Democrats Stole the Election in California — Legally, Through ‘Ballot Harvesting’

Blue State Blues: Democrats Stole the Election in California — Legally, Through ‘Ballot Harvesting’

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Alex Edelman / Getty30 Nov 20181,703
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California Democrats “stole” the midterm election using a new method that is illegal elsewhere but completely legal in the Golden State: a practice called “ballot harvesting,” which allows third parties to submit mail-in ballots for voters.

It sounds “bizarre,” as outgoing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) described it to the Washington Post on Thursday — but it is absolutely true: Democratic operatives handed in pile after pile of other people’s ballots.
And Demorats are proud of it, mocking Republicans for failing to take advantage of a new law signed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2016, over GOP objections, that allows “ballot harvesting,” and which some Republicans are now blaming for their defeat.
The practice explains several mysteries about the 2018 election, such as: why mail-in ballots caused massive shifts toward Democrats in races Republicans thought they won on Election Night; why Republicans won the turnout battle in the primary, but lost it in the general election; and why Democrats with party backing defeated fellow Democrats without it — even when the latter had more money.
“Ballot harvesting” by Democratic Party operatives — a surprise tactic they likely saved for the general election — appears to have made the difference. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday that Democrats ran a disciplined, door-to-door campaign offering to deliver voters’ ballots to the polls:

Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.
…
In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”
…
For Democrats, the ballot harvesting was all part of a greater effort to get out the vote from their supporters, particularly from occasional voters.
“We beat Republicans on the ground, fair and square,” said Katie Merrill, a Democratic consultant deeply involved in November campaigns. “Many of the field plans included (ballot harvesting) as an option to deliver voters or their ballots” to the polls.

Republicans, in contrast, simply focused on traditional turnout operations — and lost badly.
In the days after the election, some Republicans speculated that there had been “voter fraud” in the state. And, true, Los Angeles County prosecutors busted a ring that bribed the homeless to register fraudulently. The Department of Motor Vehicles also registered 1,500 ineligible voters.
Yet “ballot harvesting” likely had a bigger effect.
Democrat Secretary of State Alex Padilla mocked Republican concerns, telling Politico: “What they call strange and bizarre, we call democracy.”

But it is democracy as practiced almost nowhere else in the world — except for one-party banana republics in failed third-world states, where the sight of ruling party apparatchiks dropping off bundles of ballots is not unusual.

Eric Eggers, author of Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, told Breitbart News Tonight on Thursday that “ballot harvesting” also creates opportunities for coercion and bribery. Nevertheless, it is legal.
And as Shawn Steel, the California committeeman for the Republican National Committee (RNC), wrote on Wednesday, it is not necessary for Democrats to break the law when fraud has effectively been legalized, through “ballot harvesting” and other methods.
“Merciless and unsparing, California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already-weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule,” he said.

Audio https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/bre...vember-29-2018

But as Democrats point out, there is no reason that Republicans cannot use the same methods in California. So Republicans should take them up on it. There is no alternative.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel patted herself on the back after the election, and President Donald Trump endorsed her for re-election on Thursday.
But she lost the House. If she hopes to succeed in 2020, she had better learn to steal elections legally — just like the Democrats do.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...MVFoA8R_AFAA1Y

I heard about this last night, "ballot harvesting", ballots accepted as legal votes when they're delivered by non-government individuals? I've never heard of such a thing before. They should all be thrown out.

https://scontent-mia3-2.xx.fbcdn.net...cb&oe=5C63BCA9

Lawsuit seeks to remove 'ballot harvesting' ban

• By Howard Fischer Capitol Media Services

• Jul 4, 2018

https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.town...size=400%2C267

The Arizona state flag. (Courtesy photo)

PHOENIX -- A new lawsuit seeks to block Arizona from enforcing its ban on "ballot harvesting'' for the upcoming election, claiming the state has no legal authority to regulate who can and cannot deliver someone else's mail.

In legal papers filed in federal court here Tuesday, attorney Spencer Scharff is arguing that only Congress has the right to regulate the U.S. mail. And he said that once someone puts a ballot into an envelope which has prepaid postage on it, it becomes "mail.''

