Sacramento County Vote by Mail Official Ballot. (Photo: Saccounty.net)
Legislature Authorized Opening California’s ‘Print-Your-Own Ballot From Home’ Program to Everyone
Gut-and-amend legislation facilitated a workaround
By Katy Grimes, August 9, 2021 4:51 pm
The Globe reported Sunday that California Secretary of State Shirley Weber may have invented a “print-your-own ballot from home” program just in time for the September 14th recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom through the Remote Accessible Vote by Mail (RAVBM) system. We asked several questions:
- Was this new or has this program been around but not promoted – until now?
- Can you print out more than one ballot?
- How are these verified and by whom?
- Why can’t these ballots be dropped off?
- Why must they be mailed?
- What could possibly go wrong?
Did California invent an audit-proof way to steal elections?
Because it was Sunday, we weren’t able to get anyone from the Secretary of State’s office on the phone to speak about this program, or any county Registrar of Elections employees either.
The Globe spoke with Constitutional and Elections Attorney Mark Meuser Monday and asked several of the questions which had come up since the article published.
We discovered that the original Remote Accessible Vote by Mail (RAVBM) system was created to assist those who are disabled and confined to home or who may have difficulties getting to a polling station, which Attorney Meuser confirmed.
However, our research on the SOS website found that the program no longer specified that the program was limited to the disabled.
Attorney Meuser said the program was indeed used by the disabled, and primarily by only a handful of people each election who needed the different voting access.
But Meuser said, it now appears this is a new loophole in California’s ballot harvesting program, and we have the Legislature to thank for this.
RedState’s Jen Van Laar addressed this in an article Monday:
Due to a gut-and-amend bill hastily passed by the Democrat supermajority in June 2020. This legislative workaround was necessary because Newsom had had his Executive Order-loving wings clipped by a Sutter County Superior Court judge last fall after a lawsuit challenging those orders was brought by two Republican Assembly Members: Kevin Kiley and James Gallagher.
Meuser said the political ramifications could be troublesome legally. Imagine if a ballot harvester comes to your door and offers to take and turn in your ballot for you. You tell the ballot harvester that you don’t have it anymore, or threw it out. So the ballot harvester can now tell you that you can print a new ballot right off of your computer.
Where Meuser says this gets sticky is when we mail back our ballots in the official voter envelope, it comes with a bar code that matches up with your voter registration, and you sign the envelope. The “print-your-own ballot from home” won’t come with an official county voter registrar envelope, and the issue is it will create a huge headache for all Registrars of Voters in the state.
Meuser said when the Registrar of Voters receives your home-printed ballot in a plain envelops, she will have to either contact you and offer to send out a new official ballot/envelope, which you can fill out, sign and mail in, or drop off at the ROV office. Or, because your “print-your-own ballot from home” can’t be verified and certified, it could be discarded.
Last October, I visited Sacramento County’s Voter Registraton and Election office to learn what happens after a mail-in ballot is dropped off. What I witnessed was a sophisticated production process replete with checks and double checks.
The Registrar of Voter (ROV) scans the ballots received into the computer system, and then voter signatures on the envelope are matched to the voter’s signature in the county elections system. If the operator feels the signatures don’t match, the voter is mailed a new signature page, which they fill out and send back. If there is no signature to verify, or a return address included, what then other than discarding the ballot?
As Meuser explained, even if you have the original envelope but not your original ballot because your dog ate it, and you print a new ballot off of the computer and return it to the county Registrar of Voters, they then have to pull employees from their regular election duties to go through the verification process so the machines can properly count it, and create a ballot on their system.
“As we all know the ballots that our votes are on are different than the printer paper we purchase at the office store,” Meuser said. “It appears that the SOS is creating a program that is creating a lot more work for all county Registrars of Voters making it even more difficult for them to accurately produce election results on election night. California is already a joke in the nation when it comes to counting our ballots, and this will only prolong the issue.”
“The people of California don’t want to wait 4 weeks to find out who won an election,” Meuser said. “This new process by the California Democratic party will only result in it taking longer for all the ballots to be counted in California.”
Deep inside of the elections offices is a production center which resembles the production process in a printing plant. Operators feed ballot return envelopes in stacks into a large machine which scans them, and separates by batches and precincts. Other operators act as auditors along the way. And there are phone banks of employees taking calls about the process.
There are employees in teams of two who analyze the actual ballot for any votes “X’d” out as a mistake, looking for voter intent. If they cannot make out the voter intent, it is left blank.
And all of these operations are monitored by “Big Brother” – cameras in every room, from several angles.
“The Democratic party of California is so backwards that they have now changed the rules so that they can print ballots on their own printers,” Meuser said on his website after we talked. “What is going to stop a ballot harvesters from printing up thousands of ballots, pre marking them with the political parties choices. The ballot harvester can then go to the voters house and tell them that rather than fill out the ballot that the state mailed to them, all they would have to do is sign a blank envelope and the ballot harvester will deliver the ballot. As long as the signature matches the data base, the registrar of voters will have no idea that the ballot was not voted by the assigned voter.”
Meuser said there is no guidance coming from the Secretary of State to the registrars. He said he verified this with a couple of county Registrars of Voters who said they’ve not received any procedural guidance from the Secretary of State. This could mean with 58 counties, there may be 58 procedures.
The Globe will continue to update this, but we still want to know, Did California invent an audit-proof way to steal elections?
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There is no longer any need for any pandemic voting exceptions.
If people can go out in their cars, shop in stores, eat in restaurants, go to work, travel and attend events they can show up at their assigned polling place unless they have provided a valid request for an absentee ballot or they suffer from a condition that makes assistance to vote necessary.
The continuation of the state of emergency is a farce.
@FS: Do you live in California? I lived here all my life and never missed an election since I turned 18. I haven’t had a polling place in at least 10 years. My precinct is vote-by-mail only. Maybe your precinct still has a polling place for your convenience, but the “excuse for absentee ballot” is a thing of the past millennium.
Sounds like your precinct voted for you all those 10 years. However, if you intended to vote for their preferred candidate anyway, the chances are, you got your wish granted.
This is GREAT and, in addition to the initial questions Katy Grimes had, it answers a lot of the questions that came up from commenters attached to the previous article. Also I thought it put a lot of it in perspective given the headache for the registrars, who must not be too thrilled, to put it lightly. All things considered, I’m wondering now if it could or would even be used as a significant cheating method as a practical matter. But maybe I’m missing something.
Gut-and-amend! That process has to be dumped, but will it be, ever? Sure does appear to be a sign of wanting to hide the print-your-own-ballot nonsense. Interesting it had to go through the legislature because Gruesome “had his Executive Order wings clipped” by the judgment in the case brought by superheroes Kevin Kiley and James Gallagher, To the Rescue Again!
Showandtell, was so great to read your response because it is all so true and spot on. Im so disappointed of the broken system and how we don’t have trust or faith in our voting rights. I hate to say it but it has become hard to want to vote because it no longer makes a difference. Knowing your vote is mute because they are far better at cheating is disappointing! How do you beat people that are great at cheating? Im starting to get dragged down by them, which is what they want. I am feeling my vote won’t count. Am I the only one feeling this way?
Stacy, you’re NOT alone in feeling discouraged and dispirited sometimes from all of this corruption and even just having to know about it, never mind fight it. I often feel that way but it passes. What I mostly feel is anger but it is righteous anger and we can use that. And we must vote anyway. It hasn’t completely collapsed. I think we can mostly overcome the fraud with turnout on our side. Voters can check online with their County Registrar’s office to see if their ballot was received. Mine always has been and I think MOST people’s are.
It was very good that Katy personally visited and toured the Sacramento County Voter Registration and Election office last October. Read her description about it in part above and at the link she provided above. I felt quite reassured after reading it to see that the process was orderly, efficient, and had many checks and double-checks, as she described. And cameras from every angle!
The revelation of this latest possible election cheating disturbed me a bit because I knew it had the potential to make people feel hopeless about voting. It sort of knocked the wind out of me when I first learned of it but then I realized it would get people talking and participating and we would all learn more about the process and become more involved.
In the end, with anything political, it’s a roller coaster. One day we’re up, the next day we’re down, next day back up! I suspect that’s why people get hooked on politics. This feels more serious, of course, because so much seems to be at stake this year, and next year, and in 2024, etc., and we fear we may lose our country. Stacy, go also read Katy’s piece Deja-vu All Over Again that’s up about 1979 end-of-Carter era, pre-Reagan era if you haven’t already, and you may be reassured by how similar that time is to this one.
Best wishes to you Stacy, and be sure to Vote YES on Recall Gavin and tell everyone you know to do it too – Ha!
The Only way to keep everyone honest(ha ha), is to vote in person. After seeing Mike’s symposium the last 3 days is that CA, is the blueprint for the blue states. It sucks here in CA, Newscum, is an awful governor, hand picked by Pelosi. America if you love your Liberty, get off your butt and get involved.
Dutiful Comrades
Lovely….can hardly wait…..warehouses full of ballots from Nigeria and Belarus.
Well Queeg, we can only HOPE again for the lawsuit and a sober judge’s injunction…..or roll out the guillotine. Nationalizing the issue makes sense: https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/08/09/heres-what-we-know-about-californias-print-at-home-ballot-recall-election-scheme-n423334
Nigeria and Belarus, Queeg? Not a chance….try PLA Unit 61398.
Of course Gavin is cheating! The Democrat Party went totally unpunished for stealing the presidential election! Why wouldn’t they do it again? The GOP and Americans have tacitly approved of Democrat election fraud. The Dems never have to win a real election again.
D3F1ANT
You are correct, the spineless GOP will get everything they deserve, since they refuse to stand up to this fraud and stop it by arresting the criminals that order it and fully support it…..
@Jay: I hope you realize that it isn’t a good idea to put political parties in charge of arresting their opponents,… ????
Communists don’t lose elections.
Never have and never will.
Democrats have no morals. They are like a low life student who will cheat on his test any way he can. Joe Biden is adept at cheating and plagiarizing as his history has shown. Unless this country turns back to God this will only get worse and we will become a third world country in months, not years.
One thing that I learned from a family member who works in an election office is that you have to request this type of ballot. The elections off then has a record of your request before you can print it.
A proper representation of the article sources would have said that “Constitutional and Elections Attorney Mark Meuser” is also “Republican candidate for Senator from California in 2022 Mark Meuser.” In the past, Meuser has actively supported using new technology to accelerate CA government operations including business licensing and elections.
We identified Meuser as a US Senate candidate in our last article.
@Katy: Thank you. Guess I missed that connection, because I remembered his name from a different source… It does seem relevant to his position on the current topic.
Wish you had looked a little bit deeper. The ballot that the system prints for someone who has requested to use it contains a barcode (or some other ID) that is supposed to be cut off and taped to the outside of the voter’s return envelope if they are using their own. It serves the same function as the info on the official return ballot.
We did follow ups with everything we learned. With the SOS and ROV not replying to inquiries, it made it difficult to explain what the program was/is. What has become clear and we wrote about is that it was solely created for the disabled, but is now a useful ballot harvesting tool – even with the online security and ID verification.
Comrades
No conceived oversight overcomes cheat as you will homemade ballots from mom’s basement.
Forget the Commissar appointed judges…no help there…..
Noose prevails. Read all about it…..a landslide featuring 2 million more votes than state registered voters…miraculous…..an election record, a record mandate…… deserving of a well earned medieval gilded coronation.
Ahhh, but you forget, Queeg? Those “Commissar appointed judges” ruled against the Noose SOS twice….No “D”, Yes “Elder”…..3 for 3 three could be.
Newsom, Padilla, Becerra are skating on the edge, and should be fearful… “CYBER SYMPOSIUM” (Mike Lindell) is Live Streaming (Aug 10, 11, 12) on RSBN, OANN, and FRANK SPEECH. At 7PM Today (Tuesday) Code Monkey Z
will add light to dark places. California changed election criteria, and are compounding immoral policies to beat the odds in the Recall Election. FRAUD VITIATES EVERYTHING! Dark to light.
BACKWARDS???? They’re 100% CORRUPT, not BACKWARDS…. they’ve investigated every way to SUNDAY to cheat, manipulate systems in their favor, purchase Dominion Voting Systems that can be manipulated in their favor, now this way to obfuscate the clean count with all of the associated CHAOS that they can introduce into what used to be an honest (somewhat) system where the votes were counted & validated in a day or two – now with all of the variations and variables that the Democrats have introduced, it’s now a complete fecal festival…
“The Democratic party of California is so backwards that they have now changed the rules so that they can print ballots on their own printers,” Meuser said on his website after we talked. “What is going to stop a ballot harvesters from printing up thousands of ballots, pre marking them with the political parties choices. The ballot harvester can then go to the voters house and tell them that rather than fill out the ballot that the state mailed to them, all they would have to do is sign a blank envelope and the ballot harvester will deliver the ballot. As long as the signature matches the data base, the registrar of voters will have no idea that the ballot was not voted by the assigned voter.”
This comment copied from the RedState article linked in the main article :
“The California GOP and the Republican National Committee must band together and fight like hell to ensure election integrity on September 14. If they don’t, this will be coming to every state in the union under the guise of “voting safely” in 2022.”
So what EXACTLY is Ms. Patterson doing about this??? Sending more emails requesting contributions to the CAGOP??? She’s completely WORTHLESS….
When the Dems heard Jovan Pulitzer say he can tell a fraudulent ballot by examining the paper. They decided to change the paper to home downloaded ballots.
When the Dems heard Jovan Pulitzer say he can tell a fraudulent ballot by examining the paper. They decided to change the paper to home downloaded ballots. Think about methods to identify counterfeit money.
When the Dems heard Jovan Pulitzer say he can tell a fraudulent ballot by examining the paper. They decided to change the paper to ballots downloaded at home. Think about methods to identify counterfeit money.
I think everyone should print their own ballots. Inundate the system to the point of collapse, so the corrupt Democrats have to give up on it.
What could possibly go wrong?
One cannot simply go online and print a ballot. The link to enable one to do so are only provided after a voter has specifically requested to vote via Remote Accessible Vote By Mail. The only ballot the system will let you print will be one which is customized specifically for you, just like the one you get in the mail.
It’s a shame our governor is being treated in such a negative manner. Being able to print my own ballot will help beat back the power hungry republicans who only want to enslave and tax California residents.