Lakeside Joint School District near Lexington Reservoir includes parts of Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties. (Brian Holden — Contributed)
Editor’s note: Details about how to report voter fraud have been added to this story.
SUMMIT >> A landowner in Lakeside Joint School District recently registered to vote in Santa Cruz County, and he is urging many others to do the same. He’s hoping to boost turnout against a school district’s parcel tax on the Nov. 5 ballot.
There’s just one problem — he may be committing voter fraud, a resident alleged.
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Lakeside Joint School District straddles Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It has one school near Lexington Reservoir that educates about 100 students.
Carlton Loeber owns an undeveloped slice of forest in the district. Since 2017, he’s paid an annual $647 parcel tax to support the school. Although Loeber opposed the tax, he could not vote against it because his home is outside the district, in Santa Clara County.
In a bid to eliminate the parcel tax, Loeber said in an interview that he is doing whatever he can “to weaken the school, to try to destroy the school, break it up, whatever.”
He has criticized what he sees as a bloated administration for the one-school district, which includes a superintendent paid $244,643 annually and a principal. Some single-school districts combine the superintendent and principal roles.
Loeber estimated there are 300 owners of undeveloped land in the district, and he compared them to the 300 Spartans that defended their land against invading Persians. “These are the 300 that I say are at war, basically, with the school district,” he said.
In 2022, Loeber gathered signatures for a ballot initiative that would have exempted owners of undeveloped land who are over 65. The existing senior exemption applies only to homeowners.
The Lakeside Joint School Board did not place the measure on the ballot. Loeber sued the school district in Santa Clara County Superior Court, but a judge ruled against him in 2022. In June 2024, the ruling was upheld on appeal.
Now Loeber is taking a different tack, trying to drum up opposition to a measure on the Nov. 5 ballot that would renew the $647 parcel tax for eight years. School leaders said that Measure HH would preserve $500,000 that the tax raises annually, money crucial to keep the one-school district afloat.
Without the money, the district would need to lay off staff, which could lead to a vicious cycle of declining school performance and parents leaving the district, said Lakeside Joint Superintendent Sean Joyce. “Eventually the school would close, without a doubt,” he said.
To that end, Loeber now has registered to vote in Santa Cruz County. Although he doesn’t have a house, trailer or even a tent on his property, he considers it his legal “domicile,” he said. In election mailings and social media posts, he has encouraged other landowners to do the same.
“If I get these people to be registered, there’s no way they can pass these taxes,” Loeber said. “These taxes passed with very small margins.”
Lakeside Joint School District resident Ralph Becker, who is working on the Yes on Measure HH campaign, said he found the mailers “deeply immoral and disturbing.”
“If [Loeber] got 20 or 30 people to register wrongly in a district that has only 1,200 registered voters, and where elections are often decided by a 10- or 20-vote margin,” Becker said, “You see why we’re getting worried.”
The Santa Cruz County Clerk’s office allows people to register to vote without a record of a house on the property, said County Clerk Tricia Webber. Many people in the mountains live in unpermitted structures or trailers, she said.
If a person registers to vote at an address, “they’re declaring, under penalty of perjury, that that is the location that they live,” Webber said. She rejected Loeber’s contention that owning vacant land in Lakeside Joint School District entitled Loeber to vote on its parcel tax.
State law “requires a person to register to vote using the address of that person’s domicile in the county in which they reside,” wrote a spokesperson for the California Secretary of State. A domicile is “the place where you live, where your habitation is fixed, and where you intend to remain and return to whenever you are absent from it,” the spokesperson wrote. Unhoused people can register to vote by using cross streets or landmarks.
When asked if the state was investigating Loeber, the state spokesperson said they “do not comment on investigations, including on whether or not they exist, in order to protect their integrity.”
Voter fraud is punishable by up to three years in prison, according to state law.
A resident who lives in Lakeside Joint School District sent Webber a copy of a voter fraud complaint submitted to the California District Attorney and Secretary of State, Webber said. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the office will kick Loeber off the Santa Cruz County voter roll or impose any penalties.
“If the people vow that that’s where it is that they are living, and the investigating people agree that that’s where they are living, then there’s nothing much more about it,” Webber said. “We heard it from people who were part of a fire district, that a person [registered in the district] really wasn’t living there. But every single time they went to investigate it, it was determined that he was living there.”
Becker, of the Yes on Measure HH campaign, said if the parcel tax narrowly fails, he would consider suing the county for failing to take direct action to stop the alleged fraud.
To avoid voter suppression, Becker said the county has decided, “‘We will instead allow anybody to vote who can crawl up to the box, and the others we will carry’.”
He added, “My fear is that the registrar of voters is being very generous in not investigating incorrect addresses.”
The county clerk’s office is not responsible for verifying voters’ addresses or directly investigating voter fraud, Webber said. Complaints about suspected voter fraud can be submitted to the Secretary of State.
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Jesse Kathan is a staff reporter for Santa Cruz Local through the California Local News Fellowship. They hold a master's degree in science communications from UC Santa Cruz.
