Unofficial ballot drop boxes worry California elections officials
ocregister.com
ocregister.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/12/california-...
Apparently the state GOP set them up and has admitted as much on Twitter. They say they are justified under California's law that allows ballot harvesting.
They're putting them outside places usually frequented by GOP voters (gun stores, churches, etc) to help make it easier for them to vote.
They may have a pretty solid argument. But more importantly, like most of these types of shenanigans, it probably won't be resolved until after the election.
Edit: That it says "official" but is not official government is questionable.
These boxes are labeled as Official and fashioned as if from government. Nobody should be allowed to pose as government.
Nobody should be allowed to pose as government.
A lot of COVID risk avoidance is reasonable, if annoying. In-person voting, however, may be a hill worth dying on, metaphorically speaking of course...
Mail-in-ballots are basically the norm where I'm from (Utah), we get a ballot, and drop it off at the city building. It's nice. Nobody complains on either side of the aisle here, it just works. If we were a swing state, I'm sure someone would complain if it meant more/less votes for 'their side'.
I lean left, the state leans right, it is what it is, but why can't the rest of America have such an easy system of voting?
Because it is, in fact, illegal; there is a significant difference between each of these things, with a descending degree of voter knowledge and ability to make an informed choice about the security of their ballot:
A voter electing to entrust their ballot to a specific person.
A voter placing their ballot in a a known-unofficial collection box operated by an unknown person.
A voter placing their ballot in a fraudulently-labeled-as-official ballot box.
Allowing the first does not imply that the second should be legitimate, much less the third.
Instead, they have unattended flimsy collection boxes labeled, "Official Ballot Drop Off Box".
The vast majority of Americans are going to vote completely normally. Many of us are going to simply drop our ballots off in the mail. The mail is still running fine in the vast majority of locations.
Don’t get me wrong, these weird stories and edge cases are concerning and must be addressed, but it’s hardly the normal state of affairs for the vast majority of Americans.
In this case, the ballot harvesting efforts, however ill-advised, are likely not created with ill intent. Given the way ballots are sealed, it’s unlikely that these operators are somehow going to open the ballots, check votes, selectively discard them, reseal selected votes, and not invalidate all of them in the process.
Note that many of these drop boxes are popping at at weird places like gun shops, candidate headquarters, churches, and other locations that are likely to have voters skewed in a specific direction. However, it doesn’t make any sense that a political candidate or a gun shop would go out of their way to discard ballots collected at a location that skews toward their own constituency. Instead, it’s more likely that these people have consumed too much fear-mongering media about election tampering and believe that they are helping the situation by collecting and protecting the votes from like-minded people.
If the Florida panhandle were part of Alabama, and Michigan's upper peninsula were part of Wisconsin, the result of the 2016 election would have been reversed.
The 2000 election was decided by ~500 voters in Florida.
It's news because it's ... new.
This wasn't "ill-advised", they're doubling down after being told to cease & desist. It's part of a bigger plan.
It doesn’t. The United States has no such voter registry.
(Individual states do, but individual states aren't the country.)
If it wasn't counted you can use that receipt to file a complaint, and possibly get a chance to submit your votes again.
Nothing ensures that they do.
So basically yes, you have to trust that the law will be upheld and that the Democrats and Republicans who monitor the process together won't be corrupted at the same time.
Expert: We should probably use a secret ballot
Politician: Do you have any evidence we've used the fact that ballots aren't secret in the modern period?
Expert: No, but that's sort of the point. Courts are allowed to use this but they never do, so, just use secret ballots.
Politician: There are rumours that Military Intelligence uses it to find out who votes Communist and so on right?
Expert: Yes, there are rumours but we aren't able to substantiate them.
Politician: How about you, ex-spy, can you do better?
Ex-spy: I have heard these rumours too.
Politician: So they're true?
Ex-spy: Well like I said, they are rumours. I've never seen it personally.
And then the politicians decide actually maybe we'll think about this some more before making a decision and another decade passes with the ballots still not actually secret.
[In England you will notice that the ballots are identical on a big pile when you arrive, but then when you show them or tell them who you are, they read out a number (a locally unique voter registration number), that number is written on a serial paper counterfoil, and the current number from the counterfoil is written to the ballot paper. This means that in principle it is possible (but laborious) to unwind parts or the entire election if you wanted to until the counterfoils are destroyed, a year later typically.]
When the absentee ballots are received, the outer envelope is opened if present and then the validity what's written on the inner envelope plus whatever supplemental materials were enclosed is evaluated according to local rules. The ballot remains inside its sealed envelope at this step and is not examined.
The validation is such things as making sure that someone with that name and address is on the voter rolls, no other ballot has been cast for that person, as well as more nitpicky local requirements like that an affidavit form was signed in the correct places and/or that the signature "matches" the voter's signature on file. If the ballot is accepted at this stage, then and only then is the envelope opened and the ballot put in a ballot box to be counted.