What all that means, said Scharff, is a 2016 statutes that makes it a felony to collect early ballots and deliver them to polling places is preempted by federal law. And he is asking U.S. District Court Judge Douglas Rayes to put the law on "hold'' until there can be a full hearing on the issue.


There was no immediate response from Attorney General Mark Brnovich who is named as defendant in the lawsuit. Rayes is scheduled to talk with attorneys from both sides about the lawsuit this coming week.

The law at the heart of the litigation is aimed at what has been called "ballot harvesting,'' offering to return the early ballots that people had been sent but forgotten to mail back.

Until 2016, both major parties had engaged in some form of the practice. But it was the Democrats and political allies who were more active, going out and canvassing neighborhoods, particularly in Democratic areas, to boost voter turnout.

The 2016 law, pushed by Republican lawmakers, makes it a felony to handle anyone else's early ballot, with violators subject to a year in state prison and a $150,000 fine. Proponents of HB 2023 said it was designed to preclude fraud, or even the potential of fraud.

Earlier this year, Rayes threw out a challenge brought by the Arizona Democratic Party and others. The judge rejected their claims that the law will create a hardship, particularly for minorities.

And while Rayes said there has never been a case of voter fraud associated with ballot collection, the Legislature "need not wait until a problem occurs to take proactive steps it deems appropriate.''

That case is on appeal with a hearing set before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later this month.

This new lawsuit is based on a more basic legal question of whether the state has any authority to enact such a law.

"HB 2023's prohibition against collecting and delivering a voted or unvoted early ballot constitutes the regulation of U.S. Mail,'' Scharff wrote in the new lawsuit.

He said that since 1792, Congress has exercised its authority to regulate the handling of the mail. And Scharff said federal law specifically allows private individuals to deliver mail as long as they don't charge for the service and interfere with the monopoly the government has in delivering what constitutes "mail.''

"Thus, HB 2023 is preempted by federal law because it prohibits permitted methods of private carriage of mail-in ballots,'' Scharff wrote.


The lawsuit is being brought on behalf of Rivko Knox, a member of the League of Women Voters of Arizona and also a precinct committeeperson for the Democratic Party.

According to the legal papers, Knox makes a regular habit of going door-to-door, whether an election year or not, to register voters, raise awareness of candidates and encourage participation in the democratic process.

More to the point, Scharff said Knox encourages voters to fill out and mail their early ballots. And until the law took effect in 2016, he said Knox would deliver the early ballot of someone who made a request for her to do that.

That all changed with the new law which Scharff said prevented her from taking those ballots to polling places even though she knew that it was too late for voters to put them in the mail and have them reach county offices by election day.

Now he wants Rayes to review the law from the perspective of federal preemption of state laws dealing with the U.S. Mail and declare that legislators acted illegally.

There are some exemptions to the 2016 law and its penalties.

It does not apply to family members related to a voter by blood, marriage, adoption or legal guardianship. People who reside in the same home also can hand deliver someone else's ballot, as can a "caregiver'' who works with people in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, adult day day facilities or similar places.

https://azdailysun.com/news/local/la...67c72f470.html

https://scontent-mia3-2.xx.fbcdn.net...2e&oe=5CA150DE

Rush Limbaugh Radio

WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT “Ballot Harvesting”…And How Dems Used It To Flip SEVEN US House Seats In CA?

Dec 2, 2018

Even though it’s a mostly blue state, there are still a few Republican strongholds in California. Orange County used to be considered one of those stronghold districts. They were still considered a Republican district until several days after the election, when thousands of votes came in, and helped the Democrats to flip red seats blue.

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What should Republicans make of this 11th hour blow out of Republicans by Democrat candidates, many of them who are were virtually unknown before the midterm elections? With a massive number of Democrat votes coming in weeks after the actual election, how are Republicans going to guarantee that we never see this kind of election happen again?

