Ballot harvesting

When late arriving ballots in the race for Los Angeles mayor turned dramatically against conservative Spencer Pratt last week, Donald Trump reacted with his usual subtlety. “They’re cheating on the election,” said the President, as it became clear Pratt would be knocked out of the runoff for the  November general election.  Democrats were quick to respond. California Attorney General Rob Bonta dismissed claims of vote fraud as “a figment of the imagination of Trump and others involved in that conspiracy theory.”   Bonta is right there’s no direct evidence that fraud swayed the LA mayor’s race. But California’s notorious tardiness in counting votes has been almost universally ridiculed and has undermined public trust in elections.

“Ballot harvesting.” To some, it’s a creepy term, conjuring images of hulking party machines plowing through passive fields of citizens, threshing their votes and delivering them to the ballot box. To others, the whole thing seems practically a conspiracy theory — a catch-all for sore losers who can’t understand how voters could have rejected their team. Feelings aside, ballot harvesting is a reality for much of the country. In twenty-seven states, your ballot can be returned by someone other than you. Further, only twelve of those twenty-seven have any limit at all on the number of ballots a person can turn in, meaning an eager harvester can show up with dozens or hundreds of ballots.