21 MILLION BALLOTS ON WAY TO STATE VOTERS
Most expected to arrive this week after being mailed today
For the first time in California history, a ballot will make its way in the mail this week to every registered California voter, a decision made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that will reshape the election experience as well as the strategies of campaigns and candidates.
More than 21 million ballots will be mailed, more than in any state in the nation. Most will arrive this week, though some counties began the process almost two weeks ago. State law requires absentee ballots to be mailed no later than today, 29 days before the Nov. 3 election.
Few states have moved more decisively toward voting by mail over the last two decades than California, and the results have been striking. At least two-thirds of the ballots cast in the three most recent statewide elections had been mailed to voters, peaking at 72 percent of all votes recorded in the March primary.
Even so, millions of voters have bucked the trend and continued to vote in person on election day, and millions more don’t often participate or are newly registered. Should those two groups decide to use the ballot that arrives in the mail, they will have to abide by voting rules that might not be easily understood.
“Yes, it’s a big convenience,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. “But it shifts the responsibility for getting all the steps right from a poll worker to the voter.”
Researchers have estimated that the average California election in the last decade saw an average of 1.7 percent of vote-by-mail ballots rejected for a variety of reasons. Based on voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election — which some think will be surpassed this year — the historical average would translate into almost 250,000 ballots not being counted.
Last month, Alexander’s organization released a detailed review of rejected absentee ballots in three counties from the November 2018 election. The top three reasons were that voters returned them too late, they didn’t sign the ballot envelope or the signature provided didn’t match the one on file.
“We have this persistent, stubborn ballot rejection problem,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking when people’s ballots are rejected.”
Even though they are mailed a ballot, some Californians will undoubtedly insist on participating in person. Voting by mail has not been popular everywhere — most notably in Los Angeles County, home to more than 5.6 million voters.
“In L.A. County, the data shows that we cannot rely on a single option for voting,” said Dean Logan, the county’s registrar of voters. “Voting by mail is a great safeguard. But we know, based on the data, that there are communities and voters across L.A. County that prefer to vote in person or need the services provided by voting in person.”
In May, Gov. Gavin Newsom took the unprecedented step of issuing a statewide order for voting by mail in November, making clear that the mandate was for only one election and necessary to limit the spread of the coronavirus. The Legislature ratified the plan in June, and additional rules were put in place for those who will vote in person.
No doubt some Californians will embrace the flexibility that voting away from a polling place offers. In 1979, the state eliminated the need for an excuse to receive an absentee ballot, a system still used in some parts of the country. The option to choose permanent absentee voting was created in 2002. The changes have proved popular; in all but two statewide elections since 2008, the majority of votes were not cast at a traditional polling place.
Voter perceptions are also unusual, largely fueled by baseless accusations from President Donald Trump about the legitimacy of voting by mail. A recent UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll found 41 percent of likely California voters don’t believe that ballots can be delivered safely and on time by the U.S. Postal Service.
“It’s going to be a wild election cycle because of that,” said Paul Mitchell, an analyst whose firm Political Data Inc. consults with candidates on election trends. “It is crazy to me how much we’ve politicized the mechanics of the election.”
Myers writes for the Los Angeles Times.