[conspire] Stolen election narratives, CA edition

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Steve M Bibayoff (bibayoff at gmail.com):

> What do you think is a "plain old fake elections"? As opposed to plain
> NEW fake elections? FANCY old fake elections?  plain old REAL
> elections?

That one boggled me, too.  You'll notice it boggled me enough that I 
didn't touch it in my reply, and instead steered clear of the crazy.

Josef mentioned good ol' machine politics, NYC and Chicago-style.  
As he hints about his zayde (Yiddish: grandfather), classically a lot of
that was slipping someone a fin, and that person being expected to vote
the way you like, as a warm personal gesture of gratitude.

My friend Ruben, whom folks here know and occasionally have seen
on-list, talks with me in a friendly fashion about election fraud risks
and problems.  I really do mean friendly, and I'm going to now summarise
some of that (mostly telephone) discussion because maybe it's
interesting, and nothing I'm reporting reflects poorly on him at all.

Ruben talks quite a lot about fraud risks from every form of voting
_other_ than a single person, unaccompanied, casting a vote inside the
secrecy of an in-person voting booth.  His concerns are real, and should
not be dismissed.  Let's talk about them.

1.  Paying people for their votes.  In the strictest sense, this cannot
be prevented, period.  If people are willing to be bribed for their
votes, that will happen.  Ruben's point about that, though, to condense
down what he said, is that the secret ballot prevents the vote-buyer
from _enforcing_ the purchase.

Again, let's not ignore this risk-factor.  It's real.  Letting people
fill out ballots anywhere at all makes it easier for a Tammany Hall-style
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall) corruption operation to not
only buy votes but make sure of the vote result -- by looking at the
ballot.  Of course, a sly voter might take the $5, show the filled-in
ballot, then go to a voting office official in private and exchange the
ballot as "spoiled" for a fresh one and vote differently.

2.  Remote voting options also make possible voter coercion.  There are
many horror stories, in particular, of domineering husbands insisting on 
controlling how their wives vote, under threat of violence.  This ugly 
fact, too, is real.  Ruben asserts that making persons go unaccompanied
into a voting booth, and voting secretly, end-runs this scenario for
someone under coercion, letting that person exercise a citizen's freedom
at least at that moment.  But is Ruben's claim true?  Hold that thought.

3.  Because of the above scenarios (bought votes, coerced votes), Ruben 
asserts that vote-by-mail ballots must not be accepted.  And we must
concede some merit to his view.  But then, what else follows from his
premises?  By the same logic, absentee voting must also be banned, 
though it has been the tradition across the USA as in other democracies
for centuries.  I pointed out to Ruben that _that_ change would never
be accepted; that he picked the wrong hill to die on, if he's set in his
views.  Also, overseas voting and military remote voting must likewise 
be henceforth forbidden.  And that, too, ain't going to happen.

4.  Speaking of things that aren't going to happen, banning the
handicapped and frail from being accompanied by helpers into the voting
booth is another non-starter.

5.  But my final point to Ruben was:  People have small digital cameras,
these days, often ones in their pockets that also make telephone calls.
So, if I pay you $50 for your vote (allowing for inflation since Josef's
zayde's day), and you totally-for-sure have your voting privacy
protected by banning all forms of voting except for unaccompanied voting 
behind a drawn curtain in the voting booth, aren't I going to insist you
take a selfie with your ballot, and then show it to me?

There aren't practical ways to prevent that, other than putting TSA
in charge of voting booth access.  Cell phones are a thing. 

So, that was one somewhat disjointed conversation.




On a couple of other occasions, Ruben was terribly worked up over
"ballot harvesting", telling me that it's a terribly corrupt practice
and means for stealing elections.  And it's certainly not just Ruben 
who goes around saying this.  John H. Cox, who five days ago got 
utterly creamed at the polls by Gavin Newsom for the _second_ time, 
was asked by SFGate after his 2018 24-point drubbing why he felt he was
defeated
(https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/John-Cox-governor-recall-Gavin-Newsom-2021-GOP-why-16073577.php).
Let me just quote this worthy's answer:

   "It's a little unfair to look at percentages," Cox said. "In 2018,
   you had Democrat turnout supercharged by [Tom] Steyer, [Mike] Bloomberg
   and [George] Soros with all the ballot harvesting, so it was a tough
   environment for any Republican. What's important is I received more
   votes than any GOP candidate in state history other than Arnold
   Schwarzenegger."

So, hey, quelle surprise!  It was a conspiracy -- and, moreover, a 
conspiracy by three wealthy Jewish Americans.

That's right:  Anti-abortion guy, multimillionaire real estate investor
(and, frankly, slumlord) John Herman Cox, the California GOP's
standard-bearer for CA's 2018 gubernatorial election, got his ass kicked
at the polls by a Catholic San Francisco yuppie limousine liberal who
made his fortune operating overpriced wine shops and restaurants, and 
Cox's response was to invent an antisemitic conspiracy.

There's always room at the bottom (see
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/election-2021-09-14.html#elder), but that's
pretty low, right?  (I take a certain satisfaction in Cox's epic
2018 ass-whooping having just been repeated stronger, this time with
feeling.)


But reading that eye-rolling special pleading from Cox, and then hearing
Ruben's separate worries about "ballot harvesting", made me curious
enough to start at the obvious place:  What does "ballot harvesting" 
specifically refer to?

The correct answer, as Duncan MacKinnon like to say, is "It depends."  
People use the term to refer to multiple, distinct things.  And, as
always, the US has 51 sets of laws on the subject (including DC), 
some that outright ban and criminalise things described as "ballot
harvesting", and others (like California) that make lawful some 
varieties of the practice, and ban others.

In California, as NBC ch. 7 San Diego correctly pointed out, conveying
someone else's filled-out, sealed, signed ballot in-envelope to the
county Elections Office is lawful if:

1. Ballot-collector signs and prints his/her name in the space provided.
2. ...and deposits the envelope in a county ballot box within three days.

And, NBC ch. 7 San Diego points out, gobs of persons and groups do it
all the time, notably churches that perform the ballot-conveyance as a
service to their parishioners.

The notion of using _that_ form of ballot harvesting to "rig" an
election seems... impractical?  I mean, how does it work?  Do 
I put up a folding table outside the Save the Baby Seals Club 
with a sign saying "Hi, please entrust your treehugger bleeding heart
liberal ballots to me.  Trust me, I'll take your ballots to an official
dropbox."  And then, having collected 500 envelopes, and wishing to skew
the mayoral election in favour of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, I 
go home and create a cheery ballot bonfire?  Is that it?   I mean, 
sure, there are always gullible people, but it seems something of a
self-limiting problem, and not a useful machine-politics tactic, on
balance.