California ballot rules raise new election concerns
Many people went to bed a week ago thinking Spencer Pratt was on his way to the November runoff for Los Angeles mayor. He was ahead of Socialist City Councilwoman Nithya Raman by thousands of votes on election night. Then the count shifted. Within a week, The Associated Press called the race for Raman after a wave of late-arriving mail ballots erased that lead.
The result was not just a surprise. It also put California’s mail-in ballot rules back in the spotlight. The state allows some late-arriving ballots to be counted even when they do not have a readable postmark. If the ballot reaches election officials within seven days after Election Day, it can still be accepted under state law.
Here is how the law describes it: “Vote-by-mail ballot is postmarked or date stamped on or before Election Day by a bona fide private mail delivery service and received by the elections official in accordance with Elections Code section 3020,” state law says.
The law also says that if a vote-by-mail envelope “has no dated postmark, the postmark is illegible, and there is no date stamp for receipt from a bona fide private mail delivery service” the ballot can still be counted if the “voter has dated the vote-by-mail ballot identification envelope or the envelope otherwise indicates that the ballot was excepted on or before Election Day…”
That is where the problem starts. If there is no clear postmark, election officials have no independent third-party proof of when the ballot was actually mailed. Election law expert Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Fellow at public policy organization Advancing American Freedom, said that plainly on iHeartRadio.
“If there’s no postmark on it or it’s too blurry to read … the law in CA is ‘We’ll go by whatever date the voter wrote in the envelope,’” Spakovsky told Kittle.
That does not prove wrongdoing in this mayoral race. But it does create a system that leans hard on self-reporting and trust. A voter could, in theory, mail a ballot after Election Day and still write in the Election Day date if the envelope arrives in time. That is exactly the kind of setup that makes people question whether the count is truly airtight.
As Sean Davis said on The Megyn Kelly Show, it is hard to see how ballots without a verifiable mailing date make for a “credible, secure” election.
“There is only one reason to design an election in this way, and it’s to control the outcome,” Davis continued.