In the 21st District of California (a Central Valley district carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016), incumbent congressman David Valadao was called as the winner by the Associated Press on election night; he had a solid 4,000-plus vote lead, and was never considered a likely loser during the campaign (his race was rated a noncompetitive Likely Republican by the Cook Political Report). But late ballots, mostly from votes-by-mail that met the state’s condition of having been postmarked by Election Day, steadily eroded Valadao’s lead (as it did the votes of most GOP statewide and congressional candidates in California in the days following the election), and ultimately gave Democrat TJ Cox the victory, as called today by the Los Angeles Times. It means Democrats flipped a remarkable seven House seats in California this year, and it brought the Democratic Party’s total net gains to a nice even 40 seats (they flipped 43 seats and lost three of their own). – Intelligencer

The Daily Caller reports – As the polls closed on election day last month, six California Republican House candidates, including Representatives Dana Rohrabacher, Steve Knight, and Mimi Walters, were ahead in their respective races. However, as the absentee and provisional ballots rolled in over the intervening weeks, all six lost to their Democratic opponents.
The case of Korean-American GOP candidate Young Kim was one of the most prominent examples. On election night, Kim held an 8,000 vote lead over her Democratic opponent Gil Cisneros, and even attended freshman orientation in Washington, D.C. before watching her lead, and her victory, slowly evaporate over the subsequent weeks.
“California just defies logic to me,” said Ryan at a Washington Post live event. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election, and three weeks later, we lost basically every California contested race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”
The stunning turnaround in California, of all states, can be attributed to several factors, as conservative critics like The Federalist’s Bre Payton wrote, but the most significant of those seemed to be the practice of “ballot harvesting.”
Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.
One of the lessons that the GOP needs to learn out of this election cycle is how to work within all of the new rules, same-day voter registration, motor voters,” Denham said. “There have been a lot of changes in laws that I think have caught many in the Republican Party by surprise. You can’t just run a traditional campaign as you did before.”
San Fransisco Chronicle reports – In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”
Watch what happens when a video produced by a homeowner’s ring.com service shows a Democrat operative offering to take a voter’s ballot from them to be counted.
The woman in the video, who identifies herself only as “Lulu” says it’s a “new service,” said Lulu, for “like, people who are supporting the Democratic party.”

https://youtu.be/0s-9Q_N09H0

Youtube Video https://youtu.be/0s-9Q_N09H0

Some Republicans have cast a skeptical eye on Democrats’ use of “ballot harvesting” to boost their support. The idea’s backers say it’s just one of several steps California has taken to enable more people to vote.
Across the state there were reports of groups collecting ballots and dropping them off at polling places and election offices.
“We certainly had that going on here, with people dropping off maybe 100 or 200 ballots,” said Neal Kelley, Orange County’s registrar of voters. “We also had voters calling and asking if it was legitimate for someone to come to their door and ask if they could take their ballot” and deliver it to the polls.
For Democrats, the ballot harvesting was all part of a greater effort to get out the vote from their supporters, particularly from occasional voters.
“We beat Republicans on the ground, fair and square,” said Katie Merrill, a Democratic consultant deeply involved in November campaigns. “Many of the field plans included (ballot harvesting) as an option to deliver voters or their ballots” to the polls.
Those efforts involved identifying voters who might support Democratic candidates and ignoring those who wouldn’t.
In one Orange County household, for example, both the husband and wife were longtime Republicans, said Dale Neugebauer, a veteran Republican consultant. Democratic volunteers came by the house four times, each time asking to speak only with their 18-year-old daughter, a no-party-preference voter, and asking if she wanted them to pick up her signed and completed ballot.
That’s a perfect example of the “thorough and disciplined” ground game the Democrats used, said Merrill.
“We were not wasting time talking to people who weren’t going to vote for Democrats,” she said.

https://100percentfedup.com/why-is-n...e-seats-in-ca/

North Carolina Woman Admits to ‘Harvesting’ Ballots for Mark Harris Operative

State elections board officials delay certifying Harris’ victory over Democrat Dan McCready

Posted Dec 4, 2018 4:37 PM

A North Carolina woman on Tuesday admitted to illegally “harvesting” ballots for a campaign operative working for GOP candidate Mark Harris in the race for the state’s 9th District U.S. House seat.

