Dead Voters Receiving Ballots in Nevada County Evidences Lack of Election Security
On February 5, 2024, the Nevada County election office began mailing ballots to all registered voters in our quaint county, and yet again, our residence receives ballots intended for other people. After we bought our house in Wildwood in 2016, we received the ballots intended for the former tenants for a couple elections. Luckily, we know the former tenants and got their ballots to them so they could vote. In May of 2022, we had a fiasco with my mother-in-law’s mail ballot when, instead of our house to which her ballot had been sent for a couple elections, her ballot was randomly mailed to a residence at which she had not lived for over five years. This year’s mail in ballot adventure is a whopper and is evidence of a complete lack of integrity in our local election systems.
Dead Voters Receiving Primary Ballots in Nevada County
On February 6, 2024, and at our residence, we received, randomly and for the first time, mail in ballots intended for my wife’s father and her stepmother. Having lived in Georgetown, California, in El Dorado County for thirty years, neither Dale nor Kathy Dollar has ever lived at our house in Penn Valley or in Nevada County at all. In fact, they are both dead. Dale died in Sacramento County on January 9, 2024, and Kathy passed away peacefully in her home in Georgetown on June 26, 2023.
Image: ballots sent to dead voters, death certificates for the same voters, and email response from Nevada County Elections Office
Dead people receiving ballots in the mail and actually voting in elections is nothing new in Nevada County. After an extensive analysis of the Nevada County voter rolls in 2012, it was concluded that about ten percent of the oldest registered voters in Nevada County were deceased, half of the decedents were still receiving mail in ballots, and a couple dead people voted in elections after their deaths with one decedent who died on November 19, 2005 voting twice by absentee (2008 primary & 2009 special election) and one decedent who died on April 5, 2007 voted in person in the 2012 primary election.
In regard to the Dollars whose ballots were mailed to a location in which they never lived and after their deaths, the County election office contends that the registrations were automatically changed when a change of address form was sent to the United States Post Office. For some reason, our son-in-law never received his ballot which had been delivered to his residence in Grass Valley during past elections. He still does not know where his ballot is, so he went to vote provisionally at the Gold Miner’s Inn on March 5, 2024.
These Random Ballot Issues are Not Uncommon and Abound in Nevada County
For those of us old enough to remember, ballots being mailed randomly across this state is a new problem created by new policies enacted by our state legislature and enthusiastically supported by our local Nevada County government. The fact of the matter is that Nevada County has no idea to whom they are mailing ballots.
We are a republic and elect leaders who we think will implement good policy which creates a healthy democracy. While experience in running elections is desirable, electing an election official who supports good and sound election policy is paramount. It is paramount, because the health and vibrance of our democracy foundationally depends upon the legitimacy of our elections. There can never be a shred of doubt as to who won an election. If there is any doubt in the legitimacy of an elected official, the very foundation of our democracy is seriously damaged.
Politicians Sowing Doubt in Elections for Political Gain is only Possible as a Result of a Faulty Election System
Look no further to the actions of certain presidential candidates who point to their opponents' illegitimacy. The Washington Post wrote, “Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court curtailed his legal efforts to count more ballots in Florida, but many Democrats continued to view Bush as an accidental, if not illegitimate, president.” Hillary Clinton, who handily lost the 2016 presidential election, called the winner, Donald J. Trump, an “illegitimate president.” In lieu of posting a link to the millions of times which Trump has opined on the 2020 election, there is no doubt that Trump and over a third of Americans, question the legitimacy of Joe Biden.
In order to remove any doubt about the legitimacy of our elections, reasonable citizens support easy and efficient voting balanced by reasonable and common-sense security measures. Elections are a balancing act between these two issues. On one extreme, we could err in the direction of sending ballots to anyone and everyone everywhere for months before and after an election in order to maximize voter turnout by removing all common-sense chain of custody procedures. On the other hand, we could make it more cumbersome to vote by requiring voter identification with no mail-in ballots at all, with only in person voting on election day, and with auditable chain of custody requirements.
How Much Election Security is Necessary?
The question then becomes how much security is required to stop politicians from politicizing election results and questioning the legitimacy of elected officials who beat them. I realize that the premise of the question is ridiculous and even hilarious. How do you stop self-interested politicians from politicizing elections for personal gain? While the question seems to presuppose an impossible reply, the answer is quite simple. We must err on the side of common-sense security measures and sacrifice convenience in voting in order to put an end to these self-interested legitimacy claims. In order to put an end to the politicians questioning the legitimacy of elections after each election, the public must conclude that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the winners are the people that actually won.
California’s Automatic Voter Registration Requirements are a Complete Mess
California now has automatic voter registration requirements which cause dead people in the state to receive blank ballots in the mail. Besides dead people in Nevada County receiving ballots, what else happened after California created automatic voter registration requirements? Judicial Watch “sued the county and state voter-registration agencies in Los Angeles federal court, arguing that the state was not complying with a federal law requiring the removal of inactive registrations that remain after two general elections, or two to four years.” Los Angeles ended up with 112% registration and was forced by a court to purge 1.5 million inactive registrants. A Pew Study discovered that California DMV officials found more than 100,000 registration errors in the first year including non-citizens. Imagine delegating election integrity to the DMV. The thought, in and of itself, is ridiculous yet California did exactly that and it failed spectacularly. In conclusion, automatic voter requirements flood the zone with voter registrations of which neither the state nor the counties can keep track. In order to have a secure election with integrity, voter registration must be in person and done at your local election office which is actually charged with the responsibility of keeping our local registration rolls accurate.
