California’s glacial counting of primary election votes is a feature, not a bug. The state’s election laws are deliberately designed to make elections as untraceable and lengthy as possible. As author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer asks, “If you make election fraud legal, is it still fraud?”
Last week’s closely watched primaries for California governor and Los Angeles mayor are still not official and won’t be for at least another week. Frustrated voters and election observers routinely accuse California’s election system of incompetence, but the lazy counting is built into the system, encourages the least secure methods of voting, and all but guarantees that the Democrat Party machine that controls the system cannot be defeated. Since 2011, the state’s political leaders have built this system into a fortress.
“We’re going to unpack specific examples of the ‘legislative reforms’ that have been made in California — how you vote, who can vote, how your vote is counted, how your ballot can be delivered,” Schweizer says on the most recent episode of The DrillDown podcast. “All of which have, we would argue, made fraud legal in the state of California.”
Eggers wrote the 2018 book FRAUD: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election. The book detailed many ways that elections in the U.S. have been rigged, defrauded, and outright stolen throughout American history. He and Schweizer count up the ways the Golden State is today the gold standard for how not to manage elections. You might call it “gain-of-function election rigging.”
“California elections are a disgrace. But not by accident — on purpose,” Eggers says. He introduces a recent quote from U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli: “Our system sucks,” Essayli tells reporters on Fox News. “We have universal vote by mail. We have no voter ID. That is a recipe for fraud, and it makes it almost impossible to know how many people are eligible to vote in California.”
As Schweizer and Eggers detail, it really began in 2011, when California approved online voter registration (SB 397). A later analysis, Schweizer says, “found that it created almost instantly more than 40,000 duplicate registrations in Los Angeles County.”
In 2013, the state allowed non-citizens to serve as poll workers (AB 817). “It just seems odd. You can get near the buffet, but you’re not allowed to eat,” Eggers quips.
In 2014, it began issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. “It creates this opportunity, when you get a driver’s license, they automatically register you to vote,” Schweizer says. “And the key thing is that California election officials, including the Secretary of State’s office, are barred from accessing DMV and Homeland Security information. So, there’s no way to ascertain the citizenship status.”
“That’s remarkable. Absolutely remarkable,” Schweizer says.
The state also approved automatically mailing ballots to all registered voters and it lowered to 16 the age that someone may “pre-register” to vote. The following year, California’s legislature required that all vote counting be done at central county facilities, rather than by the more common method of doing it at individual precincts. Legislators also set very lax standards for “curing” mail ballots without requiring the verified signature of the voter.
In 2016, California legalized a practice known as “ballot harvesting,” the collection of ballots from large housing units such as nursing homes, even allowing the harvester to “assist” the resident in filling out the ballot. This also allowed anyone to turn in an unlimited number of completed, sealed ballots (most states only allow a family member to hand in a ballot). Eggers’s book explains the many vulnerabilities of doing what Florida election officials called “granny farming.”
In 2019, California went even farther, allowing anyone to use a business or commercial address as their “home” address for purposes of registration and for where to mail that person’s mail-in ballot. An L.A. County woman who worked as a longtime signature collector for ballot initiatives pled guilty to paying people, including homeless individuals in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles, to register to vote. One detail shared by the prosecution: she provided her own former address to homeless voters while they completed the registration form.
The California Post reported that thousands of homeless voters were registered to vote at L.A. shelters — despite many not living there or the facilities not having any beds. One drop-in center that received $600,000 from socialist candidate Nithya Raman, who will be in the mayoral runoff in November, had 185 registered voters at the address but offers no accommodations, the newspaper reported.
Other reports by citizen journalists associated with James O’Keefe’s organization have published video footage of paid political operatives offering cigarettes to homeless people on the streets of L.A. to get them to register.
Finally, in the wake of the 2020-2021 Covid pandemic, California’s Democrat-controlled government made universal mail balloting permanent.
“It’s like ‘goblin mode,’ as the kids say,” Eggers commented.
“The bottom line is that California has set up a system that can easily be exploited, and done it by design,” Schweizer concludes.
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