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For years, Republicans have railed against “ballot harvesting” as an underhanded tactic by Democrats to win elections.  

But for the 2024 election, the California GOP is going big on collecting ballots from voters and dropping them off at election offices or polling places, which is legal in California, with some conditions.  

In part, it’s a reflection of political reality: With a few exceptions, the Republican Party has been struggling. On top of Democratic majorities in the Legislature since 1996, no Republican has been elected statewide office since 2006. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, California has sent mail ballots to every registered voter, making it easier for people to cast their ballots earlier and not just at polling places on Election Day.

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The 2024 primary election is just six months away, and, thanks to a series of measures over the last few years, the process will look a little different for voters. 

For one, it’s the first presidential primary in which everyone can vote by mail. Because California’s top-two primary system — in which the two top vote-getters regardless of party move on to the November general election — doesn’t apply to presidential primaries, voters registered as Democrats or Republicans will receive a two-part ballot: the first includes the presidential candidates, and the second lists all the other races and measures.

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Election doubts have taken root in a very real way in Shasta County, 200 miles north of Sacramento, where a vote this year by far-right supervisors has election officials on edge about how to conduct upcoming vote counts.

The county, which for years used Dominion voting systems to tabulate the ballots of its more than 100,000 registered voters, is now going to rely on humans to hand-count the tens of thousands of pieces of paper. It’s a move that was encouraged by pro-Trump conspiracy mongers, including MyPillow exec Mike Lindell. It could make the count harder to verify and end up costing the small, rural county millions of dollars over several years.

Online at the Shasta Scout here

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The President of the California Voter Foundation has been closely involved with California’s voting systems for more than twenty years. She opposed California’s use of electronic ballots two decades ago, but supports the electronic ballot marking devices used now. She says people’s lack of trust in voting systems is important to address, but hand counting the ballots across Shasta County is not a smart way to build that trust.

In the late 90’s as technology exploded, Kim Alexander, like many, was interested in seeing voting go digital. So in 1999 when she was asked to serve on the California Secretary of State’s Internet Voting Task Force, Alexander went for it.