It’s crazy how the people who keep yapping about “protecting election security” are the ones who keep infringing on election security. On Thursday, the California Supreme Court ordered Chad Bianco, the Republican sheriff of Riverside County, to return nearly 650,000 ballots he seized from election officials during an investigation.
The New York Times reports that Bianco’s investigation began after right-wing activists claimed the county’s vote tallies during last year’s special election focused on redistricting didn’t match the ballots received. Even if there was a discrepancy, it would not have been enough to change the outcome.
Bianco began the investigation while campaigning in California’s gubernatorial race earlier this year. Soon after Bianco seized the ballots, several lawsuits were filed, including one by Clarissa Cervantes, a Riverside city councilwoman. In April, the court ordered him to stop the investigation as the case proceeded.
What’s wild to me is that California is perhaps the deepest Blue of the Blue states. It’s a surprise to literally no one that the state was all for redistricting, because the end goal is to undermine the impact of both the Republican redistricting effort and the Trump administration as a whole. If there was a sudden, overwhelming influx of Democratic votes in a historically Red state like South Dakota, then yeah, I’d get how a Republican would have some questions about what may be going on.
“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” wrote Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu in a concurrent opinion published Thursday. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents — and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”
“The high court for the state of California has spoken,” Cervantes said in a statement. “The rule of law has been upheld, and your sacred ballot and vote are constitutionally protected from any outside political interference.”
Bianco also issued a statement which predictably called out the court’s ruling.
“The facts of this case have never been disputed, this was an obvious legal attempt to prevent the investigation from occurring,” Bianco said in a statement. “This ruling and the destruction of potential evidence without answers undermines the public trust in our systems.”
Bro, your entire party has spent the last six years undermining trust in our systems. Jan. 6 didn’t happen because Republicans had the utmost faith in the system. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large have spent the last year and a half preemptively sowing doubt into our election results because they don’t like their prospects for the midterms.
That’s why Trump tried his hardest to convince Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would’ve implemented significant roadblocks to registering to vote. It’s why Trump has spent so much time trying to undermine mail-in voting through executive orders and weird postal service rules. If Trump got his way with mail-in voting, it would’ve disenfranchised millions of Americans and actually would’ve undermined faith in our elections.
These people don’t care about election integrity. They simply want to maintain power at any cost, at the expense of American democracy.
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