No Chain of Custody for Ballots in Nevada County
The chain of custody of ballots in elections is equally important as it is in a criminal court. Our society has long ago concluded that it is better to set 10 guilty people free than to send one innocent person to jail. In this same vein, it is better to not count any ballots where the chain of custody has been broken than to count any of them at all. From a purely statistical point of view and assuming that all ballots cast have been done so legally despite the broken chain of custody, the result of the election will be exactly the same. However, this paradigm contains a ridiculous assumption in connection with our elections and the nature of man. It is ridiculous to assume that all ballots cast have been done so legally despite the broken chain of custody. Further, it is absolutely improper for the government to be able to say after an election that it is more likely than not that Candidate A won. For the health of our democracy, election results must be beyond any reasonable doubt.
This assumption brings us full-circle back to mail-in ballots. Anyone can register online, receive a ballot by mail, and return it to a drop box. The obvious first issue is that the elections official never sees the individual voter. There is simply no way to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, who this new registrant is. The second issue is the completely shattered chain of custody of the evidence in an election - the mail-in ballot. As soon as the election official deposits the ballot in the mail, the chain of custody is broken. Period, full stop. If a police officer mailed a murder weapon to a prosecutor, absent a clean process that “tracks the movement of evidence through its collection, safeguarding, and analysis lifecycle by documenting each person who handled the evidence, the date and time it was collected or transferred, and the purpose for the transfer,” such evidence is going to be inadmissible. There is no chain of custody in mail-in ballots. Partisan election officials point to signature requirements as evidence, but a signature on an envelope only potentially proves that the voter signed the envelope. A signature on a security envelope, while having its own problems of verification, does not necessarily prove that the voter filled out the ballot or even signed the envelope. In fact, and absent expert testimony, a signature on a security envelope cannot be conclusively determined to be the actual recipient of the ballot. As far as dropboxes are concerned, nothing prevents individuals from harvesting blank ballots from nursing homes (as happened in Wisconsin in 2020) or apartment complexes and dropping off thousands of ballots at a time dropboxes (as happened in Georgia in 2020). These two issues are exacerbated by the bulk mailing of blank ballots pursuant to ill-kept voter registration rolls. In short, partisan policies of mail-in ballots and dropboxes create reasonable doubt in the results of elections. The partisan policies of drop boxes and mailing a ballot to any voter, thus shattering the chain of custody, allows any politician to sow reasonable doubt in the results of an election. While partisan Democrats point to Donald Trump and other politicians as the destroyers of democracy for sowing reasonable doubt in the results of elections, the truth is that the elections policies advocated and implemented by our elected officials including our local election officials (mail-in ballots and dropboxes) created the playing field where reasonable doubt can be sown.
There Must be no Reasonable Doubt about the Result of our Elections
In order to properly secure our elections and prevent the sowing of reasonable doubt in election results, the burden of proof in connection with our elections should be on the government to demonstrate that, beyond a reasonable doubt, so-and-so won. In order for the election offices to meet this high and necessary standard, there must always be a clean chain of custody of each and every ballot. In these debates about elections and their legitimacy, the government attempts to shift the burden of proof to the electorate basically asserting that the “electorate must prove the government conducted the election unfairly and, oh by the way, you have a month to complete your audit.” Such an assertion is also ridiculous. The election official ignores the chain of custody of a ballot and then demands that the public prove the ballot was illegally cast. Talk about backward. In order for our democracy to be healthy and vibrant, the burden is on the government, and not the governed, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the election is legitimate. The only way the government can meet this high and necessary burden is to establish a clean chain of custody of each ballot.
Chain of Custody of Ballots is Paramount
The simple and easy solution to stopping self-interested politicians from politicizing elections for personal gain is a completely unbroken chain of custody of ballots. After keeping meticulously clean voter rolls, the election official hands the voter a ballot in-person on election day, the voter fills out the ballot on election day, and the voter gives the ballot back to the election official on election day for counting. Knowing the number of ballots printed, the election official keeps track of how many ballots were cast, how many ballots were spoiled, and how many ballots are left over. Aside from how many ballots were printed in 2020 and after mailing the ballots, our local elections officials cannot tell us how many ballots were cast legally, how many ballots were spoiled, and how many ballots are left over as there are ballots everywhere sent to people who many times are gone. With mail-in ballots and dropboxes, there is no chain of custody of ballots, hence no reliability in the results of any election. In order to increase voter participation to the greatest extent possible after the implementation of these reasonable chain of custody requirements, election day should be a federal holiday.
Solid Election Policy Creates a Vibrant Democracy While Relaxed Policy Sows Discord
As stated previously, we are a republic and elect leaders who we think will implement good policy which creates a healthy democracy. Our elected officials, both nationally and locally, who support very bad and dangerous policy related to the health of our democracy are hyper-partisans. They are such “true believers” that they are blind to the foreseeable consequences of their harmful policies which actually led to Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.” These hyper-partisans created the policies that led to Trump actually being able to convince a third of the population that our sitting president is illegitimate. These hyper-partisan policies are like giving a kid dynamite and matches. Our elected officials, nationally and locally, are either ignorant as to what good policy looks like, or they desire the ability of politicians to question the legitimacy of each election when it is politically advantageous. Each possibility is horrible for the future of our democracy.
