OC LEADER BOARD

The most surprising outcome of the 2018 election was the Democrats winning four congressional districts by wide margins from Republicans in spite of the significant registration advantage of the local GOP in those four congressional districts. For example, the Democrats won the coastal 48th Congressional District by 7.2% even though the Republicans held an 8.5% voter registration advantage. 

While Democrats have recently overtaken Republicans in overall voter registration on the strength of other parts of the county, the question is what explains Republican losses in historically rock-solid Republican districts?

Demographic changes, voter registration decline and President Donald Trump’s unpopularity among Orange County’s independent voters have all been blamed. Each item has some merit and Republicans would be wise to address them. 

One factor, however, remains a bit of a puzzle—ballot harvesting. The law was changed in 2016 to allow unlimited ballot harvesting, which was first used in last year’s election.

In simple terms, ballot harvesting is when one person collects and turns in an absentee ballot for another person. This practice is not permitted in most states except a ballot can be collected by a relative or somebody living in the same household. Some states, like Colorado, permit the collection of a specified number of ballots, but California is unique in permitting an unlimited collection of harvested ballots. 

In OC, 62% of the ballots from the 2018 general election—689,756 of 1,106,729—were absentee ballots.

Thousands of those votes were turned in by ballot harvesters in stacks of 100s and 200s, according to Neal Kelley, the OC Registrar of Voters.

You read that right—a single person was able to turn in hundreds of votes.

In fact, approximately 250,000 vote-by-mail ballots were returned late and decidedly favored Democratic candidates, and thousands of these votes were from “inactive” voters. An inactive voter is a registered voter who hasn’t voted in the past four years and qualifies to be removed from the voter rolls. Today, there are 313,941 inactive voters on the rolls in Orange County. The late returned ballots from active and inactive voters explain why so many Republican candidates were leading on election night only to see their leads fade away as the harvested votes were counted.

Democrats claimed they simply outhustled Republicans. That is true, but is it also possible that some of these ballots were harvested from people who did not vote?

One post-election study in Orange County interviewed voters in 700 households who voted in the 2018 election. The shocking discovery is that 2% claimed they did not vote in that election. Furthermore, another 9% said that the person who voted at that address did not live there, and they didn’t know who they were. Signed affidavits validate this data and illustrates the point that voter fraud can and does occur. 

While voter fraud is seemingly difficult, it is made possible because of loose rules around ballot harvesting, along with the massive number of inactive voters in the file.

One example demonstrating the number of ineligible voters is jury duty.

In 2017, the Jury Commissioner in Orange County summoned 491,482 registered voters. Nearly 18% of the people claimed they couldn’t serve. Of the 491,482 people summoned, 86,364 refused service, including 39,290 with undeliverable addresses and 18,180 that no longer resided in Orange County. Another 28,894 said they couldn’t serve on a jury because they weren’t citizens.

Yet, these 86,364 people are called to jury duty because they are listed in public rolls, including Orange County’s voter rolls, and are thus eligible to vote!

If we extrapolate the percentage of people unable to serve on juries to the number of voters, is it possible that 18% of Orange County’s registered voters are not eligible to vote? The number of people who claimed they couldn’t serve on a jury jumped to 20% in 2018.  

It is difficult to get a precise number because voters can and do move, people die and the Jury Commissioner can utilize data other than the voter file. 

Yet, you would think that someone who self-declares that they cannot serve on a jury would be automatically taken off the voter rolls.  They are not removed because the Jury Commissioner is not required to disclose ineligible voters under state law, and the current Jury Commissioner has refused to share the list with the Registrar.

The lessons to be gleaned are two-fold. First, it is critical that the voter files in Orange County are clean and only have current eligible voters. Second, the rules around ballot harvesting should be tightened to eliminate voter fraud.

With several hundred thousand inactive or ineligible voters in Orange County voter files, coupled with known cases of voter fraud, the system is clearly vulnerable to nefarious actors. Republican losses in 2018 cannot be solely blamed on ballot harvesting or fraud. At the same time, we should have 100% confidence in the integrity of our elections, and we do not. 

Editor’s Note: Scott Baugh, a member of the Business Journal’s OC 500 list of the area’s most influential businesspeople, was a three-term assemblyman from Huntington Beach and the assembly Republican leader in 1999-2000. He ran the Orange County GOP for a decade, raising millions of dollars for candidates. Last year, he lost a primary in the 48th district to unseat Dana Rohrabacher, who in turn lost in the run-off to Democrat Harley Rouda.