The Brief

I consider myself an unlikely surfer.

A few years ago, I — a middle-aged Black woman in search of mini-adventures — put on a wetsuit, rented a big foam surfboard and took some lessons.

What surprised me was how freeing it felt. Not because I was any good, but because I didn’t feel a need to be. It was enough just to be outside, in the ocean, trying something new.

Something a little unexpected.

I’ve had several surf sessions since that first one, but last week was different. I had a lesson with Nathan Fluellen, founder of A Great Day in the Stoke, a free event in Orange County billed as “the largest gathering of Black surfers in history.”

The fourth annual festival is set for Saturday in Huntington Beach.

“Every year it’s growing, and it’s exciting to see it grow at a rapid pace,” Fluellen said.

The all-day event has many objectives, according to its founder: showcasing Black surfers, providing lessons and promoting water safety.

Organizers say the event is about creating a space where representation is the norm, not the exception.

“My surf dreams were deferred,” said Fluellen, who is Black, in an interview after my surf lesson. “I didn’t see anybody that looked like me.”

He imagined more than a few children and teens have floated the idea of surfing to parents and friends, only to be told it’s not something Black people do.

“Because they never saw it,” he said. “So if you don’t see it, you can’t believe it.”

Origins of the festival

Fluellen, a travel influencer and TV host who lives in Los Angeles, was in his mid-30s when he took up the sport. He’s now 44.

As a child growing up in Chicago, Fluellen had seen surfing in movies — the original Point Break is a favorite — and they sparked an interest, he said. But that gave way to basketball — he was growing up in the Bulls’ home city in the era of Michael Jordan after all.

The spark reignited when he got the opportunity to meet Zulu surfers in Durban, South Africa.

“It was just pure joy,” he recalled. And he couldn’t wait to go back.

Now, the event he founded draws hundreds to the water.

Nathan Fluellen, founder of A Great Day in the Stoke, an annual festival in Huntington Beach that celebrates Black surf culture

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Dana Littlefield

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The idea for A Great Day in the Stoke was prompted, in part, by paddle outs Fluellen and other surfers held starting in 2020 to honor the lives of slain Black men and women, including George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.

“It was cool at first,” he said of the paddle outs, noting they were among the few opportunities he had during the COVID-19 lockdowns to see people in person. “But then, I just got exhausted of paddle outs because it was a reaction to tragedy. And then, I was just like, ‘Man, we need something to celebrate our existence.’”

The festival’s name was inspired by a famous photo titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” taken in 1958 by photographer Art Kane. The photo featured 57 jazz musicians posing in front of a brownstone. Four decades later, in 1998, photographer Gordon Parks captured a similar image — this time with nearly 200 rap artists and producers — titled “A Great Day in Hip Hop.”

Fluellen swapped in the word “stoke” because it’s rooted in surf culture.

Representation matters

Fluellen said A Great Day in the Stoke is part of a larger movement to amplify access, equity and inclusion in surfing and promote health and wellness.

He chose Huntington Beach because it’s known as Surf City USA, home to both the International Surfing Museum and the US Open of Surfing.

He said the city has welcomed the event, which attracted hundreds of attendees its first year.

Devon James, a 24-year-old surfer and content creator from Pasadena, was at the event four years ago. He’s been surfing since he was 9.

“The first one was rad just because it was so new and everyone was, like, to the nines, going 100 percent,” he said. “Just the community as a whole really showed out.”

Attendees at a previous A Great Day in the Stoke event in Huntington Beach.

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James said A Great Day in the Stoke is about providing a space for freedom of expression in the water.

“We have people coming in from all over the country,” he said. “It’s truly just a celebration of surf culture and just an opportunity for inclusivity. And I think that’s what I love about it.”

My surf session

To avoid the crowd gathering for a special event in Huntington, my lesson took place just down the coast in Newport Beach.

The weather was as close to perfect as I could hope for. The air was hot, and the water was cold, but not too cold.

Fluellen started with instructions on how to lie on the big, foam surfboard, paddle with my arms and pop up to my feet. He asked if my stance was “regular,” with my left foot forward and my right foot back, or “goofy,” the opposite.

“Regular,” I said, sounding a little too confident.

