California's disastrous voter laws
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The 2022 midterms marked the first election held since the California Legislature passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 37, which required automatically mailing ballots to all active registered voters in the nation’s most populous state.
“As states across our country continue to enact undemocratic voter suppression laws, California is increasing voter access, expanding voting options and bolstering elections integrity and transparency,” Newsom said after signing the bill in September 2021.
That clearly hasn’t been the result of the law, said J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, on Wednesday.
“Mail ballots disenfranchise. There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count,” Adams said in a press statement. “No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late. California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”
Election officials failed to account for the 10 million ballots for multiple reasons, according to the legal foundation’s report.
“After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them,” the report says. “It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass mail elections, we can only assume what happened.”
The report says election officials rejected the 226,250 ballots for nine reasons. A whopping 47.7% of ballots arrived too late to count. California law requires mail ballots to be postmarked no later than Election Day and to arrive for counting no later than seven days after Election Day.
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The second biggest reason for rejected ballots was a signature mismatch, accounting for 39.8% of ballots. Another 9.8% of ballots had no signature, according to the report.
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Newsom and California have been prime examples of how not to run an election. Vote-by-mail ballots should only be sent to those who request them.
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