‘They are not about election security. They are about election manipulation in 2020…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As last week brought a close to the nearly yearlong dispute over a congressional seat in North Carolina amid claims of ballot fraud, the focus now falls on California, where the very same type of fraud was legalized under former Gov. Jerry Brown and used to flip seven House seats in the 2018 election.
Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who headed the House Oversight Committee, details in a new book the similarities between the practice that Democrats have hypocritically condemned in one hand while condoning in another, based on whether it benefits them.
“The process of ballot harvesting should be illegal for very good reason,” Chaffetz wrote in an opinion piece published Monday on Fox News. “It violates the chain of custody, exposing the ballot to potential manipulation by campaign operatives or nonprofit political groups.”
Geographically one of the largest and last states to close on Election Day, California has notoriously taken weeks to tally its final results in recent elections.
In several cases, conservatives who believed they had won on Election Day found those victories suspiciously reversed as the state continued to receive and count mail-in ballots.
One of the biggest concerns with the state’s lax policies on provisional ballots, Chaffetz said, is vote tampering.
“They could harass voters to turn in ballots, ‘assist’ them in filling them out, and potentially ‘lose’ ballots that don’t support the candidate the ballot harvester is paid to help,” he said.
Such was the allegation in North Carolina, where a longtime political operative in a rural county was hired for get-out-the-vote initiatives by Republican candidate Mark Harris.
McCrae Dowless, who had long been involved with elections in Bladen County and worked for both political parties, was accused of illegally collecting and discarding some of the ballots benefiting Harris’s opponents.
Harris won the race by 905 votes, but the State Board of Elections refused to certify him after a partisan left-wing board member with ties to some of Dowless’s business associates raised the voter fraud concern at the very last minute.
Chaffetz said voter proportions gave clear indications that the same suspicious circumstances were present in California—on a much larger level.
“Studies of absentee voters have consistently shown they tend to reflect the population or lean slightly to the right,” he wrote. “But when ballot harvesting was deployed in California, we saw late ballots break heavily for Democrats.”
While technically ineligible to vote, the sanctuary state‘s vast population of illegal immigrants had a large presence in the ballot-collection initiatives, he said.
That included soliciting votes from homeless people and helping them to fill out their ballots.
The Los Angeles Times reported after the November 2018 election that at least nine people had been arrested for such electioneering efforts.
Chaffetz recounted a January 2019 story by the Times that, in one case, an “Dreamer” activist approached a man smoking a cigarette on a couch behind a local group shelter.
“He politely tried to wave her off until she ‘reminded him’ he had a right that she as an immigrant without citizenship didn’t have,” Chaffetz said. “Half an hour later, she was helping the voter lookup candidates as he filled out his ballot by the light of her phone.”
Chaffetz said recent congressional efforts to enhance election security, which cast the focus on Russia and other foreign threats, failed to address the biggest concerns.
In fact, the Democrat-led House had sought to reinforce the shady practices by encouraging more laws to promote absentee and provisional ballots.
“These measures are designed to enforce less secure voting processes on local communities, including the very vulnerable mail-in ballot,” Chaffetz said. “They are not about election security. They are about election manipulation in 2020.”
The vulnerabilities are even more alarming as the Left pushes for a national popular vote referendum to replace the Electoral College in deciding presidential elections.
This would ensure that populous states with corrupt election practices could effectively disenfranchise those in other states with stricter laws and tighter enforcement—including North Carolina.
“If we want to get serious about securing our elections, state and local lawmakers and election officials must crackdown on the practice of ballot harvesting,” Chaffetz said. “Otherwise, Democrats will use it to manipulate the results of the 2020 elections.”