Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,41
dismissed these claims, pointing to what they call a dearth of voter fraud convictions.
Nonetheless, they could hardly ignore what happened in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in 2018. This time election fraud was used by a Republican campaign to narrowly win a tight race against a popular Democrat. Had the parties been reversed, who knows how much coverage the race would have gotten. But with a Democrat losing and the race being rerun, there was no way to avoid shining a spotlight on a key vulnerability.
North Carolina’s absentee ballot provision actually has more security than the one H.R. 1 will impose nationwide. It requires ballots to be signed by the voter and witnessed by another person attesting that the voter is who they say they are. Campaign operatives in the North Carolina race violated state law by collecting absentee ballots on behalf of voters and turning them in.
This process, called ballot harvesting, is illegal in North Carolina for very good reason. Campaign operatives or nonprofit political groups 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. In North Carolina, officials estimate as many as a thousand ballots supporting the Democrat candidate may have been destroyed. One witness testified she was paid $150 for every fifty ballots she collected, acknowledging that in many cases she signed as a witness for ballots she had not actually watched the voter fill out.
The same ballot harvesting process used illegally in North Carolina was recently legalized in California, where it helped Democrats flip seven previously Republican seats in 2018. The process Democrats hate in North Carolina they defend in California, where third-party organizations like Grassroots Campaigns Inc. or labor unions are permitted (one might even say encouraged) to collect ballots directly from voters and turn them in on their behalf without a secure chain of custody. Prior to that change, only close relatives or those living at the same address could turn in another person’s completed ballot.
The indication that ballot harvesting made the difference can be found in the vote proportions. Studies of absentee voters have consistently shown they tend to reflect the population or lean slightly to the right. But when ballot harvesting was deployed in California, we saw late ballots break heavily for Democrats.
Take, for example, the race between incumbent Republican David Valadao and Democrat T. J. Cox in California’s rural 21st District. When polls closed, Valadao led Cox by 6,000 votes—or 8 percent. That margin was wide enough for media outlets to call the race for Valadao. But late ballots delivered by the hundreds from third-party groups broke for Cox so strongly that Cox ultimately eked out an 843-vote victory.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that elsewhere in the state, Orange County voters were calling the registrar’s office asking if it was legitimate for someone to come to their door and ask if they could take their ballot.
Who was coming to the door? According to a January 2019 Los Angeles Times story, illegal Dreamers were deeply engaged in the process—not just delivering ballots, but helping voters fill them out. The Times reports on the experience of one Dreamer, Gabriela Cruz, who “found” a voter smoking a cigarette on a tattered old couch behind a group home hours before election day.
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. “It could really make a change for us,” said Cruz, 29.
Half an hour later, she was helping Silva look up candidates as he filled out his ballot by the light of her phone.
What are the implications of activists with an agenda “helping” voters look up candidates and fill out ballots? How many of those activists are willing to turn in a ballot that doesn’t help their cause? Should we be exposing people’s ballots to that kind of temptation?
In this case, Democrats got a head start in California, which gave them an advantage. But that won’t always be the case. What happens when the only way to win elections is to have the biggest army of ballot harvesters?
In an ironic exchange, Democratic representative Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts tweeted during the debate over H.R. 1, writing:
As GOP stands unified against a bill to strengthen our democracy & increase transparency in our elections, it’s important to remember that the #NC09 seat is vacant because a GOP candidate tried to steal an election.
In reply,