Earlier today, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law that will make voting by mail permanent for state elections. What this means is that every single resident who lives in California will receive a mail-in ballot. And this also includes residents who no longer live in California (if they did not change their voting address on the electoral roll). This is a serious problem.
What this does is that this paves the way for more voter fraud. In the last presidential election, voter fraud occurred. And it happened in 2016 and 2012 and even before that. Voter fraud occurs in every single election. The bigger question is, for 2020, is how widespread was it? Was it enough that would have changed the outcome of an election? And because of the fact that former President Donald Trump brought up the topic of election integrity, a lot of people have lost faith in the electoral system.
Fortunately, states such as Georgia and Arizona passed election integrity bills that will make future elections more secured. As for California, that is not the case here. There are numerous examples, especially in the recall election, where there were cases of the voting system being flawed. For example, police in Torrance, California, arrested a felon in his car(?) and found 300 ballots in the vehicle. He is facing charges of drugs, forgery violations, and other charges as well. Another case is in San Fernando Valley, California, election officials were telling voters that they had already voted. This should raise eyebrows. This suggests that someone had already voted for them and no election official verified and checked to see if the ballot matches the person that’s submitting it. Since these incidents happened at that these places, this means that this can happen anywhere in California. And as far as I am aware, there is no signature verification for mail-in ballots.
Who will oversee the mail-in ballots and perform any rigorous checking to ensure that the ballots are verified and authentic? How will Californians have faith in the electoral system now that vote-by-mail is permanent on a state level? Now that’s something to think about.