The speaker of the House is in the midst of what his office is calling (tongue somewhere in cheek) the “Paul Ryan Farewell Tour.” The Wisconsin Republican is talking publicly in an uncharacteristically reflective way: on his time in Congress, his biggest regrets, and the results of this month’s midterm elections.
In a conversation with the Washington Post this week, Ryan discussed the near-wipeout of Republican House seats in California. “It defies logic to me,” he said. “We had a lot of wins that night, and three weeks later we lost basically every contested California race. This election system they have, I can’t begin to understand what ballot harvesting is.” Ryan went on to call the vote-counting system “bizarre” and “weird.”
The criticism began pouring in. California’s Democratic secretary of state, Alex Padilla, blasted Ryan in a tweet.
.@SpeakerRyan, in California we make sure every ballot is properly counted and accounted for. That’s not “bizarre,” that’s DEMOCRACY.https://t.co/zBXiAscmRK
— Alex Padilla (@AlexPadilla4CA) November 29, 2018
And here’s California House Democrat and wannabe presidential candidate Eric Swalwell:
C’mon, @SpeakerRyan, don’t go out like this. In California, we count every eligible voter’s ballot – nothing “bizarre” about it.https://t.co/bTe30Knffx
— Eric Swalwell (@ericswalwell) November 29, 2018
Even the Post’s write-up described Ryan’s statement as “piling on to growing claims from the right that the way the state counts ballots is somehow improper.”
There are corners of the conservative-media world that are either implying or outright declaring that California’s vote-counting system is a nefarious plot to steal an election. It’s not. The practice Ryan and other critics refer to as “ballot harvesting” is perfectly legal in California. But it’s hardly beyond reproach.
Here’s how it works. In most states, early voting by mail requires voters postmark their ballots by a certain deadline or otherwise deliver those ballots to a polling place before the polls close on Election Day. Any ballot that comes in late risks not being counted. Many political organizations have begun seeking out expected early voters after the passage of that early-vote deadline, but before Election Day ends, who may have failed to send in their ballot. These volunteers offer to deliver the sealed ballot to the polling place for the voter.
For defenders of ballot harvesting, the practice is another opportunity to ensure every vote is counted, and helps those who might have the most difficult time delivering their own ballots—the elderly and the infirm, for instance. But opponents of the practice say it provides an easy path toward fraud. This was the basis for Arizona’s banning of the practice in 2016. A Democratic activist challenged the Arizona law this year, but a federal judge upheld it, ruling it did not violate a federal postal law nor the First Amendment.
One veteran Republican in Orange County, California, recently complained about the practice:
“The real problem was that the GOP leadership in California was hapless and got caught asleep at the switch—outmaneuvered by tactics marginally legal but which operated like cat’s feet in the night,” says Khachigian, who lives in San Clemente and was an aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan.
Harvesting is not illegal in California, so there’s no reason to suggest foul play. But the practice does raise philosophical questions about what it means to cast a vote. Does an unreturned early-vote or absentee ballot suggest a true intention to vote? Is there any agency or responsibility required on the part of the voter to make an active choice to vote?
The regime of widespread early voting has long been upon us and isn’t going anywhere any time soon, though it too raises these sorts of questions. What happens if an early voter changes his mind before Election Day? What if new information about the candidates comes to light after an early ballot has been delivered? When members of the electorate are, on a large scale, voting on different days, with a different set of shared information, things get, to quote Paul Ryan, a little weird.
Criticizing California’s way of counting votes isn’t an insult to democracy—it’s a consequence of living in a free society where we can always revisit our ideas of how to govern ourselves.
