In election integrity, California ranks 49th in the nation.
In election integrity, California ranks 49th in the nation.
I t has been over five days since polls closed in California’s primary and only 72 percent of votes in the Los Angeles mayor’s race have been counted. A generation ago, California reported its results fast enough that the winners were almost always known hours after voting stopped.
That was before liberals used the state as an experimental lab for every trendy, half-baked reform measure they could think of.
(1) All 22 million registered voters — including those listed as “inactive” — now automatically get ballots in the mail.
Democrats have ignored all warnings that this is a disaster waiting to happen and that it creates a nightmare for ballot integrity. In 2020, Los Angeles County (population 10 million) has a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population. More than one out of every five L.A. County registrations probably belongs to a voter who has moved or who is deceased or otherwise ineligible.
The public-interest law firm Judicial Watch reached a settlement agreement with the State of California and L.A. County officials to begin removing as many as 1.5 million inactive voters whose registrations may be invalid. Neither state nor county officials in California have been removing inactive voters from the rolls for 20 years, even though the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in 2019, in Husted v. Randolph Institute, a case about Ohio’s voter-registration laws, that federal law “makes this removal mandatory.” Some progress has been made in California, but enforcement of the Judicial Watch agreement has been sporadic and half-hearted.
Now two-thirds of Californians vote by mail and their ballots can be counted if they arrive three days after the election. If signatures don’t match, voters must be contacted and allowed to make corrections. Voters can also cast provisional ballots on Election Day, and their eligibility often takes days to resolve. It often takes a full four weeks to resolve some close races.
(2) The DMV automatically registers people to vote.
Almost everyone who does business with the state’s Motor Vehicles Bureau and other public agencies gets automatically registered to vote. But this program is riddled with errors and has even registered illegal immigrants, minors too young to vote, and felons who were supposed to be ineligible.
(3) California allows voters to register to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day.
On Election Day, one can show up at a polling location and register to vote and cast a ballot all on the same day by taking advantage of a Conditional Voter Registration process. It is all too easy for someone from out of state or in another city to give an incorrect address and have their vote counted before anyone is the wiser.
(4) “Ballot harvesting” allows political operatives and other third parties to go door to door collecting ballots and then deliver them to election officials. In 2018, California legalized ballot trafficking, essentially sending out an engraved invitation for mischief and the bypassing of election integrity.
The left-of-center Los Angeles Times agrees. In a 2018 editorial, it blasted the state’s “overly-permissive ballot collection law” as being “written without sufficient safeguards.” The Times concluded that “the law passed in 2106 does open the door to coercion and fraud and should be fixed or repealed.” It hasn’t been.
(5) Voters can cast a ballot at the “wrong” polling place.
California allows provisional ballots, which are ballots cast that are reviewed separately after being placed in a special envelope. The reason for the review may be that some showed up in the wrong precinct or forgot that he had already voted by mail. The Federalist notes: “These ballots are then supposed to be checked against other rolls to make sure the person did not vote twice, but there are reasons to doubt the state’s ability to properly execute this.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard ranks California 49th in the nation in the soundness and simplicity of its laws, scoring only 30 out of a possible 100.
California is the only state in the nation where it’s illegal for officials to ask for people’s IDs when they vote.
Then there’s the state’s top-two “jungle” primary, which since 2012 has mandated that the top two finishers regardless of party go on to the general election. The Los Angeles Times admits that the promises of its supporters — that pragmatic candidates would prevail over partisans and there would be more competitive elections — have “failed to materialize.” Paul Mitchell, the state’s most prominent political data analyst, bluntly says: “The record doesn’t line up with what the advocates promised.”
There are also bizarre outcomes. In 2018, voters dissatisfied with the visibly fading 85-year-old Senator Dianne Feinstein had to choose between her and a radical Democrat in the November general election. This year, a solidly GOP state-senate district saw only two Democrats advance to the November runoff. Everyone else will be disenfranchised.
Let’s stipulate that California’s political rules are a mess and shouldn’t be emulated by any other state. Period.