Is election fraud a problem in CA’s recall election? No, says state’s top elections official

Larry Elder – the leading Republican candidate to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom should the recall election be successful – believes “there might very well be shenanigans” in the Sept. 14 election and has said his campaign is ready to file lawsuits.

Former President Donald J. Trump chimed in last Tuesday, suggesting the election is “probably rigged.”

“The ballots... are mail-in ballots... I guess you even have a case where you can make your own ballot,” said Trump. “When that happens, nobody’s gonna win except these Democrats. The one thing they are good at is rigging elections, so I predict it’s a rigged election.”

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who is in charge of the Sept. 14 recall election with an estimated $276 million price tag, downplays the voter fraud allegations.

“If you give us factual information, we will definitely investigate it,” Weber said during a telephone interview with Vida en el Valle last Friday.

Repeated investigations nationally, especially after the hotly contested presidential election, said Weber, has shown “no evidence of fraud, even when the Republicans themselves have formed committees and commissions to investigate fraud, as Trump did when he became president.”

“They found nothing after years and years of investigations,” said Weber, who is overseeing her first statewide election after being appointed to fill the post vacated by Sen. Alex Padilla earlier this year.

Newsom criticizes Republican allegations of election fraud

Newsom, in an interview with The Sacramento Bee last Friday, criticized the Republican allegations.

“There is a thread within the Republican Party that, if they don’t get what they want, they are willing to assault the core tenets of an election in ways that have far reaching consequences,” said Newsom. “It’s very, very damaging and baseless, absolutely baseless.”

Weber points to studies and investigations that show election fraud is miniscule.

“MIT did a study on voter fraud and ballot fraud and, I think, it came out to be like .00006%,” said Weber.

Still, her department will investigate allegations of voter/ballot fraud, said Weber, if evidence is presented.

“But if somebody just says this is fraud and there is no evidence of fraud, there’s very little we can do about it,” said Weber, who represented a state Assembly district in the San Diego area since 2012 before her appointment by Newsom.

Weber said she tells elected officials who complain of voter fraud, “does that mean that you will not do your job because you were part of the electoral process too?”

“Nobody seems to want to claim that there was massive fraud (because then) they as elected officials were probably not duly elected either,” said Weber.

Weber said California has one of the country’s most secure elections.

“People can come in and watch the process of vote counting. We try to do a minor audit after the election with a 1% count, and a number of things that have been recommended by individuals who are familiar with voting,” said Weber.

“We can do all that and still there will be those who will say it’s fraud because that makes people feel like, ‘Oh, something is happening and I need to be a part of it.’”

Weber encourages people who complain of election fraud to provide the evidence so that it can be officially investigated.

Cries of election fraud can diminish confidence in the electoral process, even when there is little to no evidence backing those claims, she said.

“After a period of time, you almost become numb to things,” she said. “If someone makes an allegation over and over and over again, those who want to believe it will continue to believe it,” said Weber, a Democrat.

“It’s like the kid who cried wolf over and over. Eventually, people will stop paying attention to you,” said Weber. “But, I’m hoping that we won’t do that. We will always take every real concern seriously.”

More than 11 million ballots have been returned

Weber is hesitant to estimate the election turnout, but noted that more than 11 million ballots had been returned as of last Thursday. The 2003 recall, in which Gray Davis was voted out and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, drew 9.4 million votes.

Norma Trinidad, a community organizer with the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, has been busy educating Latinos in rural parts of the Valley about the recall election. The non-partisan group does not take a position on the recall.

“There’s 50% of our community that knows there’s a recall, and there’s 50% that don’t know,” said Trinidad. “So, that’s where we go ahead and inform them with information.”

Once they get information about how to vote, “they are motivated,” said Trinidad, whose volunteers spent two days in Dinuba and will be in Mendota on Monday.

Polling several months ago spelled trouble for Newsom in that a majority of Latino voters favored the recall. Recent polls, however, suggest that they have gravitated toward keeping the governor in office.

Esta historia fue publicada originalmente el 12 de septiembre de 2021, 7:21 p. m..