Ginger Eason, a Bladen County resident, told a reporter for WSOC-TV on Tuesday that she had done campaign work for Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr., who paid her $75 to $100 per week to collect absentee ballots in the county and deliver them to him.
It is illegal in North Carolina for a third party to turn in absentee ballots.

“I was helping McCrae pick up ballots,” Eason told WSOC-TV, adding that she never looked to see whom people had voted for. She gave the ballots to Dowless.

She was then asked by the reporter whether the ballots she turned over to Dowless were reported and counted.
“I guess,” Eason said. “All I can say — I don’t know nothing [about] what happened after I dropped them off. ... I dropped them off. What they do, that’s on them.”

During the campaign season, Dowless worked for the political consulting firm Red Dome, which the Harris campaign paid $428,000 this past cycle.

In a sworn affidavit submitted to the North Carolina state elections board, which is investigating the irregularities in the mail-in absentee ballots, one person described overhearing Dowless say he would receive a $40,000 bonus if Harris won.

Dowless is no stranger to Bladen County politics. He has been paid by multiple candidates for state and local positions — including Bladen County sheriff and a 2016 candidate in the 9th District’s GOP primary — for “get out the vote” functions, according to campaign finance reports first reported by WSOC-TV.

Republicans in North Carolina are pressuring the state elections board there to certify the 9th District results, even as the board continues to investigate irregularities in absentee mail-in voting.

Harris, a Baptist minister, defeated Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in the unofficial vote count.
Harris and the North Carolina GOP have argued that even with alleged irregularities in mail-in absentee voting in Bladen County, there were not enough ballots in question to overturn the results of the midterm election.

“Make no mistake, I support any efforts to investigate allegations of irregularities and/or voter fraud, as long as it is fair and focuses on all political parties,” Harris said in a statement Friday. “But to date, there is absolutely no public evidence that there are enough ballots in question to affect the outcome of this race.

Accordingly, the Board should act immediately to certify the race while continuing to conduct their investigation. Anything else is a disservice to the people of the Ninth District.”

The board — comprised of four Republicans, four Democrats, and an unaffiliated ninth member — has twice in the last week declined to certify the election as it continues to collect evidence and sworn statements alleging illegal harvesting of absentee ballots for the benefit of Harris.

The board’s 7-2 vote on Friday included a provision to hold a public hearing by Dec. 21 to shed more light on its investigation.

A state prosecutor has been investigating the mail-in absentee ballot irregularities and potential tampering for roughly 10 months, her office confirmed over the weekend.

Harris’ distinct advantage in absentee voting in Bladen County, where voters cast an unusually high number of mail-in absentee ballots, has raised eyebrows.

Harris won 96 percent of all mail-in absentee ballots in the county in his primary race against GOP Rep. Robert Pittenger back in May, far outpacing his overall margin of victory.

And in the general election, Harris won 61 percent of the mail-in absentee ballots in Bladen County even though just 19 percent of the voters who requested and received mail-in ballots were registered Republicans.

https://www.rollcall.com/news/politi...rris-operative

Bienvenidos a Mexico: California's ballot-harvesting, sure enough, is borrowed from Mexico

Real Clear Investigations has a must-read piece on just how bad ballot-harvesting is. Worse still, it's a cultural appropriation: From Mexico.

December 22, 2018
By Monica Showalter

In an extraordinary investigative piece on how ballot-harvesting works by Steve Miller, published on Real Clear Investigations, we learn an amazing amount of information about how ballot-harvesting works and why it's so closely connected to election fraud, skewing elections in directions they normally wouldn't go. The must-read piece is focused on how Texas is dealing with the seedy issue, enforcing the law, prosecuting more than twice as many cases of electoral fraud as California, even hampered as Texas is by weak penalties for violators. But a little detail stands out much deeper into the piece: ballot-harvesting, which is at the root of considerable fraud of all kinds, is a practice specifically borrowed from Latin America, with an impressive Latino analyst, K.B. Forbes, who has electoral experience in both countries, citing Mexico. Here's the passage:

The practice has its roots in Latin America, said K.B. Forbes, a political consultant and Hispanic activist who has served as an elections observer in Sonora, Mexico. "In the Latin culture, they have colonias, which is 'little colony,' literally," he said. "In these, they sometimes have the equivalent of a precinct boss, and that's how people move up. The [politiqueras] deliver the vote and when the candidate moves in, the theory is that they get a good post inside the government."

