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The sunny state of California made headlines this week for failing to account for just over 10 million ballots during the 2022 midterm elections, according to research published by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Per their report, “significant numbers of mail ballots were rejected during California’s first year into its mass-mail balloting. During the 2022 primary and general elections, 226,250 mail ballots were rejected by election officials because of the switch to mail balloting.”
PILF alleged that, in total, 10,891,525 ballots were unaccounted for in the Golden State in the wake of the 2022 midterm elections.
This is a shocking development for Californians and Americans who value the sanctity of the vote. According to Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams, mail-in ballots “disenfranchise” voters.
“There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count,” he said in a statement. “No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late. California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”
In their report, the foundation cited that during the primary and general elections in California, the “most common reason for rejection [of mail ballots] was late arrival. The United States Post Office sets a 94 percent success rate for timely delivery of political mail, so the failure to deliver ballots on time is not surprising.”
Further, they noted that California state law required ballots to be postmarked no later than Election Day and “arrive back for counting no later than seven days after Election Day.”
However, they reported that in 2022, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after Nov. 15.
Per the foundation:
“After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them. It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass mail elections, we can only assume what happened. Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap. The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”
California recently had a surprising hand in helping House Republicans clinch the majority in November 2022 with the election of Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., as reported by RSBN.
Unfortunately, it appears that issues of election irregularities and potential fraud have greatly tainted the integrity of the 2022 midterm elections.