President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday morning against “ballot harvesting,” a controversial California practice in which party operatives submit unlimited numbers of mail-in ballots for other people.
GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD. THE USA MUST HAVE VOTER I.D., THE ONLY WAY TO GET AN HONEST COUNT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2020
Most states ban the practice. It is also shunned internationally, and is commonly associated with “ballot stuffing,” in which parties attempt to cheat in elections by providing batches of ballots large enough to outweigh any possible opposition.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sought to impose “ballot harvesting” in her version of the stimulus bill last month, after she rejected bipartisan negotiations in the Senate. Her legislation caused emergency relief to be delayed by several days, as millions of jobs were lost.
As Breitbart News explained:
“Ballot harvesting” was legalized in California in 2016, and first used in the 2018 midterm elections. It allows anyone to drop off someone else’s mail-in ballot at a polling station. There is no process for vetting or verifying those delivering the ballots — no background checks or identification requirements. Democrats dropped hundreds of thousands of ballots off at polling stations in 2018, helping Democrats as they flipped seven Republican seats.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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