The actual voting fraud
It’s not just that Democrats have been able to count on more than 50 electoral votes from California for three decades. Congressional Republicans have been reduced to trying to win back a few of the seats they lost two years ago in onetime strongholds such as the San Joaquin Valley and Orange County. And the party’s state Senate caucus, already a micro-minority occupying just over a quarter of the chamber, could lose a third of its remaining seats next month.
What’s a California Republican to do? Cheat, apparently.
The state GOP acknowledged this week that it was behind unauthorized ballot boxes, some labeled “official” or “secure,” that cropped up beside churches, gun shops and other locations in communities where Republicans are defending territory. Representatives of Secretary of State Alex Padilla and Attorney General Xavier Becerra, both Democrats, wrote a cease-and-desist letter to Republican officials declaring the boxes illegal.
The hamhanded dirty trick was a gift to Padilla, the state’s top election official, who is rightly under scrutiny for awarding a $ 35 million emergency contract to a firm linked to Joe Biden to reassure voters that mailin ballots are safe — which, to be clear, they are. State Controller Betty Yee’s office has withheld approval of the contract on the basis that Padilla hasn’t cited sufficient legal authority for the expense.
With President Trump falsely impugning the security of voting by mail as a means of preemptively challenging the election, California Republicans are no anomaly within a party that poses as a guardian of election security. Rather than put up fake ballot boxes, Texas Republicans opted to remove the real ones, restricting dropoff sites to one per county. A court upheld the tactic this week.
Such shenanigans might motivate more to brave pandemicera polls in person, but too many will find unnecessary barriers there, too. Georgia voters, for example, reported waiting up to 11 hours to cast ballots Monday. That could reflect ephemeral enthusiasm on the first day of early voting, but the state’s sordid history of suppression provides cause for concern.
Thousands nevertheless endured the wait with determination and even enthusiasm, powerful antidotes to any attempt to thwart the people’s will.