Fluellen carried on with the lesson: “Your head controls where you’re going. So if you look straight, you’ll go straight. If you look to the left, you’ll go to the left. Look to the right, you’ll go right. Look down, you’re going down.”

I laughed nervously.

No need to worry about paddling, he said, because he’d wait for a wave and push me into it. All I had to do was stand up.

Easier said than done, I thought.

What followed was me trying and failing again and again to catch small waves as they rolled to the shore. In the end, I had sea water in my mouth and sand in my ears, but I managed to stand — briefly — at least once.

And that felt like success.

“You’ve got good mechanics,” Fluellen told me later. “You’ve got to just keep practicing, keep coming out. … You know, practice makes perfect.”

Luckily for me, perfection’s not required.

LAist Associate Producer Brandon Killman contributed to this report.

On a tour of Orange County’s voting headquarters on Wednesday, Registrar Bob Page demonstrated the careful, multi-step process through which voters’ ballots are validated and counted.

As the federal government raises the specter of unsubstantiated voter fraud, Page’s message was clear: “ I want voters to know that we're doing everything we can to make sure they can vote safely and securely."

More than 380,000 Orange County ballots have been returned as of Oct. 27, Page said. That’s about 80,000 more ballots than was received around the same time in 2022, the last mid-term elections.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page addresses the media and other members of the public in attendance as part of a tour of the voting operations on Wednesday, less than one week before Election Day.

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Kavish Harjai

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The journey of a ballot in Orange County

Collecting, and counting, all those ballots takes time. Page explained that two-person teams are dispatched to collect dropped-off ballots every day during election season.

The ballot drop-off boxes in Orange County are made of steel, weigh more than 1,000 pounds and are bolted to the concrete, Page said.

The ballot retrieval duos are required to follow a strict process to ensure the chain of custody remains secure, including taking photos showing they’ve picked up the ballots, properly locked the retrieval door and that the internal fire suppression canister is intact.

The locations of the two-person teams are GPS-tracked by separate teams, which also review the photo evidence before giving the ballot retrieval duos the green light to go to their next stops.

An overhead camera shows the process that occurs after the signatures on a ballot have been verified and the ballot is then ready to be counted.

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Kavish Harjai

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Signature verification

Once a ballot reaches the Registrar of Voters’ office, the next step is ensuring the signature on the envelope matches the voter's signatures in their registration file.

“If we do challenge [a signature], we’re required under state law to send a first-class letter notice to that voter,” Page said, adding that state statute affords voters until the day before Thanksgiving this year to correct errant signatures.

Page said three election workers must agree that enough of a discrepancy exists before the decision to challenge a signature is made.

Around 1.9% of the nearly 718,000 vote-by-mail ballots returned in the June primary election in Orange County were rejected, largely due to signature mismatch or because they weren’t received in time, according to the California Secretary of State.

Verified ballots are then separated from their envelopes and sorted before they’re prepared to be scanned and, finally, counted. The equipment used to tally votes isn’t connected to the internet, and access to the room the equipment is housed in is limited, according to Page.

Threats from the federal government

On Wednesday evening, a federal judge denied an emergency request from the Department of Justice to segregate 20,000 ballots across California that the federal government said were sent to “likely” noncitizens.

More than 1,750 of those people identified were in Orange County, according to a letter Bill Essayli, top federal prosecutor for the Central District of California, delivered to the county registrar’s office Monday.

The Department of Justice said it will appeal the ruling from U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, who, in his decision, said the federal government’s attempted move could “wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway.”

California Attorney Gen. Rob Bonta called the ruling an “important victory,” but warned “the fight is not over.”

On Wednesday, before the ruling came down, Bonta released resources about election integrity in the state, including guidance for local election officials if law enforcement attempts to “access election sites where ballots are cast, processed, or counted.”

Page said he’s fielded more questions from the public this year about the potential for law enforcement to interfere in the election. He said he will have open lines of communication with partners with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and  Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center should the threat arise.

What’s on your ballot?

Our LAist Voter Game Plan is here to help guide you through the Nov. 3 election with guides to races across Los Angeles and Orange counties — and that long list of state propositions — to help you cast a ballot that’s in line with your own personal beliefs and values.

But the one thing we don’t do? We don’t tell you how to vote. That part is left up to you.

You can find it all at LAist.com/Vote.

