- The California attorney general dropped a lawsuit against the state party over ballot drop boxes.
- Some state GOP officials had set up their own unofficial drop boxes ahead of the 2020 election.
- The state initially issued cease-and-desist orders over the boxes, but dropped the case after the election.
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The California attorney general's office dropped a lawsuit against the California Republican Party involving its use of unofficial ballot drop boxes in the 2020 presidential election.
The matter began the week of October 11, when news outlets including The Orange County Register and CBS Los Angeles reported that local election officials in parts of the state including Orange County, Los Angeles County, and Fresno were investigating reports of Republican officials possibly confusing voters by setting up unofficial drop boxes.
In a tweet subsequently removed by the platform, a then-California Republican Party regional field director, Jordan Tygh, posted a photo of himself holding his mail ballot in front of a box with a laminated sign taped to it that said "official ballot drop-off box" and "no postage necessary" while wearing a mask with the logo of the Republican congressional candidate Michelle Steel (Steel has not been accused of any wrongdoing or of any official connection to the setup of the drop boxes).
—OC Registrar (@OCRegistrar) October 12, 2020
In an October 12 press conference, then-California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced they formal cease-and-desist orders to both the state Republican Party and county-level Republican parties in Fresno, Los Angeles, and Oranges counties in connection with the drop boxes. Padilla said state officials were also sending guidance to political parties reminding them of the rules around ballot collection.
"Misleading voters is wrong, regardless of who is doing it," Padilla said in the press conference. "Political campaigns and parties can engage in get-out-the-vote efforts, but they cannot violate state law."
But 10 days later, the attorney general's office suffered a setback in court when a judge declined to force the California Republican Party to comply with a subpoena asking them to provide the names of all the voters who had dropped off their ballots in the GOP's collection boxes and locations of such boxes. The state formally dropped the lawsuit altogether a month later on November 21, 2020, when officials concluded that they could account for every ballot cast in the party's drop boxes.
California has expansive laws around both mail voting and third-party ballot collection, laws that both political parties have benefited from in recent election cycles. And on Twitter, the state Republican Party stood behind putting up the drop boxes, citing a state law passed in 2016 expanding ballot collection and arguing that the party-run boxes would give voters another layer of reassurance that their vote would be counted.
"If a congregation/business or other group provides the option to its parishioners/associates/ or colleagues to drop off their ballot in a safe location, with people they trust, rather than handing it over to a stranger who knocks on their door — what is wrong with that?" it tweeted.
The California GOP is correct in pointing out that state law allows any one person to return an unlimited number of other voters' ballots.
Those returning ballots, however, must properly sign for those voters' ballots and follow the legal procedures to safely return them, and setting up unauthorized and unmonitored third-party drop boxes to collect ballots is not legal in California.
In a memorandum released October 11, Padilla's office said that not only did state law ban the use of drop boxes that are not put in place and regulated by government election officials, but setting up those boxes also violates the regulations governing the collection of ballots.
Republican Party operatives can deliver other voters' ballots, but voters must designate a specific person to return their ballot, and those returning the ballots must affix their name, signature, and relation to the voter on the outer envelope.
Some commentators originally suggested that the unauthorized drop boxes could be a cynical attempt on the part of the GOP to feed into some of the misinformation suggesting that fraud is rampant. But the episode appeared more like a real attempt at encouraging Republican voters who might be skeptical of mail voting to return their ballots.
"This looks more like paranoia about returning absentee ballots than an attempt at fraud," Rick Hasen, a leading election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine, located in Orange County, told Insider in an October 12 email. "It is ironic though that the GOP has set up a massive ballot harvesting operation, even though they are not calling it that."
In addition to risking legal consequences, the state GOP also put itself at odds with the messaging on election security of national Republicans, including President Donald Trump, who frequently point to third-party ballot collection as inherently suspicious and the ultimate encapsulation of the dangers of lax voting rules.
"GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD. THE USA MUST HAVE VOTER I.D., THE ONLY WAY TO GET AN HONEST COUNT!," Trump wrote in an all-caps tweet in April. (There is no scholarly evidence that voter-identification laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud.)
And in a September tweet that decried "the atrocious Ballot Harvesting Scam," Trump celebrated a court ruling in Pennsylvania limiting third-party ballot collection.
The Republican National Committee, in particular, has been at the forefront of the legal fights to limit third-party ballot collection.
The organization calls ballot harvesting "unacceptable" on its website ProtectTheVote.org, which summarizes its ongoing election-related litigation, and lists it as one of its top priorities to stop.
The phrase "ballot harvesting" appears 23 times on the website, which identifies seven states where the RNC legal team has fought in court to limit third-party ballot collection.
But on Monday, the organization did not rush to condemn the California GOP's tactics.
"We are continuing to fight Democrats' efforts to expand ballot harvesting, but we are not going to let them have an artificial advantage in places where it is legal," an RNC spokeswoman, Mandi Merritt, told Insider in an email. The California Democratic Party is notably not, however, similarly installing unauthorized drop boxes to collect ballots.
The Trump campaign, which also forcefully opposed ballot harvesting and has been a party to litigation to restrict the practice, did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
And the National Republican Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, appeared to defend the practice, tweeting in response to Steel's opponent, first-term Democrat Rep. Harley Rouda: "Looks like Junior here is only ok with ballot harvesting when it's the Democrats ballot harvesting. Go back to the beach, bro."
The California Republican Party openly embracing a practice decried as the height of fraud and dirty tricks by the national GOP is just the latest example of a Republican campaign breaking with Trump's hardline rhetoric supporting election restrictions.
Throughout this year, even as Trump and other top Republicans have publicly (and falsely) lambasted mail voting as inherently fraudulent and untrustworthy, the Trump campaign and other GOP groups have encouraged their voters, through mailers and robocalls, to take advantage of no-excuse mail voting in the states that allow it.
This story has been updated.
