Dirty: Dem. Sec. of State Caught Allowing Hundreds of Californians To Vote Twice: Report
It’s not uncommon for a state-level political candidate to push “voter access” and “election integrity” as cornerstones of his or her campaign.
One liberal California politician not only failed to uphold his promise, he’s grossly ignoring a gaping flaw in the system that allows some residents to vote for their favorite candidates twice.
According to Daniel Borenstein with The Mercury News, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla is taking heavy flak for not correcting a serious issue in several counties that has resulted in hundreds of voters being able to cast two votes at the polls.
Since it’s not uncommon in this period of American history for election determinations to come down to a few votes, this is a complete mess that very well could have serious implications for future state and national elections.
But it’s not a problem that Democratic politicians, including Padilla, seem to be eager to fix. It’s not difficult to understand why: A majority of those double-voters are likely to be Democrats, given their geographic location.
At this stage in the game, we know that Democrats have a history of doing everything they possibly can to secure as many votes as possible, no matter the means.
The way this voting glitch is exploited is scary and simple. All that a resident of the affected county has to do is register to vote by mail in the primary and claim no party preference. He or she then receives a nonpartisan mail-in ballot.
The voter then “changes” his or her mind and decides to vote with a Democratic primary ballot, which is promptly sent out.
So, the trick is that the voter doesn’t surrender the nonpartisan primary ballot received, which can later be taken to the polls on Election Day and exchanged on the spot for a Democratic ballot for a second vote. The poll workers have no way to check if that voter has already voted by mail, as other counties do. They use computers to check whether a voter has participated.
According to The Mercury News, the issue doesn’t affect counties that have converted to Padilla’s Voters Choice Act program, which emphasizes voting by mail.
But in the affected counties, which include Contra Costa and Alameda counties, it’s difficult to determine whether someone has already voted until it’s entirely too late.
After this issue was eventually brought to light, several of the double voters were charged with fraud and given light community-service sentences as a punishment. Not only is the system broken, the consequences for cheaters are barely a slap on the wrist.
Most of the voters who were discovered to have voted twice were not found guilty, as “criminal intent” couldn’t be proved.
Padilla calls it an “administrative” issue that he intends to fix — except he hasn’t, despite being in office for three years. One would think that something so simple as an administrative problem would be easy to correct, as opposed to something that would require actual legislation. But nope.
Not only are this convenient flaw and Padilla’s failure to correct it the opposite of “election integrity,” but they trash his promise to increase “voter access.” If select Californians are allowed to vote twice, that mathematically denies every other California voter the entirety of his or her vote, since it’s being minimized by the people voting two times.
And to think, Padilla was one of the leading voices against efforts by President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission to collect the personal data of California voters because he claimed it would legitimize claims of previous fraud in the state. Turns out, Trump’s commission was on to something.
Padilla and other state legislators should be humiliated by a problem such as this, which can be easily corrected with modern technology. But hey, extra votes are extra votes, so don’t expect a change anytime soon.
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