In February 2020, 3,721,903 California voters received their ballots in the mail—without the presidential candidates.
I can’t make that up.
Think California and you think of laid-back surfer dudes, vegan taco trucks and progressive Democrats. But buried under the palm trees are the uncounted ballots of millions. No state—not Georgia, not Florida, not Ohio—comes even close, for sheer number of ballots disqualified, than The Golden State—thanks to the sticky fingers of its Democratic Secretary of State, Alex Padilla.
Here’s how he does it. While Californians vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in general elections, 5.3 million voters, mostly the young and Latinos, refuse to join the Party. They register as independents or, as they are called in California, No Party Preference (NPP) voters. Each of these five million voters is legally entitled to vote in the Democratic primary—but good luck trying.
Just before Christmas 2019, each of these 5 million indie voters was mailed a postcard offering the chance to get a ballot with the Democratic presidential primary candidates. The postcards looked like junk mail, and 91% of voters threw them out.
Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the postcard trick, Golden State style. Paul Mitchell, recognized as the state’s top voting statistician, calls this “Disenfranchisement by Postcard”—similar to the Husted/Kemp purge-by-postcard game but on a far grander scale.
Who gets screwed out of their ballot? Target one: the 1.4 million young NPP voters, the 18- to 24-year-olds, who move from dorm room to dorm room, apartment to apartment, sofa to sofa, and often don’t get the cards.
In other words, Bernie Sanders voters.
Almost no young voters (only one in twenty) return the postcards allowing them to vote for President.
Target two: Latinx NPP voters who also return only 1 in 20 of the postcards. California Hispanics voted overwhelming for “Tío Bernie.”
You won’t be surprised to learn that Secretary of State Padilla does not consider Bernie his tío. Padilla, while directing this postcard pogrom of Latinx and young voters, campaigned for Joe Biden in the 2020 primary, and for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary against Sanders.
Political Data Inc., Mitchell’s firm, the respected source of polling data for both the Republicans and Democrats, surveyed the independent NPP voters in 2020 and found that a large majority (61%)—well over two million citizens—very much wanted to vote in the Democratic Primary. However, only one in eleven got the ballot with the candidates.
Older (65+) voters—those who prefer Medicare for Me as opposed to Medicare for All—were nearly four times as likely to get ballots as the young voters.
Well over a million NPP voters were denied ballots they wanted and had a legal right to obtain.
Polling shows that most California voters who want to get the ballot are just clueless about how to do so. Another third of California voters thought they had no legal right to exchange their no-candidate ballot.
PDI measured NPP candidate preferences a week before the March 2020 primary. Sanders was the NPP independents’ favorite. It’s easy to calculate from the PDI data that 553,000 NPP Californians for Sanders never received the ballot with their candidate’s name. And thus, Bernie was burned out of half a million primary votes—and scores of delegates to the Democratic convention.
I must add that another candidate threatening Biden, Mike Bloomberg (a fave of older, white independent voters) was also given the Golden State shaft: about 382,000 of Bloomberg’s would-be voters never got the ballot with their candidate.
THE MAGIC WORD “CROSSOVER”
There is another way for the five million independent voters to get to vote for their candidate: they can bring their “NPP” ballot into the polling station and exchange it for a ballot with presidential candidates.
Not many know about this option, but be careful: a woman voting in front of me brought in her Bernie-free NPP ballot . . . but was bounced because she forgot to bring the envelope.
But now it turns from weird to Kafka. The voter must turn in their NPP ballot and ask for . . . a “Democratic Crossover” ballot. In many counties, if the voter doesn’t know the magic word “Crossover,” they’re S*** Out of Luck; no new ballot.
The poll workers are muzzled. If the voter asked for a Democratic Party ballot, they were told, “NPP voters can’t have a Democratic ballot.” The poll workers were not allowed to say, “Oh, you want a Crossover ballot.” Some poll workers, taking mercy on those who may have waited hours in line, used rule-bending hints and pantomime.
5 million California voters can only use the “Crossover” ballot—and 4 million of them have no idea how to get it.
Jen Abreu was a poll worker in San Diego, and this magic word game bothered her big time.
If this NPP voter did not specifically ask for a Democratic crossover ballot, they were given an official NPP ballot, which did not list presidential candidates.
Many confused poll workers gave the NPP voters Democratic ballots, not ones marked “CROSSOVER,” not realizing that, in most counties, those ballots would be tossed out, disqualified.
Some voters were given provisional ballots instead of crossover ballots—again, grounds for disqualification.
And some voters were told to simply write “Sanders” on their NPP ballots. Which they might as well throw right into the burn barrel.
