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Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.
[...]
measure passed the Legislature on a largely party-line vote.

[GOP] felt the hit on Nov. 6 — and in the days after, as late-arriving Democratic votes were tabulated and one Republican candidate after another saw leads shrink and then evaporate. This week, a seventh GOP-held congressional seat flipped to the Democrats, leaving Republicans controlling a mere seven of California’s 53 House districts.

In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”
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House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin called California’s election system “really bizarre” and said he couldn’t even begin to understand what ballot harvesting is.

“We were only down 26 seats (nationally) the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race. Point being, when you have candidates that win the absentee ballot vote, win the day of the vote, and then lose three weeks later because of provisionals, that’s really bizarre.”
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Rep. Jeff Denham of Turlock (Stanislaus County), one of the House Republicans who saw victory slowly turn to defeat after election day [said] “One of the lessons that the GOP needs to learn out of this election cycle is how to work within all of the new rules, same-day voter registration, motor voters. There have been a lot of changes in laws that I think have caught many in the Republican Party by surprise. You can’t just run a traditional campaign as you did before.”
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“We certainly had that going on here, with people dropping off maybe 100 or 200 ballots,” said Neal Kelley, Orange County’s registrar of voters. “We also had voters calling and asking if it was legitimate for someone to come to their door and ask if they could take their ballot” and deliver it to the polls.
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Those efforts involved identifying voters who might support Democratic candidates and ignoring those who wouldn’t.

In one Orange County household, for example, both the husband and wife were longtime Republicans [...] Democratic volunteers came by the house four times, each time asking to speak only with their 18-year-old daughter, a no-party-preference voter, and asking if she wanted them to pick up her signed and completed ballot.
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harvested ballots arrived in the waning days of the election, adding to the flood of votes that couldn’t be counted on election day. And those late ballots broke heavily for the Democrats.
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In the Central Valley’s 10th Congressional District, for example, Denham led Democrat Josh Harder by 1,287 votes the morning after the election. As of Thursday, with almost all of the late ballots counted, Harder was ahead by 7,416 votes.

In Orange County, Republican Rep. Mimi Walters of Irvine saw her 6,074-vote lead over Democrat Katie Porter turn into an 11,866-vote deficit.
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https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-late-votes-broke-big-for-13432727.php
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-late-votes-broke-big-for-13432727.php

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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