Vote Harvesting

Democrats had a great election. Congratulations. They had had four consecutive mediocre to poor House elections and they were bound to have a good one eventually. They got destroyed in 2010 and 20014. They won narrowly in 2012 and lost narrowly in 2016. Winning by a 1 point in 2012 was a pretty low high point. When there are only two parties, one can't dominate for too long. You'd better have a good election in a mid-term with the other party in the White House.

That said, just because a party should win big doesn't mean they'll actually win big. Hillary Clinton was expecting a 10 point win. Or maybe it was 50 points. The environment was great for Democrats and they took advantage.

They certainly did that in California. They wiped Republicans out. I was very wrong in my predictions and I couldn't figure out why. My predictions looked great at the end of election night. I was a little high for some Republicans and a little low for others. The late vote has skewed Democratic. In 2016, they picked up votes after election day in 80% of the districts. On average Democrats gained about 1.8 points. So I figured my predictions would still look good in the end.

I was very very wrong. The post-election votes were nothing like they'd been in the past three elections. Democrats had done 5-6 points better after election day previously were doing 20 points better. And there were a lot more post-election day ballots than there'd ever been. This election was different than the three previous ones and I couldn't figure out why. I was rather embarrassed that I'd dropped the ball by so much. Okay, I thought. This is taking so many unexpected bad turns for Republicans I'm better off waiting until it's over and then writing something.

I had no idea why this happened. I knew it couldn't be Republicans massively voting Democratic or NPP voters going from voting Republicans by 10 to Democrats by 40.

I found out the answer today. In 2016 Democrats made it legal for anyone to pick up VBM ballots from voters and deliver them to the ballot box themselves. Previously only a family member could do it. The process of picking up people's ballots is called vote harvesting.

Democrats outspent Republicans in California by 4-5 to 1. Most of the Democratic candidates spent double what their Republican counterparts did and Democratic dark money groups added to that. Republicans have shown an unwillingness to spend money in California. They didn't spend in 2014 and lost a bunch of districts narrowly. I think they're more willing to spend down ballot money when the party is competing for Senate and Gubernatorial elections up ballot. That doesn't happen here.

The bill was passed on a party line vote with Democrats voting for it and Republicans voting against it. Democrats clearly had a plan in place when they passed the bill and did something called vote harvesting. They sent their operatives to people they felt would vote Democratic and collected their VBM ballots at such a massive rate that the post-election counts were practically only adding Democratic ballots.

Republicans lost 6 districts where they had an election night lead. As a result, Republicans won roughly 35% of the House vote but won 13% of the congressional districts. Republicans may think that's wrong but they did know the rules Democrats made for the election. It's not the Democrats fault that the GOP couldn't take advantage of the rules.

I don't know if vote harvesting is legal in other states. It looks like it happened in North Carolina and people may go to jail as a result.

Republicans have called for voter ID for years but there's likely little fraud voting in person. Even without an ID some people voting for someone else would be recognized as not being that person. There's only so much you could get away with. It's easy to commit fraud with vote by mail, on the other hand. There's no one to check that you're the person who is supposed to fill in the ballot and you have weeks to collect ballots, rather than 12 hours to vote.

Vote harvesting makes it easier because now you can legally have someone else's ballot.

A campaign worker comes to someone's house. "Have you completed your ballot?"
"No."
"Give it to me. I'm allowed to complete it for you."

Or they could open the envelope and change any vote they don't like. That won't get their candidate a vote but it will get the ballot thrown out. Sure, they're not supposed to do that but there's nothing stopping them from doing it now.

A campaign worker comes to someone's house. "Have you completed your ballot?"
"Yes, here's my ballot and my husband's ballot."

Husband and wife are different parties. Why not just throw out the ballot that'll go against you? A hundred people in a nursing home are supposed to get their ballots delivered to them by the staff. What's to stop that staffer from taking those ballots and filling them out themselves? It might be illegal to fill out someone else's ballot and turn it in, but how would anyone know?

All these things have happened in the past and been reported. That wasn't on a massive scale. Did that happen this year? We have no way of knowing. What we can know is that the California system makes it easy to do this.

Maybe there's little or no voter fraud. Regardless this election has shown that sRepublicans don't have the money to compete with Democrats under these rules. I think 2020 will be even better for Democrats than 2018 was. I can see Republicans being reduced to 3 or 4 districts.