by Bob Walsh
The formerly great state of California permits “ballot harvesting.” This procedure allows people, usually political operatives, to go around and pick up ballots from people to mail for them. Sometimes they “help” the people fill out their ballots. It is believed that they often just fill them out whether the legal recipient of the ballot wants their assistance or not. They also have been know to just pick up ballots that are left laying around, such as near the mail boxes of large apartment buildings where voters may have moved and not left forwarding information.
Very recently the Republican party in California (yes, it is there, small though it may be) has been placing “ballot drop-off boxes” in certain areas. Strangely a lot of them are showing up in gun stores. Churches too. There are at least several dozen of these around the state.
The California Attorney General, Xavier Becerra (who is a hard-core liberal psychopath) has issued a Cease And Desist letter to the California Republican Party directing them to stop this practice. Their response, thus far, is to request that Becerra quote chapter and verse of exactly what law it is they are breaking. Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, another strong Democrat partisan, has said the Republican will be prosecuted if they do not remove the boxes by the end of this week.
For years CA has had a very open policy about absentee ballots. You didn’t need a “reason” to ask for one, all you had to do is ask. Consequently a large chunk of California has voted by mail for years. Virtually all of California has gotten their blanketed mail ballots. California mailed ballots to their entire voter roll this election, allegedly due to the Covid-19 plague. This included people who have moved out of state, people who are dead and not a few illegal aliens. California gives voter registration material to EVERYBODY who gets a drivers license. This includes illegal aliens. California state law requires that DMV do this.
There are a fair number of official ballot collection boxes around the state this year, plus this year you do not have to put postage on the ballots. You can just drop them in the USPS mail box and they will get to the county registrar sometime before mammals become extinct, probably.
There will be at least four house seats in SoCal that are competitive this year. The Republicans would dearly like to claw back a few House seats.
It will be interesting to see how this works out. The solid Democrat power structure in California is not shy about throwing official weight in support of clearly partisan causes.
Bob Walsh is a California resident and retired from the State of Ca. Dept. of Corrections. You can read more of his commentary at barkgrowlbite.blogspot.com.