It hasn’t always been legal in California for just anyone to show up at a stranger’s door and ask them to hand over their vote-by-mail ballot.
In 2001, Gov. Gray Davis vetoed Senate Bill 462, writing in his veto message, “This bill would delete the requirement that an absentee voter be ill or disabled in order for a family member to return a ballot and add ‘a person who resides at the same residence’ to the list of individuals statutorily authorized to return a voter’s ballot.” He continued, “It is important to maintain the standard under current law that a person be ill or disabled to request that someone else submit the ballot.”
That’s how tightly the chain of custody of vote-by-mail ballots was controlled 25 years ago. People voting by mail were required to mail or drop off their own ballot unless they were physically unable to do so, and even then, only a family member could return the ballot.
In 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed Assembly Bill 1271. “This bill would allow a vote-by-mail (VBM) voter to authorize any other person to deliver or return their ballot,” he wrote in his veto message to the Legislature. “As I have noted when vetoing similar legislation, any effort to increase voter participation must be balanced against the potential increase in voter fraud. While I appreciate the author’s intent and efforts to protect against fraud, the opportunity is still too prevalent.”
AB 1271 required written authorization by the voter for someone else to return the mail ballot. Schwarzenegger said that was “an important safeguard” but not enough. “There is no way to verify that the ‘authorized representative’ is not paid by, or volunteering with a political party, campaign or other political entity,” he wrote. “While some VBM voters could benefit from this added flexibility, it would leave the door open for bad actors to abuse the system.”
In 2016, Gov. Jerry Brown addressed concerns about safeguards on returning vote-by-mail ballots in an interesting way. He removed all of them.
Brown signed Assembly Bill 1921, authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who went on to become president of the California Labor Federation. AB 1921 deleted all legal restrictions on who could return a voter’s ballot.
AB 1921 even deleted the provisions in state law that had prohibited a paid or volunteer worker of a campaign committee, political party or other organization from returning a voter’s ballot. The workers can’t be paid “by the ballot,” but there’s otherwise no limit on what political interests can spend to pester people in their own doorways into voting on the spot, then turning over their ballot to a perfect stranger.
In some states, this is a crime.
Of course, voter intimidation or impersonation are not legal in California, but with mail voting, no election officials or poll workers are present to prevent these things from happening, or to witness them.
At a polling place, it’s illegal even to wear a campaign button within 100 feet of the entrance. Voters are entitled to a secret ballot, in peace, without anyone telling them how they should vote. Since 2016, it is legal for paid campaign workers to stand next to a voter who is filling out a vote-by-mail ballot.
The Legislature’s bill analysis for AB 1921 cited a letter from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which warned that the bill “promotes vote harvesting and greatly increases the likelihood for fraud in our elections process. This is especially true now that current law allows for absentee ballots without a postmark to be turned in up to three days after the election. It would not be an implausible scenario for a close election to be reversed through the filling out of absentee ballots after Election Day.”
The vulnerability to fraud has since been widened. Counties now must mail a ballot to every active registered voter and accept ballots delivered up to seven days after the polls close, even without a postmark, if the ballot envelope is hand-dated and the date is on or before Election Day.
Anyone old enough to vote is old enough to remember that California hasn’t always been so careless with its elections.
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