That brings up California, where ballot-harvesting is perfectly legal, and normal voters have to wonder how the heck that happened. Ballot-harvesting has been a disaster for Republicans in California, with all conservatives now shut out from any representation in once red Orange County. Most congressional elections there showed Republican candidates in the lead on election night in the last midterm, but all of them flipped to Democrats as the Democrat-led ballot-harvesting brought in votes and votes and votes from supposed precincts, harvested by their political operatives, until the result went the other way. (This, by the way, didn't happen in districts where Democrats held a small lead. Nothing flipped in their cases, and ballots did not keep rolling in.)
If ballot-harvesting is a practice imported from Mexican politics, what does that say about California politics, whose legislators would embrace Mexican electoral practices over the U.S. standard? As I mentioned earlier, Mexico has been called "a perfect dicatorship" by none other than Nobel Prize-winning literary lion Mario Vargas Llosa, owing to the continuous power of the Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (or PRI), which, up until a decade or two ago, had a hammerlock monopoly on Mexican politics, winning every single election in what was then a one-party state. That's a system so bad that people emigrated illegally from that country to get away from it. Now, the cultural practice is right there waiting for them in California, albeit, virtually nowhere else.
And like the PRI's Mexican electoral practice of ballot-harvesting, it's noteworthy that the ruling Democrats of California also are famous for doling out the goodies to the loyal voters. They've promised amazing things to California's illegal alien population, with the latest thing free heath care. California's insurance commissioner, the respected non-partisan Steve Poizner, was, conveniently, ballot-harvested out of office after an election-night lead several days after the midterms by utterly leftist Democrat Ricardo Lara, who openly declared his support and big plans for free health care for illegals. He's tried it before in the Legislature, and now he's going to do it through the Executive. California's incoming governor, of course, is all in for the goody-slinging. In Mexico, they used to pass out bags of beans for votes. In California, the prizes are considerably higher, and they go well beyond free health care. I've already noted the weird similarities between how California is run and PRI-style politics here.
Any wonder California is going way out of its way to welcome illegal aliens? "You're all welcome here," as Gov. Jerry Brown famously said. California already hosts a quarter of the nation's illegals, and with middle-class families now moving out due to high living costs and punitive taxation, the California PRI likes new bodies coming in who have a lot of needs, which keeps the congressional seats numerous and the federal funds flowing.
It all makes a normal person wonder about the weird closeness of California officials and their Mexican counterparts, too. Newsom has already paid a visit to Mexico to discuss the caravan with the Mexican government in Mexico City (not Tijuana, where he would have gotten an earful from the generally conservative and more dissident-oriented Tijuana locals), and he has declared he plans to withdraw National Guard troops from the U.S. border. With his party now embracing the PRI's style of governance and having some unnaturally close ties to Mexican officials (I've seen it myself at Los Angeles functions as a guest of the Mexican government), it looks like a growing merger of Mexican and California politics.
Mexico knows how bad the system is, and its citizens did rebel against it with a Trump-like leftist president, Andrés Manuel López-Obrador, who won on a vow to end corruption. One can safely take that as a sign that Mexicans are trying to move away from that kind of politics, which would include ballot-harvesting. California, on the other hand, is moving toward it, embracing what Mexico is trying to reject. That speaks pretty poorly for the sorry state of affairs in California. It's great only for the rulers and those they patronize, until the money runs out.
Until then, clarification about California's Mexico borrowings needs to stand as an incentive to other states about what not to do.
Image credit: Carlos Manuel Citalán Marroquín, via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog...om_mexico.html

Palm Beach Post Editorial:
Use voter fraud report to fix absentee ballot system

HIDE CAPTION

A June 22 Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office memo outlining an investigation into alleged voter fraud involving absentee ballots in the August 2016 primary election appears to clear (l-r) state Sen. Bobby Powell, state Rep. Al Jacquet and County Commissioner Mack Bernard of any wrongdoing. (Damon Higgins / The Palm Beach Post)


Posted Jul 26, 2017 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jul 27, 2017 at 5:14 PM

“The criminal activity generally surrounded the absentee ballot request forms. There was not enough evidence to name a suspect and sustain a lawful arrest and criminal prosecution.”

