After California's ballot harvest: What is to be done?

The ballot-harvesting issue, which gave Democrats an absolute monopoly of power in even Orange County, signals a sort of the bottom dropping out in California. Now that Democrats have discovered they can flip any race based on selective collections of mail-in ballots by Democratic door-knockers from voters who didn't ask for them, their one-party state of the past 20 years in California has gotten even more entrenched in power. One gets the sense that the landscape has changed and what the voters want no longer matters. Voting is no longer about you, or what you think or the decisions you make, it's now all about that unasked-for piece of paper on the kitchen table known as a ballot and how Democrats can get their hands on it. You are incidental. The creepy Democratic machine, with its 1980s PRI-style politics, rigged this state this way, and in so doing would make Hugo Chávez or Daniel Ortega envious. PRI Mexico was, after all, once called "the perfect dictatorship." Now the title has moved on to California.

It amounts to stolen democracy, which ultimately cries out for revolution. As Lenin before 1917 used to say, what is to be done? One of the defeated candidates in the last midterm, Omar Navarro, who challenged Maxine Waters for her seat (he probably wasn't done in by ballot-harvesting, given the wide margin by which Waters won, and her advantages of incumbency, but one admires his scrappiness), has come up with an important tweet describing the scope of the problem. Here is the tweet: We need to push for these things in California.



- Overturn Ballot Harvesting

- Overturn the Motor Voter Law - Stops illegals being registered to vote by DMV automatically.

- No Early Mail In Ballots

- Voter ID Laws — Omar Navarro (@RealOmarNavarro) December 4, 2018 An intelligent discussion followed, and Navarro added that California's first-two-out-the-gate "jungle primary" system needs to go, too. That was the system that forced Republican voters to choose between the execrable Dianne Feinstein and the even more execrable Kevin de León for the U.S. Senate seat. That was obviously a bid to give Democrats an advantage as well. Getting ballot-harvesting out of there, getting the Motor Voter law overturned, getting voter ID in place, and getting the mail-in ballot scene at a minimum under control (many people think there are valid grounds for elderly and handicapped people to get mail-in ballots, as well as first responders and military people who may not be able to get to the polls, but these exceptions must be verified, and mail-in ballots must be returned well before election day, but counted on election day so the manipulation seen cannot go on), is a tall order. And it's made even harder first because California is a one-party state, where there will be no support in any branch of its government for such efforts to make elections fair. Worse still, that control there has now extended to Democrat rule of the House, so there's no chance for such laws to pass at the federal level. It's worrisome, because California tends to be a trend-setting state, and you can bet other blue states are looking to entrench their holds on power the way California did. Some of the commenters on Navarro's tweet thread cited Colorado and Washington as going the same way. Legal action may prise open some of these entrenchments, and a recent announcement from Judicial Watch that it will investigate ballot-harvesting seems to be a hopeful development. What's left is the Senate, the Supreme Court, and maybe even the United Nations or other international bodies. Now, having watched Venezuela for years, and knowing some of the players, such as the Sumate leaders, who have sought and fought hard for free and fair elections, I know that this is a tall order. But it's critical to keep trying. It's a good thing that Navarro has brought this disaster up and defined the scope of it to rally voters – he got 7,000 retweets for that outline. Now an exceptional strategy is required, and that is the next step. One can only hope he keeps it up, because the California GOP seems to be feckless in its inability to realize it's been had, and it's a diminishing entity. Maybe someone like Navarro, if he stays with it and refuses to let the issue go, can be its leader instead. Image credit: Volgograd.ru via Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported and GNU Free Documentation License 1.3.