The state of Colorado ignored the diktat of the DNC for its own open primary, sending each independent voter both a Democratic and Republican ballot, making it easy to vote as one chooses. Kind of like a democracy. Sanders won Colorado in a walk.
In California, with the confusion at the polls and the pressure of long lines, provisional ballots were handed out like candy. In Orange County and elsewhere, poll workers were told to hand independent voters provisional, not crossover, ballots. Confusion? Malice? ¿Quién sabe?
Three days after the primary, 345,000 provisionals had not yet been “processed”—not even looked at, let alone counted. Most were for NPP (i.e., young and Latinx) voters who did not know they had to bring in their NPP ballots for the goofy “exchange” process.
We can estimate the number of provisional ballots that will be deep-sixed. Sec. of State Padilla has to report his rejection rate in general elections to the federal government. In 2016, Padilla’s system disqualified over 400,000 ballots, about 31% of all provisionals. California threw out more provisional votes than all other 49 states combined. And that was in a general election. In the primary, it would be worse.
BERN’D IN 2016
I first took note of the California Democratic Party’s championship vote suppression system in 2016 during the primary race between Sanders and Clinton.
This caught my eye:
—8.6 million: the number of Californians who cast ballots in the presidential primary.
—7.3 million: the number of votes counted for all presidential primary candidates.
Math whizzes will note a discrepancy of 1.3 million votes.
Did people wait in line, in some cases for hours, to vote for . . . no one? Or did a million-plus Californians just want to vote in the race for local sheriff?
Doubtless, there are some Californians, especially since the legalization of recreational marijuana, who just like to hang out at polling stations. Whatever, we can reasonably assume that most of those whose ballots were cancelled were voters “disenfranchised by postcard” and who sent the no-president ballot, or wrote “Sanders” on their NPP ballots, or received a Democratic ballot instead of the Crossover—and so had their ballot disqualified.
That year, three-quarters of a million primary voters were shunted to provisional ballots. How many were destroyed uncounted? Padilla won’t say. Apparently, complete election returns are a state secret.
I’ve asked Padilla’s office six times to locate the 1.3 million missing 2016 votes and tell me what happened to them. For the Guardian, I filed a formal Freedom of Information request. So far, we have neither freedom nor information, just silence and a tall stone wall.
In 2016, Padilla declared Hillary Clinton winner of California’s primary by a slim margin. The win was enough to effectively put an end to Sanders’s run.
Most of the uncounted ballots in 2016, as in 2020, represented attempts to vote by those beleaguered NPP independent voters. This led to many reports suggesting Sanders’s win could be buried in that giant pile of rejected ballots.
PolitiFact declared that the several reports that Sanders’s victory was in the hundreds of thousands of uncounted votes was a “pants on fire lie.” (PolitiFact is a self-appointed arbiter of truth; in reality, they’re just a gaggle of amateur googlers paid by Facebook as censors for hire.) According to PolitiFact, “Sanders would have to win the remaining votes by roughly a 2 to 1 margin to overtake Clinton”—and quoted a pollster who said, “You’re smoking something if you think that’s going to happen.”
I don’t smoke, but unlike PolitiFact, I checked the facts, turning to the Golden State poll from Stanford University. The Golden State reported that Sanders crushed Clinton among NPP voters 67% to 29%, well more than two to one. Even the pollster they quoted showed Sanders ahead—an intra-party red shift. I guess a PolitiFact, like a FoxFact, is not a Factual Fact.
IS SILICON VALLEY IN CALIFORNIA?
One big reform could give democracy a chance in California—and throughout America: “SDR” as legislators call it, “Same Day Registration.” If you’re wrongly purged from the rolls, or given a bullshit NPP ballot, rather than walking out without voting or accepting a may-not-get-counted provisional ballot, you can simply register or re-register right on the spot.
California has had Same Day Registration on the books for more than eight years. It was signed into law in 2012 by Governor Jerry Brown with a lot of self-congratulatory hoopla from the Guv about making voting easier. But for a voter in Los Angeles who knew they could register on Election Day (and almost no one knew), you’d have to drive to the County building in Norwalk, which, from my house, for example, is a two-hour round trip. Virtually no one took advantage of this so-called right.
Why can’t Americans register right at the polling station? In the case of California, the Democratic political leadership was smart enough to place a little landmine in their SDR law: no one could register at a polling station until the state properly computerized its voter registry.
Other states—like Mississippi and Alabama—had computerized their voter rolls years earlier. But California simply could not, over eight years, figure out how to properly digitize its files. I was under the impression that California has a few folks who know about computers. But Jerry Brown and Alex Padilla could not seem to find them.