Using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse, California Governor Gavin Newsom mandated that all registered voters in the state receive a ballot via mail for the General Election.
Now that the Nov. 3rd election is approaching rapidly, it’s time to check how the approach is fairing.
To begin with, the dead are receiving ballots. A Redondo Beach man received an official ballot for his deceased parents.
Millions of California residents are receiving mail-in ballots for the Nov. 3 election, including Redondo Beach resident Tom Thompson and his parents.The only problem is that Thompson’s parents have been dead for more than a decade.“I am the son, and I’m getting these officials ballots for people who passed away many years ago,” Thompson said. “Why is this happening?”So Thompson took to social media in hopes of spurring an investigation.
It turns out nearly 350,000 dead registrants remain on voter rolls across 41 states, according to an audit conducted by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF).
The number is a major improvement over the last time an assessment of similar scope was performed in 2012, when a Pew Research report turned up 2 million deceased voters on the rolls….With less than two months left before Election Day in November, the report is a major contribution to the argument about mail-in voting. Supporters of vote-by-mail say it is more essential than ever in 2020 due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19. Opponents say universal mail-in ballots open the door for fraud and undermine confidence in the outcome of the election.“The timing is critical. Partisan advocates have fought for automatic vote-by-mail systems in which all registered voters are sent ballots. These efforts must assume the voter rolls are accurate enough to sustain this sort of radical transformation to how we conduct elections. They are not,” PILF President J. Christian Adams wrote in the introduction to the report.
Additionally, there are worries that thousands of duplicate ballots are being sent.
[A]n election watchdog group, Election Integrity Project California believes some of those ballots are going to the same person, the wrong person, or even dead people.Ellen Swensen is the chief analyst with EIPCa. She says California has always had a problem with its voter registration database.“Now it’s been exacerbated because the state is sending all these people a ballot, and when you have messy lists and universal vote by mail it’s a recipe for disaster,” Swensen said.EIPCa bought the voter registration list from VoteCal in august. It contained voter registration information for more than 20 million Californians.In Kern County alone they found duplicate entries from nearly 2,500 people.Swensen believes 2,379 people will get two ballots from Kern County, 18 will get three, and six people will get four ballots because they have duplicate voter registration IDs within the database.
Indeed, there are already reports of duplicate ballots.
Ballots have been sent without the presidential choices page.
The Los Angeles County Registrar on Tuesday, Oct. 6, mailed new ballots to at least 2,100 Woodland Hills residents, who a day before received faulty ballots with duplicate options for a proposition — but with no opportunity to vote for president.The ballots came in the mail Monday — the first day of a massive first-time effort to send vote-by-mail ballots to the county’s 5.6 million registered voters in the lead-up to the Nov. 3 General Election.
Ballots from Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree, the area around the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, were found in the trash.
A citizen told San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies with the Morongo Basin Station that they found the discarded incoming mail, including voter ballots, in the 6500 block of Winters Road in Joshua Tree. More discarded mail was found in the 6500 block of Encelia Avenue in neighboring Twentynine Palms….All the residents with mailboxes in the area were contacted by deputies, and no more victims were found, authorities said. The case has been forwarded to the United States Postal Inspector for further investigation.
In conclusion, all is proceeding exactly as most Legal Insurrection fans have foreseen. As for me, I am going to take my ballot to the polling place and vote by a poll.
It’s the only way to be sure.
[Featured image via YouTube]
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY