Why do you suppose California Republicans are setting up their own ballot drop boxes at churches and gun shops to offer voters a safe way to ensure their votes make it to election officials for counting? Do you suppose they have some concerns about how well the mass mail-in voting system will perform when it’s put to the full test on November 3rd? Perish the thought. I’m sure everything will be fine. Well… nearly everything. But we might not be entirely confident about the eventual fate of roughly 400,000 ballots that went out this month. That’s because their voter rolls don’t appear to have been tended very well over the years and that huge slug of ballots went to people who had either moved out of the state or taken up residence in cemeteries. (CBS Los Angeles)

Millions of California ballots have been delivered to residents across the state as early voting begins for the 2020 general election, but some have gone to people who should no longer be registered to vote in the state.

A new study from the Election Integrity Project California has found that close to 400,000 ballots have been sent to people who moved or died.

“The fear is that people who are dishonest could vote those ballots and attempt to get them counted,” said Evelyn Swenson, who works with the organization. “What kind of confidence to the people of California have in the system when they’re getting ballots from their deceased loved one 10 years ago or someone who never lived there or someone who moved 10 years ago? That hurts the confidence in the election.”

If only someone had warned them about this. Oh, wait… that’s right. We’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for most of the year. States like Washington, where they do full mail-in voting every year have the system in fairly good shape, but it took them years to get there. They had to clean up their voter rolls entirely and then develop better ways to track when people are born, when they die, and if they move. California hasn’t had nearly enough time to seriously take on that challenge. As a result, ballots are showing up in all sorts of incorrect locations.

The local CBS station interviewed a number of residents and business owners who received ballots in the mail that didn’t belong there. Margaret Richards of Sherman Oaks was sent a ballot. The problem is that Ms. Richards has been living in Tennessee for the past sixteen years. One Monrovia resident received a ballot for the person who sold her the house she now owns fifteen years ago. The previous owners now live in Texas. In theory, any time a ballot is sent back to the post office marked as undeliverable because the resident no longer lives there, the voter’s registration record is supposed to be deactivated. But the woman in question claims to have done that every time she received any election material but they’re still coming. And what about all of the people who moved within the state but haven’t updated their registration yet? Will they be provided a way to vote?

But hey… nothing serious could go wrong with this, right? Unless, of course, somebody decides to “test the system” by sending in the ballot anyway like that guy in Florida did for his dead wife. That wouldn’t happen though, would it? Naw. I’m sure he was the only one.

I really have to take a moment here and offer a tip of the hat to the local CBS team in Los Angeles. Unlike their national parent network, they’ve been doing a bang-up job in uncovering fraud and incompetence in the California state government. They’ve reported on the huge problems the state is having with unemployment fraud, prompting the government to take action. And now they’re all over the mail-in voting issues. Well done, folks.