All of this is supervised by elections officials representing both major parties, which in practice makes it very difficult for either side to stuff the ballot box or "lose" ballots. There is still room for suppression via those extra rules - if the local rules are biased towards rejecting any challenged ballot, for example, one party can just claim that people with names they think are less likely to have voted for their side "doesn't match" - this is all highly dependent on the exact jurisdiction you're in and many states have rules biased towards accepting ballots, wherein unless the challenger can present a VERY good reason ("The identified person is dead" for example) the ballot is accepted.
Anything rejected should then get kicked, still unopened, into the "provisional ballot" process which technically has a way for voters to appeal the decision and present evidence that their vote should be counted - this is the same process used for people who aren't on the voter rolls but think they should be, or who weren't able to present any ID at the polls to come back and show their ID the next day, etc. In practice almost no one bothers unless the election-night returns were so close that the provisional votes might actually swing things.
There is, once the ballot has been accepted and the envelope opened, absolutely no way to trace an individual ballot back to a specific person. The ballots themselves may be retained in case there's a recount, but nothing can be "unwound" after a vote is cast.
For in person ballots, after the voter shows their eligibility, they are handed a ballot, or the equivalent such as being authorized to cast one ballot on a voting machine. No identifier stays with the ballot itself in any case; once they've passed the first station and been approved to vote that's it, there is no way to "unwind" or revoke that vote.
The inner envelopes are then opened and counted, again with scrutiny from both parties, in public.
Try selling unofficial nikes or use unofficial dollars and see how that gets reported.
Ballot harvesting is not only legal but standard procedure... for the Democratic Party. The only difference wish these boxes is social distancing. But because ballot harvesting mostly happened in... different neighborhoods than the typical HN reader live in, therefore it's strange and unfamiliar and this didn't really happen, apparently. So naturally when the wrong team does the same thing (but with social distancing) it's the end of the world. And you can bet your last dollar that if the wrong team had collected the ballots in person, that would have been evidence that they're endangering peoples' lives with COVID.
This sickens me.
Also, reminder that you can track your ballot online and make sure that it is received and counted, whether you mail it or drop it off.
Oh, and though this is probably obvious, I'm dropping at the box at City Hall, because I know that one's legit.
“Grand jury transcripts give peek into minds of OC deputies who lied about booking evidence” (10-3-2020)
https://www.ocregister.com/grand-jury-transcripts-give-peek-...
The number of people that thought I was their bank or phone provider and gladly typed in their details into the Comments box...
Then there's the (smaller group of) people that dug down enough to find my phone number that I put on a page when I first set it up. Took me a while to figure out how they got that.
This is arguably legal under California's ballot harvesting law.
If one was a little more motivated, one could also get FEC donation records and also purge GOP voters whose donation history in the current cycle indicate that they were likely to vote out of line with the party endorsements.
What guarantees do you have that a random gun store is going to deliver your vote to the proper authorities?
How can you be sure that all of the people using these boxes know they are handing their ballots to someone not involved in the election at all?
I don't see a security argument since centralizing the collection of ballots would seem to me to make it easier, not harder, to attack. Fake boxes are one attack discussed in the article, but even straightforward stealing of ballots from boxes would be much easier when you only have to attack one collection box containing thousands of ballots instead of thousands of individual mailboxes distributed all over.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...
I've voted by mail in nearly every election since my first in 2008 and never had a problem. This year when the president knew a large amount of people were going to vote by mail he installed a mega donor with no experience and I began receiving my mail extremely late. I absolutely did not trust it this year and turned my ballot into a drop box at a polling site. Drop box usage was thankfully expended this year in my state.
They are not as "everywhere" as you'd think though. The closest mailbox to my house, for example, is on an unremarkable parking lot in about a mile from my home, in geographical distance, and about two miles if you follow the roads. And I live in relatively dense suburb. If someone lives in a more rural setting, it could easily be further and harder to locate, especially if you aren't good with online searches (I would never think to go look for my closest mailbox in that specific location otherwise, there may be some logic in why it's there but I for sure don't know it). So if you have a location that you know is frequently visited by a lot of people (such as, e.g., church) it may make sense to place a collection point there to ensure you do not lose anyone.
These people want to not have to go to a crowded polling place during a pandemic, but also are worried that a ballot sent through the mail may not arrive on time. So they are seeking to ensure their vote is counted as well as possible by dropping their ballot off in person.
Regarding the security arguments you propose: The list of official boxes is generally on the local board of elections’ official website. Also, many boards of elections notify the voter upon receipt of their ballot, so if you drop off your ballot but never receive notification, you can call them and find out what’s up. The boxes are locked, many are near places like schools or banks that have CCTV.
And the kicker: If anyone catches you tampering with the very obviously marked box, you risk jail time. To really swing an election, you’ll need multiple people who are willing to risk jail time in return for possibly but not certainly swinging an election in their preferred direction.
> If anyone catches you tampering with the very obviously marked box, you risk jail time
> The boxes are locked
These are all true of any public mail drop box. Mail tampering is a felony with prison time, the list of official mail drop boxes is public, and they are all locked. I remain unconvinced. A centralized box with marginally better security is still easier to attack than thousands of distributed mailboxes.