The real scandal in California elections is what is legal

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here. California’s voting laws are so broken that even Gov. Gavin […]

---

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.

California’s voting laws are so broken that even Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) was forced to criticize his own state for taking so long to count ballots.

“We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads,” Newsom wrote in a letter to state election officials this spring ahead of the state’s June primaries.

Newsom, of course, was quick to blame bad actors like President Donald Trump for exploiting the state’s lengthy vote-counting process, but even an institution as far left as the New York Times has admitted that California’s voting laws undermine the legitimacy of the state’s election results.

WHY FEWER BIRTHS DOESN’T MEAN CHEAPER HOUSING

“There is no good reason that California takes so long to count votes,” the Times editorial board wrote as the state was still counting ballots days after the recent primary election. “Most democracies around the world count votes quickly. So do most other large U.S. states, including Texas, Florida, Michigan and Virginia. Until the past decade, California itself counted votes quickly.”

“California has since adopted an approach to election administration without meaningful benefit and with substantial downside. It makes the state government look incompetent. It fails to increase voter turnout. It creates needless uncertainty about results,” the Times continued. “California officials have conflated the length of a bureaucratic process with its efficacy.”

These criticisms of California’s voting laws are on point, but they do not go nearly far enough. It is not just the ballot-counting process that has fundamentally compromised the integrity of California’s elections, but also the casting and collection of votes.

The first thing to understand about California’s voting system is that it is designed to make voting by secret ballot in a voting booth obsolete. All registered voters in the state are mailed a ballot and encouraged to fill it out and return it. Each county must offer a “vote center” where voters can show up on Election Day and cast a ballot in a booth, but there are far fewer vote centers available than when most voting happened in person at a neighborhood precinct. As a result of these policy choices, about 90% of ballots counted in California in 2024 were vote-by-mail ballots. Only seven other states have such a universal vote-by-mail policy.

What makes California’s system particularly slow, in addition to the fact that 90% of voting is vote-by-mail, is that election officials are required to keep accepting ballots well past Election Day. Any ballot postmarked by Election Day must be counted if it arrives within seven days. And if a timely mailed ballot has no postmark or an illegible postmark, California law still creates a presumption that it was mailed on time if the voter dated the return envelope by Election Day.

Not only does this provision guarantee that not all ballots will be processed on election night, but it also prevents vote counters from knowing how many ballots have yet to be counted on election night, since more legal ballots arrive each day.

Additionally, while California law allows local election officials to begin processing ballots before Election Day, it does not require them to do so. In Florida, for example, all early voting and vote-by-mail ballots must be processed by 7 p.m. the day before the election. Then, within 30 minutes after polls close on Election Day, all early voting and vote-by-mail totals must be sent to the state. California has neither of these requirements.

Finally, California gives voters a lengthy window to cure their ballot if it is rejected. As we will return to later, California does have a system where each voter’s signature is on file, and election officials must match each signature on a ballot envelope to the voter’s registration signature. Not only does this process take a lot of time, but for those few ballots that are rejected, counties must notify the voter through mail, phone, email, or text, and then give the voter until 5 p.m. two days before certification — which can be nearly a month after Election Day — to fix the problem.

These five policies — mailing ballots to all voters, replacing many neighborhood precincts with vote centers, accepting ballots after Election Day, failing to require counties to process ballots early and report them quickly, and the time-consuming signature-matching and cure process — are why California takes weeks to deliver election results.

These are all bad policies, and California should change them. But they are not what make California elections fundamentally corrupt. That honor falls to “third-party ballot return,” more commonly known as “ballot harvesting.”

California has allowed no-excuse absentee voting since 1978, and prior to 2013, an ill or disabled person could designate a family member or legal guardian to deliver his ballot for him. That all changed in 2016, when Democrats passed a new law allowing anyone to collect and return a ballot for anyone else. Unlike some states, such as Colorado, California left the number of ballots any one person could turn in uncapped. Furthermore, California allows anyone to pay ballot harvesters to collect ballots, as long as they are not paid on a per-ballot basis.

As mentioned above, California ostensibly requires election officials to match the signature on a ballot envelope with the voter’s registration signature, but state law makes that safeguard exceedingly weak. The presumption is that every signature is valid, and a ballot may be rejected only when the differences are “multiple, significant, and obvious” beyond a reasonable doubt. In practice, that means signature verification is less a serious fraud-prevention tool than another procedural hurdle that delays final results.

This sets up a system that is ripe for abuse and fundamentally undermines the cornerstone of our democracy: the secret ballot. Just look at the instructions the Democratic Socialists of America have posted on their website for ballot harvesters.

The DSA advises its ballot harvesters to “confirm strong candidate support” for the DSA-approved candidate. “If voting for other candidate,” the instructions say, “thank them and move on.” DSA harvesters are then prompted to ask voters whether they have received their ballots and, if so, whether they will get them right now. DSA harvesters are then prompted to suggest, “we fill it out together right now,” and then “sign it over to me and I can bring it to the city.”

If a volunteer, election official, or paid campaign worker hovered over a voter in a polling place, urged him to support a preferred candidate, and tried to take possession of his completed ballot, everyone would recognize it as an assault on the secret ballot. But if these questions and pressure tactics are applied in someone’s home, or at a homeless shelter, or in a nursing home, or at a place of business where immigrants might fear for their jobs, it is perfectly legal under California law.

Worried about election integrity after the 2000 presidential election, former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III formed the Commission on Federal Election Reform. In 2005, this Commission on Federal Election Reform released its final report, warning that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

“Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation,” the report found. “Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”

A ballot handed to a political operative cannot be monitored the way an in-person ballot can. Allowing individuals other than the voter or his immediate family to handle ballots is a recipe for mischief. Election officials have no way of knowing whether the voter filled the ballot out freely, whether anyone watched or pressured him while he voted, or whether the ballot ultimately returned in his name reflects his choices.

The danger is not limited to tampering. Third-party ballot collection also gives campaigns, parties, unions, and activist groups access to voters at the very moment they are casting their ballots, outside the privacy of the voting booth and beyond the supervision of election officials. No one is present to ensure that the voter is not being pressured, threatened, misled, or rewarded for voting a certain way. Nor can anyone guarantee that a ballot collector will faithfully deliver bal