Remote Access Vote By Mail Program

Now, there’s nothing inherently bad about the RAVBM system. It was instituted for people with handicaps who use assistive technology as a matter of course, or for military members serving abroad. In the instance of a person with a handicap, it eliminates the need to have someone else physically fill out the ballot for them, which is good from a ballot harvesting perspective (they don’t need that “helpful hand” advising them). In regular elections, only voters meeting those criteria qualify to receive a RAVBM ballot and must specifically request it from their county. The county emails the voter a link to the ballot, which they fill out using whatever assistive technology they normally use, print, and mail back using the envelope in which they received their traditional vote-by-mail ballot. //

RAVBM ballots can also be returned in-person, and do not have to be in an official ballot envelope to be considered valid as long as the voter has signed the outside of the envelope. That’s where the major issue comes in for this recall election. Ostensibly, someone living in another state can sign up for a RAVBM ballot using the name of a California registered voter (whether that registered voter is alive, dead, or living in another state at this time), vote, print, and mail it in. At this time we have not seen any official procedures for how RAVBM ballots received are secured or if they’re checked against other vote-by-mail ballots received or in-person ballots to ensure that the voter has only voted one time. One can imagine legions of union workers dutifully printing these ballots, with the union bosses keeping boxes of them at the ready to be delivered to LA County, San Francisco, or Oakland at 3 am if it looks like Gavin might actually lose this thing.

The California GOP and the Republican National Committee must band together and fight like hell to ensure election integrity on September 14. If they don’t, this will be coming to every state in the union under the guise of “voting safely” in 2022.