Elections
10 million California mail-in ballots ‘unaccounted for’
It is believed that not one, not two, but up to ten million mail-in ballots in California have gone unaccounted for in the state’s first major test of its universal mail-in voting program according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
In a report this month the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a watchdog group, claims California’s November elections were a huge fail as the state tested the mail-in program. Such a fail, that the state has nearly 10 million ballots have evaporated into thin air.
The report states “after accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding.” This means “election officials do not know what happened to them.”
“It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients,” the group said. PILF argued that universal mail-in voting rules “have an insurmountable information gap.”
“The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address,” they wrote.
The group further noted that, in the 2022 primaries and elections, “226,250 mail ballots were rejected by election officials,” many due to signature problems or late submissions.
In 2021 California became one of a handful of states to adopt the universal mail-in voting policy, which means every voter in the state receives a ballot to vote via mail prior to an election.
After hours of debate, the House voted Wednesday night to approve a bipartisan debt-ceiling deal, taking a step toward averting a default on U.S. debt. The measure passed with 314 members voting in favor and 117 members voting in opposition. 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats voted to approve the bill, while 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats voted against it.
National Review writes the measure’s passage secures “a victory for House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who managed to keep his caucus together despite a challenge from House Freedom Caucus members intent on securing greater spending concessions from the Biden White House.”
The bill will now head to the Senate. McCarthy said the measure is the “largest spending cut that Congress has ever voted for,” but faced opposition from members of his caucus who believe the deal “didn’t go far enough in restoring pre-Covid spending levels.”
In his speech on the House floor Wednesday before the vote, McCarthy pleaded with his colleagues to support what he had bargained for with Biden:
“They demanded a clean debt limit, which really means they spend more and you pay more in taxes. House Republicans said ‘no’,” McCarthy said.“Over the past four months, we fought hard to change how Washington works. We stopped the Democrats from writing a blank check after the largest spending binge in American history… The Fiscal Responsibility Act is the biggest spending cut in American history.”
National Review reports:
The agreement suspends the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt limit through January 1, 2025, and caps spending in the 2024 and 2025 budgets.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the deal will reduce budget deficits by about $1.5 trillion between 2023 and 2033. Director of the CBO Phillip Swagel projected that there would be reductions in discretionary outlays of $1.3 trillion over the 2024–2033 period. Mandatory spending would decrease by $10 billion, revenues would decrease by $2 billion over the same period, and the interest on the public debt would decline by $188 billion.
Biden warned of the consequences of default, saying what would follow would include an economic recession, devastated retirement accounts, and millions of jobs lost.
“I made clear from the start of negotiations that the only path forward was a bipartisan budget agreement,” explained Biden on Twitter. “No one got everything they wanted. But that’s the responsibility of governing.”
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