Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis has faced no shortage of criticism after recent elections, but he’s pushing back against a Grand Jury report taking his performance to task.

Though Dupuis announced in September that he would step down from his position in 2026, the county’s top election official will oversee one more election this fall – which will include the controversial redistricting measure Prop. 50 – before the county replaces him.

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The Grand Jury report had 13 findings and 10 recommendations for the Registrar of Voters, drawing primarily from the experiences of grand jurors who observed the election before, during and after Nov. 5. 2024. The Grand Jury’s focus on the Registrar of Voters comes after various issues in recent elections for which election integrity organizations have criticized Dupuis.

The most notable among these controversies concerned a 2022 Oakland school board race using ranked-choice voting where human error led to certification of the incorrect candidate as the winner. Dupuis met with county counsel at the time to determine how to resolve the improper certification, eventually swearing in the rightful winner Mike Hutchinson to the school board. In addition, Alameda County has notoriously been one of the slowest counties in the state to produce election results, which has garnered anger and frustration from the public.

Former Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson addressed the protracted count following last November’s election, saying “Months ago, in public meetings, I asked the Registrar if he had a sufficient workforce and resources in order to carry out the November elections; his response was ‘yes.” Unfortunately, that appears not to be the case.”

The Grand Jury report focused on election transparency, with jurors for Alameda County describing their attempts to observe the election via video streams and in-person observation as “frustrating,” and saying the publication of election results was “incomplete, delayed and at times misleading.” In one instance, observers waited two hours to be ushered into the room for vote tabulation, according to the report.

Dupuis did not reject all of the report’s findings, he told Bay Area News Group.

“We did take into account the items that they recommended. Some of those items we already implemented for the Oakland special election, or we will be implementing by the June (2026) election,” he said.

However, the Registrar of Voters office did draft a response to the Grand Jury report that pushed back against many of its findings or attempted to provide additional context to better explain the county’s election process.

“(I)t’s a mix of things that we disagree with, partially agree with and do agree with,” Dupuis told the Board of Supervisors at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re open to those suggestions, and we just need to look at it through a lens of the processes that we have to put in place.”

The report calls on the county to invest more into the Registrar of Voters office to improve timely reporting of election results. These recommendations call for larger facilities, more equipment and additional staff, according to the Grand Jury report.

However, the Board of Supervisors rejected that finding in a draft response, saying, “The recommendation will not be implemented because it is not warranted.”

“The Board will support the ROV to responsibly achieve greater transparency and increased reporting, while at the same time remaining mindful not to place undue financial burdens on local jurisdictions, including the county,” the draft response by the Board of Supervisors states.

The Board of Supervisors did not adopt their response to the Grand Jury’s report on Tuesday, but scheduled the formal approval of the response for Oct. 7.