Dan Morain is a former L.A. Times reporter and Sacramento Bee editorial page editor and author. His forthcoming book is about the mental healthcare system. This story originally appeared on Dan's Substack page.
Alex Padilla was 33 with an American tale to tell, and I was part of The Los Angeles Times’ Sacramento Bureau covering the Capitol when we met 20 years ago. First, he had a personal story to impart.
I write about this now after Padilla attacked President Trump’s latest rant delivered in prime time last Thursday about his wholly unproven claims that large numbers of undocumented immigrants vote.
Padilla is the son of immigrants, a father who was a cook at Du-par’s in Los Angeles and a mother who cleaned houses. He entered kindergarten speaking Spanish, got into MIT where he studied engineering, and like many Latinos of his generation, became politicized during the fight against Proposition 187 of 1994, a cruel idea.
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By promising to deny all public funds to undocumented immigrants, it would have barred children whose parents brought them here without authorization from public schools, essentially turning teachers into immigration officers. The sick could have been denied government-funded health care, including elderly people in nursing homes. After voters approved it in the Republican wave of 1994, courts rightly struck it down, though the battle continues 30 years on.
Padilla, meanwhile, rose in politics, working as a Los Angeles field representative for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, winning a Los Angeles city council seat in 1999 and becoming its president, and winning the state senate seat in 2006 representing his hometown of Pacoima.
Then the young man on the rise had the fright of his life. On Dec. 5, 2006, a day after being sworn in, Padilla had a headache and thought he had the flu. It was far more serious. Diagnosed with a malformation in the outer lining of his brain, known as dural arteriovenous fistula, he underwent surgery.
Paul Thornton
Although we didn’t know one another, Padilla trusted me enough to sit down with me over coffee in Sacramento a few weeks later and tell me about it. I wrote a story, which ran on Dec. 14, 2006. He was at work when the Legislature convened that January.
In the Legislature, Padilla gained a reputation as a moderate Democrat. The engineer-politician carried business-friendly legislation on telecommunications, energy and the power grid, though he regularly returned to topics closer to his heart, health care and children who are English language learners.
In 2009, when I decided to leave The Times, Padilla surprised me by sponsoring a proclamation acknowledging my 27 years at his hometown paper. I found it awkward to be honored on the Senate floor by politicians I covered, but appreciated his thoughtful gesture then, more so now that I’ve left the daily news business.
I was The Sacramento Bee’s editorial page editor in the election year of 2014 when he decided to run statewide, seeking to become Secretary of State, the office that oversees that most American of functions – voting.
Karin Klein
For the first time, California was holding an open primary in which the top two vote getters faced one another in the general election, regardless of their party affiliation. Dan Schnur, a one-time Republican who dropped his party affiliation after serving as chairman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, ran as a no-party preference candidate for an office that ought to be nonpartisan. Schnur might have gotten my vote in the general election, but ran fourth in the primary behind Democratic Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco.
Yee’s footnote in California history is that while running for an office that monitors honesty in politics, he faced a federal racketeering indictment alleging that in the Legislature, he traded votes for campaign donations. He pled guilty a year after the primary, and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Padilla was the top primary vote getter, narrowly, 30.2 percent to 29.7 percent for his Republican opponent, Pete Peterson, a smart and accomplished academic. In The Bee’s editorial endorsement interviews, I asked candidates a basic question: How many additional voters would they expect to register during their terms. Padilla responded by saying he’d register another million voters. We on the editorial board approved and in April 2014 wrote:
“It’s expected that Padilla will run for U.S. Senate at some point. But that’s a plus: He will have to do more than a mediocre job as secretary of state if he wants voters to endorse him for a more powerful position.”
In 2014, California had 17.8 million registered voters, 73 percent of the eligible adults. By the end of Padilla’s first term four years later, an additional 1.5 million citizens were registered to vote. By 2021, when Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Padilla to the U.S. senate seat vacated when Kamala Harris became vice president, California had 22 million registered voters, almost 88 percent of all eligible adults.
As secretary of state, Padilla had embraced automatically registering citizens when they apply for drivers licenses, and promoted pre-registration. When 16 and 17-year-olds apply for learners permits, they get pre-registered, so they are signed up to vote when they turn 18. He also presided over another far less noticed change, one I especially appreciated, though he would have had no way of knowing why.
For almost 20 years, I was my brother Frank’s conservator, first with our father and later on my own. By law, Frank and I would appear once a year in front of a superior court commissioner to renew that conservatorship.
Conservatorship forms enumerated rights Frank, like all people who are conserved, forfeited: the right to own a gun and have a drivers license were two. A third was the right to vote. The form read: "The conservatee is not capable of completing an affidavit of voter registration," and: "The conservatee is disqualified from voting." In other words, “conservatees” routinely lost their most basic right to speak through the ballot box. It was an unnecessary indignity.
Frank viewed himself as a Republican, knew the names of presidents, and held a healthy disdain for politicians. Despite his brain injury, Frank knew enough to vote. Each year, at my request and at Frank’s, the commissioner would make a note specifically allowing Frank to vote.
In 2015, 15 years after Frank died, a source in Padilla’s office called to alert me to legislation backed by Padilla that would grant citizens who are conserved the right to vote. The bill by Assemblyman Marty Block, a San Diego Democrat, passed over the objections of several Republican legislators. Foreshadowing the future president, they claimed without evidence that Democrats would manipulate the votes of such people. I wrote in a column supporting the bill, pointing out that if all citizens who are conserved voted, their collective voices might nudge politicians to pay attention to their needs.
Knowing Padilla, I was pained when I saw the video of federal agents tackling and cuffing him as he tried to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem amid the immigration raids in Los Angeles in 2025. I think today what must have gone through his mind when he saw images of Liam Conejo Ramos, the bundled-up 5-year-old boy with the Spiderman backpack and blue knit cap with floppy bunny ears being detained in Minneapolis by immigration agents earlier this year.
And I listened to Padilla’s comments on Trump’s bogus claim that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants are registered to vote in California and other states:
“Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the integrity of our elections are false. We cannot and will not let him erode trust in American democracy.”
Trump cannot square his claim of voter fraud with the reality that Republicans control both houses of Congress, for now, and that he won the presidency in 2016 and 2024 when Democrats held the White House, but lost in 2020 when he was President. Of course, his claims are fantasy. And so the son of immigrants, a politician who helped millions of citizens register to vote, defends our most fundamental right.
Dan Morain is a former L.A. Times reporter and Sacramento Bee editorial page editor and author. His forthcoming book is about the mental healthcare system. This story originally appeared on Dan's Substack page.
