The late-September postcard from the Monterey County elections office — with all-caps text saying “ACTION REQUIRED — rattled the denizens of quaint Carmel-by-the-Sea.
The notice said all residents needed to update their voter registration. It was sent days before ballots were mailed for the Nov. 3 election.
Carmel-by-the-Sea just got numbered street addresses for the first time in its 110-year history. After decades of debate — and months of nitpicking a draft map released earlier this year — every house, business and government building was assigned its final number in September.
Indeed, each resident will eventually have to update their street address on their voter registration. But not before the upcoming midterm election, which has already been fraught by nationwide confusion and concern over President Trump’s attempt to restrict mail voting that was blocked last month by the Supreme Court.
“We’re at our wit’s end,” Carmel-by-the-Sea Mayor Dale Byrne said of the city’s attempts to clear up confusion wrought by the county mailer, which led some people to think their registration had automatically been canceled. “The city continues to send out notifications to all our residents that you don’t need to re-register right away, that you can still vote.”
After collecting his mail, Hans Lehmann, 91, walks past a bank of post office boxes at the post office in downtown Carmel-By-The-Sea on January 12, 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Monterey County Registrar Gina Martinez said in an email Thursday that the county began mailing ballots Oct. 1, including to Carmel-by-the-Sea, where there is no at-home delivery and locals pick up their mail — and ballots — from the downtown post office.
Voter registration records are based on a person’s physical residential address, which determines the districts where they can vote. The records can include separate mailing addresses, including post office boxes, where they receive ballots.
The county asked Carmel-by-the-Sea residents to update just their physical addresses.
“They can return their ballot without updating their information,” Martinez said. “If the voter prefers to vote in person and they haven’t yet updated their address, we will assist them with completing an address update form at the polling place.”
Since its founding in 1916, the 1-square-mile town has used directional descriptors — City Hall is on the east side of Monte Verde Street between Ocean and 7th avenues — instead of building numbers. And residents have given their homes whimsical nicknames such as Sea Urchin, Surf Song and A Whistle Away.
The address issue has long been contentious in the woodsy town of 3,200 people on the Monterey Peninsula, where residents once threatened to secede from California if they were forced to number their homes. They argued that the lack of addresses — along with other quirks, such as no streetlights or sidewalks in residential areas, which requires many to walk at night with flashlights — added to the vaunted “village character.”
But complaints about missed packages and mail-order medications, as well as trouble setting up banking accounts and utilities, persisted. And in the aging community — where the median age of 69 is nearly double that of the state — fears have grown that emergency responders may be unable to find people in the midst of a crisis.
The California Fire Code also requires buildings to have and display addresses, meaning the community has long been out of legal compliance.
New addresses, at long last
Last month, residents received city-issued postcards with final assigned building numbers.
While some opposed to street addresses fearing they would lead to at-home delivery and trigger the closure of the post office — where, locals say, serendipitous run-ins with neighbors are an essential part of the small-town charm — that won’t be the case. Residents will retain their post office box numbers and continue picking up parcels downtown.
Locals must now display address numbers visible from the street, at least 4 inches tall and 0.5 inches wide, and in a color that contrasts with their background. Residents who live in the wildland-urban interface, which is more prone to fire, have to post reflective numbers that can be seen in the dark.
“This is probably the most divisive thing in the city’s history,” Byrne said, adding that the rollout has included extensive community outreach and has, for the most part, gone smoothly.
While there are still some holdouts who worry the numbers are chipping away at traditions, the mayor said that “when you’re supporting a tourist economy, which we are, it’s almost punishment to people coming here to do that to them, when they can’t find anything, especially when there’s no parking.”
“‘Old’ is not a strategy,” Byrne said, “and public safety should take precedence over thinking it’s cute to not have addresses.”
In July, Byrne was visiting a friend’s house when the man turned pale and passed out at the table. When Byrne called 911, he spoke to multiple dispatchers, struggling to confirm the home’s location without an address (His friend was fine, just severely dehydrated).
