California Republican Party Vows to Continue Ballot Drop Box Program

The California Republican Party (CRP) plans to expand its ballot drop box program despite Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s (D) recent cease and desist letter.

“We are going to continue this program. If he wants to take us to court, then we’ll see him in court,” CRP spokesman Hector Barajas told ABC 7 this week.

Republicans asserted that they are simply following the “ballot harvesting” law the Democrats themselves passed, according to Breitbart News:

In 2016, Democrats legalized the practice — which is considered illegal in most other states — of allowing third parties to collect and deliver mail-in ballots from voters. The “third parties” can literally be anyone, including political party operatives, and do not need to register or pass any kind of background check. There is also no limit to the number of ballots that can be “harvested.”

You mean only Democrats are allowed to do this? But haven’t the Dems been doing this for years? See you in court. Fight hard Republicans! https://t.co/vaToeGB2ze

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2020

Republicans have been and are still opposed to ballot harvesting, but now, they need to make a choice, Barajas told ABC 7.

“We can either whine and complain about the election results later or we can get smart and figure out the rules and figure out the chess board they laid out before us and play the game that they’re doing,” he said.

In a recent statement to Breitbart News, Barajas explained that “there is nothing in any of the laws or regulations cited in that advisory that indicate private organization drop boxes are NOT permitted. The regulations cited apply to Registrar of Voters only.”

He continued:

The Democrats amended the law to remove all of the restrictions on WHO can harvest ballots and provided NO rules about HOW ballots can be collected except that someone cannot be compensated per-ballot. The CRP’s program goes above and beyond, is less coercive and more secure than other methods of collecting ballots. The way Democrats wrote the law, if we wanted to use a Santa bag, we could. A locked heavy box seems a lot safer.

Padilla’s cease and desist letter is a “deflection from the mounting criticism for giving a non-budgeted, $35 million get-out-the-vote contract to a ‘Team Biden’ PR firm, which is also receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars to oppose Republican candidates in targeted California districts,” Barajas said.

He added that the GOP would remove the word “official” from the ballot drop boxes to avoid any confusion.