Ballot harvesting may be legal, but it isn’t right

Athought experiment: An Arizona-based political activist group with a radical agenda — left or right, take your pick — has hit on the idea of collecting mail-in ballots at election time from so-called “low efficacy” voters. That is, voters who sometimes may return the ballots mailed to their homes by the elections department. And, sometimes, not.

It’s not against the law. No other state is anywhere near as indifferent to such “ballot-harvesting” by activists as Arizona is. In comparison to election law in pretty much every other state, Arizona is a ballot-integrity-free zone.

For the last several election cycles, activists have collected these ballots by the thousands. How, exactly? That seems to be an activist’s trade secret.

They may collect them one by one, after an earnest discussion with the voter about the issues and candidates. Or, they simply may drop by after the voter has filled out the ballot all by himself. The activist may be wholly indif-

ferent to this low-efficacy voter’s choices. The activist organization may be just a plain, old civic-engagement group, organized to further the American experiment. Like Boy Scouts.

On the other hand, of course, the activists also could be a bit more, well, aggressive about assuring that the voter supports the right candidates and causes.

Would a liberal, union-supported activist group be inclined to deliver a ballot that approved of, say, Phoenix’s Proposition 487, which would end the current pension system for some public-sector unions? Pretty unlikely. They could, conceivably, be harvesting empty ballots that the activists fill out themselves. Or, they could organize “ballot parties,” serving lunch and giving away prizes to voters checking the right boxes. These are “low efficacy” voters, remember. They could be stealing the ballots from mailboxes, for all anyone knows. How can anyone possibly know?

So, there is the hypothetical. And, now, here is the question for you to answer:

Why the hell would any state that gave a damn about the integrity of the ballot countenance such an arrangement?

One day before the primary elections ended, on Aug. 25, a young fellow wearing a Citizens for a Better Arizona T-shirt walked into Maricopa County elections headquarters carrying a box. It was filled with hundreds of mail-in ballots, which he merrily delivered to county election workers.

ARepublican activist who happened to be there filmed the CBA worker delivering the ballots. His video recently went viral on YouTube. Conservative groups and media picked up the story. For conservatives, it was a true “ah HA!” moment. It was, to them, evidence of “ballot stuffing.” Of fraud.

And, a lot of the conservative media noted the fact that all the “fraud” was being perpetrated by “Mexicans.”

Say what you like about leftist machine politics, but they know how to do damage control.

They leaped in with press releases declaring that Citizens for a Better Arizona is nothing but a “civic engagement group” helping out befuddled voters.

The CBA is a union-backed, Alinskyite activist group whose aggressive tactics in past elections have infuriated and embarrassed even other union-backed activist groups. To call the CBA a “civic engagement group” is akin to calling Rush Limbaugh a political-issues analyst. True, but, well, just gross.

Many of them, too, noted the peculiar obsession some conservative critics seemed to have with race — a well-established, effective method for changing the subject and shutting people up. When some conservative media picked up the story and accented the “Hispanic” angle, the liberal spinmeisters suddenly had a lot of race-obsessing material to work with.

“The man dropping off the ballots is Latino, fitting perfectly into the theories about voter fraud enabling liberal electoral victories,” wrote an emotionally wounded reporter at the liberal website the Daily Dot, about all the mean coverage of the video.

And, they noted — correctly — that accusations of fraud were, simply, inaccurate.

“I know it’s uncomfortable for people to see someone delivering masses of ballots,” said Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne. “But there is nothing illegal about it.”

That doesn’t make it right, of course. It only accents how absurdly porous Arizona’s mail-in ballot law is.

Incredibly, the PR doctors working to smother the video’s fire somehow convinced the League of Women Voters of Arizona to put its stamp of approval upon ballot harvesting.

“This is not different than any other get-out-the-vote campaign that assists voters getting to polling places on election day,” said Robyn Prud’hommeBauer, president of the Arizona league.

No different? Again, a thought experiment:

You are a poll watcher on Election Day. A person wearing an “I am a political radical” T-shirt walks up to a voter who is marking her ballot, and instructs her on who and what to vote for.

What do you do? Once upon a time, League of Women Voters poll watchers would call the cops. Now? They cheer lead for “ballot parties.”