Traditionally, residents locate homes and buildings by giving directional descriptors, such as being on the “west side of San Antonio Street, 3 houses south of 12th Avenue.” When Byrne spoke to the dispatchers, they told him they were accustomed to finding that house by using another cross street and a different direction of travel as a reference.
Due to the lack of addresses in Carmel-By-The-Sea residents post creative names to identify their homes in the seaside town, on January 12, 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“I’m the mayor, and I know how this works, and I was confused,” said Byrne, who again had to call 911 to urgently describe his location a few months later when his wife broke her arm in the middle of the night.
“They got there within two-and-a-half minutes. But imagine if I were a 92-year-old woman and had dementia and my husband did this. I might not be able to describe where I am,” he said, adding that Carmel-by-the-Sea recently outsourced its ambulance service to the Monterey Fire Department and cannot guarantee every dispatcher is familiar with the quirky local addressing system.
Voter confusion
Brandon Swanson, the acting city administrator, said of the addressing process that “for this big of an institutional change, it’s going pretty smoothly.”
That is, he said, until the county sent its mailer saying voters had to re-register. The notice didn’t include a deadline for updating physical address information, and some local news outlets initially reported it had to be done before the election.
Swanson said the city has been scrambling to reassure voters. It has been sending out digital communications and created a detailed frequently asked questions website about registration that says: “Did you receive a postcard from the Monterey County Elections Office? You are still registered to vote.”
“We’re not happy right now with the county,” Mayor Byrne said.
Martinez, the registrar of voters, said in an email that “overall, voters indicated the information provided is clear and straightforward.” Asked when they need to update their information, she said they are being encouraged to do so “as soon as possible.”
Hans Lehmann, who is 94 and lives in a 1929 redwood cottage nicknamed Pine Gates, said he was surprised by the “giant postcard” from the county and worried he wouldn’t get his ballot in the mail. He tried calling the elections office the day he got the mailer, but it was a weekend and it was closed.
He’s been slightly confused but mostly amused by all the messages.
“We got a card saying, ‘You have to re-register!’ then City Hall said, ‘The mail ballot is fine. Forget all that other stuff!’” he said, laughing.
Lehmann, a longtime mail voter who says he is carefully reading up on the proposed statewide billionaire tax, was relieved to get his ballot at the post office, as always.
Lehmann’s house once was a downtown restaurant called Ella’s Southern Kitchen. In 1941, the whole house was put on rollers, pushed up a steep hill and plopped onto a foundation of beach sand. He recently made a trip to Ace Hardware to mark it with its new designation: a big, fluorescent No. 80.
A man sweeps the sidewalk along San Carlos Street, between 5th & 6th Streets, in downtown Carmel-By-The-Sea on January 10, 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“Are the addresses popular? Who knows. Ask someone who voted one way, and they’ll change your mind; ask someone who voted the other way, and they’ll change your mind again,” said Lehmann, who loves the convenience of shopping on Amazon.
As long as his electrician and plumber can find the place, he figured, he’s in good shape.
Karyl Hall, an 81-year-old preservationist who grew up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, has long fought addresses, saying they’re part of the push for convenience and modernity that is destroying the artsy soul of the community, where, she said, too many historic cottages are being plowed down and replaced by sleek, boxy new homes.
The addresses, she said, are “representative of the total degradation of all our historic places and maintaining something special versus Everywhere, USA.”
She was baffled by the notice from the elections office. She said she filled out a form with her information, then heard by word of mouth that the county’s message was “a mistake,” and then saw city messaging saying that residents didn’t have to do anything before the November election.
“It’s confusing,” said Hall, who always votes by mail. “We’re dealing with the bureaucracy of not knowing quite how all this should be handled.”
Hall lives in a house called Jollyhase, German for “Jolly Rabbit.” She said she often shops for her 6-pound Pomeranian, Bubbles, at Chewy.com and has never missed a package, even sans address.
She said this week: “I’m one of the rebels that is not going to put a number on her house.”