A little-known option of voting involving the printing of ballots home and sent is giving Newsom recall proponents cause for worry about voter fraud.
Ballots began being dropped in the mail on Monday by the Stanislaus County Elections Office. The recall election is on Sept. 14. Recent polls suggest that support for the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom is growing and near or at 50 percent.
There is growing unrest over Newsom’s leadership, including the explosion in homeless numbers, highly restrictive regulations relating to COVID-19 and concerns about loss of individual freedoms, the closure of schools last year and now mandate for vaccines and masks as well as releasing prisoners onto the streets. Recall organizers collected more than 1.5 million signatures from voters from all parties to qualify for the special election.
A total of 46 candidates are running to replace Newsom should the first question about the recall pass with a majority vote.
Orrin Heatlie, the chairman of the California Patriot Coalition to Recall Gavin Newsom, is concerned about the potential for voters fraud associated with the RemoteAccessible Vote By Mail system, or RAVBM. The program was created in 2017, mostly for use by active military and overseas voters or blind voters.
Heatlie wonders why there is such a program when the state mandated all mail ballot voting. He said if a last-minute surge in support for Newsom occurs to defy what the polls are saying about a close election, his group could mount a legal challenge. Heatlie told the Washington Examiner: “All the mail-in ballots weren’t good enough, and they had to go and take that extra step.” He said his group will be working closely with the Election Integrity Project to ensure no voting irregularities occur. The fear is that aggressive Democrat ballot harvesters could use the RAVBM system to thwart the recall of Newsom by pressuring people to vote against the recall.
U.S. Senate candidate Mark Meuser said GOP Congressman Young Kim lost the 2018 election after posting a sizeable lead but losing with harvesters in Orange County dumped thousands of ballots on the last day. He said he heard that some canvassers knocked on the same doors up to 10 times to bug them for a ballot. He said those voters who trashed their ballots but “suddenly decided to vote, it’s not because they are a patriot. It’s because they are under undue influence by an individual.”
Donna Linder, clerk-recorder-registrar of voters in Stanislaus County, said the RAVBM system has safeguards against double voting or persons voting who shouldn’t be.
She said the online system can benefit visually impaired voters as it can read the voter information guide and the ballot and the voter can mark it.
“But you have to have a printer and you have to mail it back to us,” said Linder. “And you have to have your signature for us to verify it.”
Because of COVID, all voters can use the system.
The process starts with a call to the county elections office and a hunt for that specific voters’ information on the website.
“If you aren’t a registered voter you’re not going to find … your ballot.”
She said others cannot get to just any voters’ information to steal a ballot and she also said there are safeguards so that a voter cannot vote twice – if two ballots are received, they will not be counted and will be throw out.
