California GOP’s Fake Ballot Boxes: What Scared Losers Do
Having failed in their legal attempts to block Gov. Newsom’s plan to send a ballot to every active registered voter in the state, the California Republicans are seeking to sow confusion and doubt about voting in the 2020 general election.
Dark grey metal boxes, some of which are deceptively labeled as official ballot drop off sites, have been reported at gun shops, firing ranges, churches, and GOP offices in Los Angeles, Orange and Fresno counties.
***The Registrar of Voters in San Diego has over one hundred authorized ballot drop off locations. Click here for a complete list. ***
The New York Times reports state Republicans have purchased one hundred of these metal boxes and are placing them in areas with competitive down-ballot races, with the hope they’ll boost turnout enough to counteract the President’s drag on local candidates.
On Monday, California’s secretary of state, Alex Padilla, and Attorney General Xavier Becerra sent a cease-and-desist order to the state- and county-level Republican parties, ordering them to remove the boxes. They also urged voters who might have unknowingly dropped off their ballots in the receptacles to sign up with the state’s voter tracking website to ensure their vote is counted.
“Misleading voters is wrong regardless of who is doing it,” Mr. Padilla said in a conference call with reporters, adding that the boxes “are not permitted by state law.”
Mr. Becerra called the boxes “fake,” adding that it was “illegal to tamper with a citizen’s vote.” He warned that anyone “engaging in this activity” could be subject to criminal prosecution or civil action.
Hector Barajas, a spokesman for the California Republican Party, said the party would continue to distribute the boxes, without adding any label identifying them explicitly as Republican ballot drops.
GOP leaders claim the faux drop boxes are legal, citing California’s law allowing campaign workers and volunteers to collect vote-by-mail ballots while canvassing. Calling the practice “ballot harvesting,” GOP leaders claim the process is corrupt.
Since the party was seemingly unable to attract enough volunteers to collect ballots from GOP-leaning voters, they’ve engineered this scheme.
https://twitter.com/sfpelosi/status/1315990667273756673?s=20
***California now has the means to allow voters to track their ballots once they are cast. For more information visit this link.***
With election day still three weeks away, a record number of Californians have already turned in ballots.
As is so often true with right wing conspiracy theories, the verification requirement in all 26 states allowing ballot collection by human beings is overlooked. Last I heard, boxes placed in public locations are considered polling sites, subject to controls created by county registrars of voters.
In California, creating an illegal polling site is a felony punishable by up to four years in prison. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some of those ballots collected by the GOP would show up on Fox News with the claim they were found in the trash or some such story.
What’s happening in the Golden State is just one part of a systemic effort by the GOP to suppress, interfere, or delegitimize the act of voting, especially among constituencies less likely to vote for conservatives.
In Kentucky, Texas, and Georgia early voters in locations primarily serving people of color saw wait times as long as 12 hours.
https://twitter.com/johntalsr/status/1315774645061246976?s=20
From NBC News:
In 2019, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago used smartphone data to quantify the racial disparity in waiting times at polls across the country. Residents of entirely-black neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer to vote and were 74 percent more likely to spend more than 30 minutes voting.
Similarly, nonwhite voters are seven times more likely than white voters to wait in line for more than an hour to vote, according to a 2017 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Stephen Pettigrew, who is a senior analyst for the NBC News Decision Desk. The reason, the study concluded, is because election officials send more resources to white polling precincts.
That can affect the electorate for years to come.
“Waiting in a line makes you less likely to turn out in subsequent elections,” Pettigrew said earlier this year, citing his research on that issue.
And mail voting, trusted less by voters of colors, has its own challenges: Black voters’ ballots are more likely to be rejected than ballots cast by white voters
Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter says the Fox News wannabes at Sinclair Broadcast Group, headed by David D. Smith, are actively promoting (often misleading) stories aimed at creating confusion and concern over voting:
In recent days, Smith's company assisted Trump by amplifying wild claims about absentee voting. But the message is often laundered through trusted local outlets affiliated with respected brands like NBC, CBS, and ABC.
For example, last Friday, Franklin County, Ohio discovered that it had sent 50,000 voters the wrong absentee ballot. The election board immediately "started the process of printing and mailing replacement ballots to every voter who received the wrong ballot." And voters should receive their replacement ballot early this week. Further, "stringent tracking measures are in place to guarantee that a voter can only cast one vote."
These kinds of clerical errors occur in every election. But Trump seized on the news as proof that the entire election is "out of control" and "rigged."
Trump's claim is absolutely baseless. But Trump's message was uncritically amplified on Twitter by dozens of Sinclair affiliates.
And it’s not just the process of voting that’s under attack; the people running election systems are getting death threats.
ProPublica surveyed election supervisors around the country and found at least 209 have recently resigned or retired citing burnout, stress or health concerns.
The head of the Kentucky Board of Elections says death threats have become “part of the job.”
Shepard Smith at CNBC news talked with some of these election officials, including one in Nevada who was threatened by a guy who said he sealed his absentee ballot with coronavirus-laced spit. By the way, that ballot was not counted, and police tracked the guy down because, you know, his name was on the ballot.
If you spot something hinky at your official polling place call Election Protection at 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to report what you see. Assistance in also available in Spanish at 888-VE-Y-VOTA (888- 839-8682), in Arabic at 844- YALLA-US (844-915-5187), and Asian languages at 888-API-VOTE (1-888-174-8683). A video call number for American Sign Language is available at 301-818-VOTE (301-818-8683).
https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1315991761492340736?s=20
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