A new practice called "ballot harvesting" is legal in the state of California, but illegal everywhere else. It allows third party companies to submit ballots for other voters, and it's why California Democrats won big in the midterms.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told the Washington Post that even though this may sound "bizarre," it's still very real.
Back in 2016, Jerry Brown signed in the original law that began allowing the "ballot harvesting". The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Democrats ran a campaign during the 2018 midterm election that used this practice to get to their victory.
Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.
In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”
For Democrats, the ballot harvesting was all part of a greater effort to get out the vote from their supporters, particularly from occasional voters.
“We beat Republicans on the ground, fair and square,” said Katie Merrill, a Democratic consultant deeply involved in November campaigns. “Many of the field plans included (ballot harvesting) as an option to deliver voters or their ballots” to the polls.
Democrat Secretary of State Alex Padilla later told Politico, "what they call strange and bizarre, we call democracy."
Read more about California's "ballot harvesting" on Breitbart.