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In an ideal world, we could be confident that all persons are honest and trustworthy at all times. But that is not the world we live in.
It is therefore a great mystery why California has created an electoral system that operates on an On Your Honor vote-by-mail system, which has destroyed election integrity in our state.
Parts 1-4 in this article series discussed California’s “on your honor” policies of
The above State policies cause county elections offices to have to process millions of ballots before they can count them. In 2022, approximately 80+ percent of all ballots cast were mail-in ballots that needed processing.
Ballot processing is multi-step and very time- and labor-intensive. California’s lax ballot processing procedures subject ballots to multiple opportunities for error, carelessness, incompetence or intentional wrongdoing that could lose, alter or disqualify legitimate ballots while failing to filter out those cast illegitimately or illegally.
One of the most significant steps in ballot processing is signature verification, marketed to voters as the way to ensure only lawful ballot are counted. But, as they say, the devil is in the details, and a closer look at the regulations surrounding this “verification” make it far less reassuring.
- Signatures no longer must “match.” The Secretary of State’s arguably illegal “emergency” regulations, which the legislature hurried to translate into law, now say the signatures must only “compare,” and that the comparison “shall be liberally construed in favor of the voter.”
Perhaps nowhere is the On Your Honor system better exemplified than this statement in the emergency regulations (now law) first imposed in September 2020:
“…comparison of a signature shall begin with the basic presumption
that the signature…is the voter’s signature”
- There is a long list of provided handwriting characteristics processors may use to determine whether a signature “compares” (qualities such as slant, spacing and letter formation). But each county determines the definition of “compares.” Some counties require three points of similarity, some two and many only ONE.
- Though the law also requires further scrutiny for signatures that show “multiple, obvious and significant differences,” EIPCa observers have reported that if the mandated one-to-three-point comparison is verified, multiple, obvious and significant differences will not cause the signature to be challenged.
Thus, signatures clearly not written by the same individual are accepted because, for example, both the envelope and file signatures are in cursive, or all the “I”s are dotted, or all the “T”s are crossed.
- In this context of lax signature comparison, EIPCa observers have observed election workers:
o not verify the signature at all.
o conduct only a cursory comparison.
o accept signatures that clearly do not compare with the signature on file.
It is not possible to overstate the significance of this problem.
Because hundreds of thousands of “bad” ballots are in circulation due to unmaintained voter rolls and on-your-honor citizenship verification,
because people mark their ballots without the protection or supervision of elections officials and observers,
because people return their ballots with no chain of custody, and
because signature verification procedures are so weak as to be virtually useless…
bad actors may submit fraudulent ballots, alter ballots, forge signatures or dispose of “inconvenient” ballots without detection.
California law and regulations make it possible (probable) for large numbers of ineligible voters to vote, and for harvesters and other would-be manipulators to submit large numbers of invalid ballots that will be counted.
Other issues creating chaos in the ballot processing arena include:
- Ballots deemed damaged or unreadable by tabulating machines must be duplicated in a process that is not standardized and often poorly supervised. This includes ballots damaged in handling or by the voter, voting choices sent in on regular paper or sample ballots and remote access vote by mail ballots.
- Multiple ballots received in a single envelope must by law be counted, provided that the same number of signatures appears on the return envelope, even though there is often no way to match the extra signatures with a signature on file.
Starting with the “On Your Honor” presumption that all ballots are legitimate lowers the vigilance of election officials and opens up the possibility of invalid votes, ineligible people voting in our elections, and/or inconsistencies between counties.
These problems have destroyed election integrity
by undoubtably allowing invalid votes.
Please stay tuned for the rest of this On Your Honor article series.
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