It’s time to admit that California’s vote-by-mail system is deeply flawed | Opinion
Good ideas don’t always turn out so well. Just consider California’s move to automatic mail voting for every active registered voter.
Prohibition advocates thought banning alcohol would uplift morality and increase prosperity. Instead, black markets, gangsters and widespread opposition followed.
Automatically sending a ballot by mail to everyone is our modern noble experiment.
Opinion
In 2021, lawmakers in Sacramento passed a new law initiating the vote-by-mail experiment in California. It called for every active registered voter would be mailed a ballot automatically.
Of course, it would be great if every eligible voter voted. But new data reveals that this experiment actually caused disenfranchisement. More than 226,000 mail ballots in the 2022 elections were rejected by election officials, according to the California Secretary of State’s own post-election data.
The top reason why ballots were rejected was because they arrived too late. That doesn’t come as a surprise, as the post office is best known for slow delivery. The Inspector General of the United States Postal Service established an aspirational goal of a 94% success rate for the timely delivery of political mail. Thank goodness the airlines set higher standards.
But the post office isn’t the only reason the experiment failed. Also disenfranchised were voters who mailed more than one ballot in their return envelope and were rejected;. Some envelopes arrived empty, and other envelopes lacked validation signatures.
When you vote in person at a precinct, you are given the opportunity to fix these issues. But, in the mail, there’s not someone there to alert you to your mistake and help you fix it.
In short, voting in person will always be a more secure way to ensure your vote is counted.
Meanwhile, another 10.8 million ballots were never returned. The majority of these ballots likely ended up in landfills and recycling bins across the Golden State. Currently, we don’t have any accounting for where they are.
Regular polling places have ironclad controls over ballot inventory and reconciliations are done at the end of the day. But there is no reconciliation of ballots in landfills.
Furthermore, mass mailing to bad addresses also wastes taxpayer dollars. Mail ballots should not be sent to voters who aren’t interested in voting by mail.
Vote by mail works best in states where voters fill out an application for a mail ballot. The California State Assembly made a mistake when it decided to automatically mail ballots to everyone, and it’s time to fix the problem.
While they’re at it, lawmakers should require that mail ballots be accompanied with a driver’s license, voter registration number or social security number to protect the process.
The automatic vote-by-mail experiment has failed. Will California lawmakers do anything about it?
J. Christian Adams is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
