On Your Honor

Although we value and aspire to uphold virtues such as honesty, courage and selflessness, we often fall short and bend to the temptations of dishonesty, cowardice and selfishness.  Human nature being what it is, we need fences, locks, and ID cards.  We need laws, consequences, and punishments.

Wise people do not trust others just because they say they can be trusted.  Wise people insist on safeguards.  Yet, the state of California has built an election system whose central feature is On Your Honor.

Part 1 of this series dealt with the unwise policy of not definitively verifying registrants’ citizenship before adding them to the voter rolls.

We now turn to the problem of faulty voter rolls, which pose notable problems for election integrity.  EIPCa data experts identified (conservatively) almost half a million “bad” registrations on the rolls before the 2020 election: duplicates, deceased, relocated, and non-voting for many years, sometimes decades).

If in-person voting with photo ID were the only way to vote, faulty voter rolls would pose less of a problem.  But they are a big problem in California because the state uses these faulty voter rolls as the basis for mass mailing.

Using faulty voter rolls for mass mailing floods communities with ballots that do not necessarily have a valid voter behind them:

• Ballots arrive at addresses where voters no longer live, making it possible for the current resident to complete and return a ballot in their place.  Evidently, the state trusts all current residents to do the right thing and destroy the ballot.  

• One individual may receive multiple ballots at the same address due to multiple registrations for the same person; e.g., Pat Jones, Pat G Jones, Patrick Jones.  This makes it possible for such individuals to vote more than once.

• Suspicious addresses – such as post-office boxes, storefronts, and office buildings, enable bad actors to locate, complete, collect, and return ballots that never reached valid voters.

A key reason that these problems have such significant impact is that California has watered down signature verification standards to the point that election workers cannot rigorously verify signatures, and virtually all signatures provided, legitimate or not, will be accepted.  We will detail this issue later in the series. 

California’s decisions to flood communities with ballots based on faulty voter rolls and to accept virtually all signatures have all but erased election integrity in our state.

Please stay tuned for our next article in this continuing series of On Your Honor.

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