson added that Jordan, who has been working since he was a child and has delivered a “blockbuster movie star performance,” had been left out of the Oscars race until now.

Sinners, a mashup of vampires and blues music set in 1930s Mississippi, surpassed Titanic and La La Land for nominations, followed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which received 13 nominations.

Sinners was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score.

Other standout nominations

Thirty-year-old Timothée Chalamet, nominated for best actor for his role in Marty Supreme, also made history as the youngest man with three nominations to his name.

KPop Demon Hunters was nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, “Golden,” which spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The film is up against Disney’s box office hit, Zootopia 2 for the Best Animated Feature category.

“The phenomenon that KPop Demon Hunters has been, this just makes us all the more excited for what we’re going to see on that Oscars stage come March,” Jackson said.

Elle Fanning, who has been acting since she was a child, also received her first Oscar nomination at age 27 for her role in Joachim Trier's film, Sentimental Value.