Election Blues

By Lou Segal

Blue Shift in Late Votes Cast in California

I know if you say that our elections may not entirely be on the up and up at this time in our history you will be accused of being a right-wing conspiratorial nut or even worse, an insurrectionist. But what is going on in California with our elections today doesn’t pass the smell test.

After two weeks many congressional districts had only 40 to 50% of the votes counted. Three weeks after the election, California was still counting votes. How could this be? Well, since California instituted universal mail-in balloting and allowed ballot harvesting, it has resulted in millions of flawed votes that need to be “cured.” This is a situation where voters forget to sign and/or date their ballots or where their registration records are missing or incorrect. Sometimes election officials can’t match signatures on the ballots with the signatures on the registration files for these voters.

Also, many voters don’t mail their ballots until election day and the ballots are not received by the election office until many days after the election. The law in California doesn’t allow for any ballot to be rejected until it has gone through a lengthy process of curing. In other words, voters are contacted to give them the opportunity to correct problems on their ballots.

Curiously, there is a phenomenon in California called the Blue Shift. What this means is that all these ballots that are not counted until days and weeks after election day are disproportionality going to Democrat candidates. Two egregious examples are two House contests in Southern California. One is District 13 and the other is District 45. In both contests, the Republican was leading by over five percentage points on election day or by many thousands of votes. However, in each case, the Democratic candidate overtook the Republican a full three weeks after election day. On the 21^st day after the election, with close to 99% of the votes counted, the Democrat pulled ahead in each case by less than a hundred votes. Most of these flawed votes that took three weeks to “fix” mostly went to the Democrat candidates.

How convenient.

Changing Methods to Favor Democrats

California – for reasons that are obvious – keeps passing laws removing any controls to protect the integrity of the voting process.

For a U.S. House of Representatives where the Republican majority may be only two votes, losing these two seats in the House of Representatives can be very consequential in moving legislation to implement the president’s agenda.

Another potential pitfall is same-day registration and voting. This means a voter can show up on election day unregistered and still cast a ballot. They don’t even need a voter ID, such as a driver’s license or Social Security number to prove U.S. citizenship.

If you don’t have an address, that’s okay too.

If you are wondering how we can be sure this voter is a U.S. citizen, the answer is you can’t. Interestingly, districts or precincts that are slowest to count votes have the highest percentage of young and minority voters or large numbers of college students.

Democrats in California argue all this is not important. The only concern should be making sure every person has the opportunity to vote, regardless of whether we can be sure they are eligible to vote. Obviously, they are trying to tilt election outcomes to favor themselves, and so far, as evidenced by the two races referenced herein, they have been very successful.

Federalizing National Elections May Be Required

States such as Florida count 98% of the votes on election night. Everyone knows the outcome of their elections a few hours after the polls close. Consequently, there is a high degree of confidence in their elections as opposed to California, where Republicans with big leads after the election ultimately end up losing by having their leads chipped away little by little, like a slow steady drip, until weeks after the election they find themselves on the losing end by the thinnest of margins.

Skeptics are going to ask: Where is your proof of fraud? How do you know these late votes are counted incorrectly?

The answer is: I don’t know, but why should I have the burden of proof when I don’t have the ability to examine these votes or scrutinize our voter rolls. Why should I have to prove a negative?

It’s incumbent upon election officials to open the process so everyone can see what is happening with these votes. Are these voters U.S citizens legally residing in California? Did they fill out their ballots without undue interference by partisan interlopers?

Although I have been skeptical about federalizing election laws, I think one of the first things the Republican Congress should take up after Inauguration Day is correcting this problem of counting votes weeks after the election. We need to replicate the Florida model in California and every other state. Polls indicate that this is overwhelmingly desired by the American people. It’s unhealthy to have nearly half the country believing our elections are rigged. Whether or not there is sufficient cheating going on to change election outcomes, it’s time to make sure everyone has a high degree of confidence that our elections are honest and fair.