The U.S. Justice Department has issued subpoenas to California officials in an escalation of its scrutiny of local election administration.

The Associated Press obtained copies of three subpoenas sent Oct. 21 to employees of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, ordering them to appear in court on Nov. 4, the day after the election. The documents request any records, documents and communications related to letters sent in July and October by federal officials to state election officials outlining allegations of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The subpoenas also seek information relating to the office’s “methods for screening for unlawful voting by aliens” and anything about efforts to prevent noncitizen votes from being counted.

The subpoenas were being issued by all four U.S. attorneys in California, according to a person familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar, said, “threats and intimidated have no place in elections.”

Subpoenas come amid ongoing court battle

The Trump administration has sued to force California to set aside up to 20,000 ballots it suspects went to noncitizens and not count them until citizenship can be verified. A district court judge on Tuesday rejected that request, then on Thursday appointed a special master to evaluate the administration’s claims.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter did not specify the exact scope of special master Daniel B. Garrie’s responsibilities, but said he would be tasked with “developing the factual record” for the court.

In a Tuesday court hearing, Carter said he wanted to vet the federal government’s list of over 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters since there has been extensive debate over its reliability and both sides have agreed that it includes an unspecified number of citizens.

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Carter also said at the hearing that a special master could investigate California’s claims that it cannot logistically separate the ballots in time for the county election certification deadline on Dec. 3. The federal government has contested that assertion.

It is not clear what would happen if a special master did find a substantial number of noncitizen voters on the federal government’s list or whether it would affect the certification of California’s election results. The 20,000 people on the DOJ’s list constitute only a small fraction of California’s 23 million voters.

Trump administration appeals to higher court

Meanwhile, the Trump administration asked a federal appeals court to quickly weigh in.

The Justice Department said in a late Wednesday filing that it’s essential the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issue a ruling as soon as possible due to “irreversible ballot processing occurring on an ongoing basis.”

Carter’s decision was the latest legal setback for President Donald Trump in his efforts to expand federal control over state-run elections in the midterms that will decide control of Congress for the rest of his term. The Justice Department has made similar demands in other states, including Washington. Noncitizen voting has been a central focus of Trump’s political messaging for years, although available data indicates it is exceedingly rare.

Trump blasted Carter’s ruling against the federal government on Thursday morning before heading to a campaign rally in South Carolina.

“California is very corrupt. The elections are extremely corrupt. The judge should not have done that but we’ll appeal that, of course,” he told reporters. Trump added without evidence that there are “hundreds of thousands” and then amended it to “millions, in my opinion” of “bad ballots” in California.

Carter, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, argued that the Justice Department’s demands were a clear violation of the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits changes to voter rolls or election procedure within 90 days of an election.

A number of US citizens were included in the Justice Department’s list of names

Both sides agree that an unspecified number of citizens were inadvertently included. Carter argued that separating the ballots at this point would risk disenfranchising citizens and “wreak havoc” on the election certification process.

Over 500,000 votes have already been processed in Los Angeles County alone, according to court filings. The system also protects voter privacy: Once a vote is processed, it cannot be traced back to the person who cast it.

Carter is to rule on the government’s renewed request for a preliminary injunction, which would bar the state from counting the ballots until the litigation is resolved. He said he will do so after a Nov. 13 evidentiary hearing with input from the special master.

He said that if the federal government suspected noncitizens were voting, it could continue to prosecute those cases criminally. Federal authorities have charged over two dozen foreign nationals in California as part of a statewide sweep targeting people officials allege have illegally registered or voted in U.S. elections.

Appeals panel judges have said they wouldn’t support setting aside ballots this close to midterms

The appeal will be the second time that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will consider the case.

The first time was just last week when the Justice Department argued before an appeals court panel that a fast ruling on its request was needed to stop any counting of the ballots.

Although the panel ruled it was premature for an appeals court to get involved before a lower-court ruling, two of the three judges wrote separate concurrences making it clear they wouldn’t support setting aside ballots at this late date. They questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s list of alleged noncitizen voters and argued that to set aside votes risks disenfranchising citizens.

One judge dissented, arguing that federal law bars noncitizens from voting and requires California to vet the potentially illegal ballots before counting them. The failure to do so, he wrote, would cause irreparable harm to the election.