by Edward Ring
The conventional wisdom among experts who monitor elections in America is unvarying: Voter fraud is statistically insignificant. These sanguine claims are made despite the fact that internal controls are often so poor, or even nonexistent on election integrity, that it is nearly impossible to know if voter fraud has even occurred.
In every critical area—voter identification, voter registration, duplicate voting, absentee ballots, ineligible voting, ballot custody, ballot destruction, counterfeit ballots, voting machine tampering—gaping holes exist that invite systemic fraud. But so what? How relevant is voter fraud, if the entire system is already rigged to favor one party over the other?
Come to California to see what’s going to roll out across America in time to guarantee a progressive landslide in 2020. It may be perfectly legal. But it’s so rigged it would make Boss Tweed blush.
When planning for the November 2018 election, California’s Democrats didn’t just aim to pad their supermajority in the State Legislature. They weren’t going to be satisfied with a sweep of every elected state position, including governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, controller, treasurer, insurance commissioner, and superintendent of public instruction. They knew they could do that, but they aimed higher. They were bent on eliminating every Republican congressman they possibly could, and they did pretty well in that. Going into the 2018 election, California’s Republican congressional caucus had 14 members. After the election, there were only seven left.
The way they did this was to pass laws designed to rig the system.
Three laws in particular combined to stack the deck against Republicans. First came the Motor Voter law. This meant that as soon as any California resident acquired or renewed his driver’s license or state ID, he would be registered to vote automatically. Second, the state legislature authorized counties automatically to send absentee ballots to voters, even if they had not requested those ballots. Third, the rules governing ballot custody were changed so that anyone could turn in absentee ballots, not just the actual voter.
The opportunities presented by these three laws were fully exploited by Democrats. According to a Republican campaign worker who operated in one of the Orange County congressional districts where an incumbent Republican was narrowly defeated by a Democratic challenger, for a week prior to November 6, the Democrats had over 1,000 people on the ground, going door to door, collecting ballots. Armed with precise voter information, they only knocked on the doors of registered Democrats, and in thousands of cases, they actually collected the ballots and brought them to a polling center for the voter.
According to Orange County GOP chairman Fred Whitaker, 250,000 ballots were dropped off on election day. The actual amount of harvested votes may have been much higher, since harvesting was occurring for weeks prior to the election. In Orange County, out of 1.1 million ballots cast, 689,756, or 62 percent, were “vote-by-mail” ballots.
This is not your ordinary get-out-the-vote effort. For each congressional district in play, the cost per thousand full-time paid vote harvesters was approximately $125,000 per day. The Democrats spent tens of millions, and it made the difference in several congressional races. This process of vote harvesting swept across California, funded by well-heeled public sector unions (which collect dues in excess of $800 million per year in California), and by leftist billionaires such as California’s own Tom Steyer.
To be fair, Republicans could have taken advantage of these same corrupt laws to harvest votes from registered Republicans. But not only did the Republicans rely primarily on a vastly outnumbered handful of unpaid volunteers, they didn’t even bother to provide their volunteer canvassers with up-to-date data in the phone apps they were using to determine which voting households to approach.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, quoted by Politico, sounded insulted at allegations that the Democrats stole close races. “Our elections in California are structured so that every eligible citizen can easily register, and every registered voter can easily cast their ballot,” he explained.
You can say that again. In a scathing commentary on just how rigged California’s election laws have become, former California State GOP Chair Shawn Steel wrote, “California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule.” In addition to automatic voter registration, automatic sending of absentee mail-in ballots, and legalized vote harvesting, Steele itemized additional ways the Democratic legislature has rigged elections in California.
They have legalized pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, based on the accurate assumption that these youths, products of leftist indoctrination in California’s K-12 public school system, will vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. They have legalized the right for convicted felons and, in some cases, prison inmates to vote, based on the accurate assumption that these cohorts tend to favor Democrats. They have even passed laws in some California cities that permit noncitizens to vote in local elections.
There’s more. California’s legislature passed a law that requires a mailed ballot merely to be postmarked by election day. These ballots then have over a month to get counted. They have also permitted “conditional ballots,”wherein an unregistered voter can decide on election day to vote, and they will be simultaneously registered and handed a ballot. In California, 40 percent of the votes were tabulated after election night. Who were these 40 percent? Why is it they were overwhelmingly supporting Democrats?
The answer to this question casts the entire split between Democratic and Republican voters into a harsh perspective.
What sort of voter needs to be automatically registered instead of taking it upon themselves to sign up?
What sort of voter waits until election day to finally register and vote?
What sort of voter would not vote unless a mail-in ballot was automatically mailed to his home without even requesting it?
What sort of voter needs someone to come to his home, remind him to vote, then collect his ballot and bring it to a polling place for him?
What sort of voter is your average convicted felon, or prison inmate?
The Democrats passed laws in California that allowed them to harvest hundreds of thousands, if not millions of votes from people who are the least engaged politically. They have built a system that harvests millions of votes from the most apathetic, most easily manipulated, low-information voters in the electorate.
And that strategy, because it worked so well, is on its way to every state in America.
Count on it happening fast—wherever Democrats control a state legislature, California’s new election rules will become law. In those states, using government union money and foot-soldiers, augmented with limitless funds from globalist left-wing billionaires, Republicans will be wiped out forever. The massacre will not spare countless battleground congressional districts currently held by Republicans.
Is there voter fraud in America? Probably—simply because the process is so riddled with loopholes and weaknesses that statistically significant fraud could be occurring and we would never know. But why rely on just fraud, when you can also rig the laws to harvest millions of votes?
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Edward Ring is a political and financial analyst, working primarily with start-up and early-stage organizations. In 2013, he co-founded the California Policy Center, a free-market think tank based in Southern California. He is a prolific writer on the topics of political reform and sustainable economic development. Ring, a fifth-generation Californian, has an undergraduate degree in political science from UC Davis, and an MBA in finance from the University of Southern California.
Photo “United States Postal Service” by U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Jordan Castelan.
