The Alameda County Board of Supervisors has voted to appoint long-time county employee Cynthia Cornejo as interim registrar of voters.
Cornejo will take over on March 29 for Tim Dupuis, who is retiring after nearly 24 years with the county.
Cornejo was hired as a clerk in 1996 and has earned various promotions at the Registrar of Voters Office over the years, eventually becoming deputy registrar in 2007.
The county is currently in the process of hiring a permanent replacement for Dupuis, whose tenure wasn’t without controversy.
He has been criticized for a perceived lack of communication by city officials and members of the public, for overseeing slow vote counts, dragging his feet in implementing youth voting for school board seats in Oakland and Berkeley, and making mistakes tabulating ranked choice votes in cities that use the alternative election system.
In one particularly glaring case from 2022, Oakland Unified School District board candidate Mike Hutchinson was erroneously declared the loser because of a vote-counting mishap.
Dupuis didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and neither he nor Cornejo attended Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.
A turbulent tenure
During his tenure, Dupuis was also accused by detractors of denying access to people wanting to observe the election process and for initially refusing to release the county’s “cast vote records” in an electronic format that allows for independent verification of the vote tallies, instead of the PDF format he was using at the start of the Nov. 5, 2024, election process.
A 2025 report from the Alameda County Elections Commission ticked off a list of problems at the Registrar’s Office, including poor language access, lack of public access to observe electoral processes, lack of comprehensive and thorough poll worker training, lack of compliance with poll worker labor laws, lack of availability of ballot drop boxes and lack of rapid access to accurate information from Dupuis’ office during elections, among other things.
“No other county in the state seems to be experiencing the volume of problems, or appearance thereof, that Alameda County has logged over the past few years,” according to the report.
“No other county in the state seems to be experiencing the volume of problems, or appearance thereof, that Alameda County has logged over the past few years,”
Alameda County Elections Commission 2025 report
In response, Dupuis wrote a letter to the commission disputing its characterization of the facts and its findings.
“While our Office welcomes constructive oversight, such oversight must be informed, fair, and contextually accurate — but this report is not,” Dupuis wrote.
Critics have also lamented the fact the Board of Supervisors appointed Dupuis as both the head of the Registrar of Voters Office and the county’s Information Technology Department, both of which are generally seen as challenging full-time jobs.
“I think Tim’s done as good a job as he could have done under the circumstances,” said Supervisor Nate Miley, who noted that the county has also decided to “decouple” the registrar’s job from the information technology job.