That was the conclusion of an 10-month investigation by the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office into alleged voter fraud involving absentee ballots during last year’s August primary. An unsatisfying end to arguably the biggest election probe in the county in years.

But it shouldn’t end there. The investigation into what Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher alleges was “a group of subjects that were working for certain political campaigns that were involved in voter fraud,” should prompt her to ask county officials to plug gaping holes in state laws governing absentee, or vote-by-mail ballots.

After all, they’re unlikely to find any better reason than this one.

RELATED: Voter fraud in Palm Beach County: State attorney finds crimes, but no suspect

County Commissioner Mack Bernard and state Rep. Al Jacquet went door-to-door through Haitian-American neighborhoods in their respective districts, allegedly stepping into people’s homes and helping them fill out their absentee ballot request forms or ballots. The candidates’ tactics helped them generate incredible turnout in votes by mail.

In March, the Post Editorial Board said Bernard, Jacquet and state Sen. Bobby Powell — who used a similar strategy — should all welcome the inquiry to remove whatever cloud hangs over their respective victories.

They continue to deny any wrongdoing, and there is no proof they broke any election laws. Yet, for some, State Attorney Dave Aronberg’s investigation raises as many questions as it answers.

Yet, for some, State Attorney Dave Aronberg’s investigation raises as many questions as it levels answers.

As The Palm Beach Post reported on Sunday, the 24-page memo detailing the investigation involving the election campaigns of Bernard, Jacquet and Powell laid out what appeared to be a coordinated effort “by someone” to fraudulently manipulate absentee ballot requests that worked to the three elected officials’ advantage.

Due to Bucher’s suspicion that as many as 2,000 absentee ballots and ballot requests could be fraudulent, some 14 Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office detectives were brought in on the case. What they found would lead you to believe they were thorough. For example:

• numerous voters in the lawmaker’s districts were sent absentee ballots that they never requested;
• 25 voters’ signatures were possibly forged on absentee ballot request forms;
• a man deemed to be a “person of interest” was seen on security video dropping off “large quantities of absentee ballot request forms” to the Elections Supervisor’s Office.

RELATED: Read the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office report

But detectives didn’t talk to some voters who complained until as much as eight months after the August primary election. And curiously, detectives never interviewed the man in the security video who just happened to be Powell’s legislative aide, Delano Allen.

Powell, who himself was not mentioned in the memo, told the Post Editorial Board on Tuesday that neither he nor his campaign “had done anything wrong, or illegal. Period.”

“Encouraging voters to request and mail-in absentee ballots is a strategy that all (political) parties engage in as a way to increase voter turnout,” he said. “Anything implying that I would risk my own credibility by engaging in some type of voter fraud is simply not true.”

Bernard echoed those sentiments to the Post Editorial Board on Tuesday: “There was no voter fraud. That’s something I’d never do.”

RELATED: Democratic politician rips Post’s coverage of absentee ballot fraud

Fine. But the fact that detectives closed their investigation without interviewing Allen is disturbing. They went to his home in August, before the election. He wasn’t there, but told them over the phone he would be willing to sit down for a sworn statement. But that didn’t happen. They tried a couple more times before dropping it.

Detectives also didn’t interview Bernard, Jacquet or Powell. Why not? Wouldn’t that help close a huge hole in our understanding of what happened?

Yes, it would. The candidates deserve better than the taint of “we know something was wrong, we just don’t know who did it.” And voters deserve a conclusion that doesn’t further undermine confidence in the electoral system.

Hopefully, the unsatisfying finish of this investigation will spur efforts to draw up clearer rules for a absurdly lax laws governing absentee ballots.

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/o...VMSRvCpWaXSgL/