Conservative Activists Are Salivating For The Newsom Recall Election

It's apparent that conservative activists view the upcoming Newsom recall election as the equivalent of Christmas - a way to directly intimidate liberal voters and strip their votes away:

"An observer in Nevada County raised concerns about the race of a woman seen removing ballots from a drop box outside the county building, according to county records. The woman, who was Black, was the county registrar’s wife.

In San Diego County, a volunteer poll watcher upset voters by telling them they should surrender their hand-delivered mail-in ballots so they could be canceled and instead vote in person. And in Orange County, an observer attempted to interrupt a couple voting together, and another caused a disturbance for three hours by trying to interview voters as they left.

...“They were interfering with voters. They were interfering with our process,” Neal Kelley, registrar of voters for Orange County, said of Election Integrity Project watchers. “They chew up resources like you wouldn’t believe. … Eighty percent of the time it was just nonsense.” 

The activists are part of a national surge in poll policing, from Florida to Colorado. In California, the top cop is Linda Paine, a former Santa Clarita tea party activist who founded the Election Integrity Project and claims California — which has one of the country’s most permissive approaches to voting — is part of a national scheme to replace the “constitutional Republic” with a “globalist socialist oligarchy.”

...Buoyed in recent years by support from Republican Party officials and major conservative donors, the Election Integrity Project and a second organization, the Institute for Fair Elections, have challenged more than 3 million voter registrations since 2018, The Times found.

...The activists hunt through these changing, imperfect voter rolls to compile lists of registered voters they say should be removed because they are probably dead, have moved, have multiple registrations, haven’t voted in years or, in some cases, are guilty of double voting.

They have had uneven success in demanding that state and local election officials investigate the names on those lists. Interviews, state government records and data analyses by The Times show activists often made major errors or targeted problems that had already been corrected. Still, these continued claims have succeeded in promoting suspicion in conservative enclaves that fraud is a significant problem in California’s voting system.

Addresses they flagged for having suspiciously large numbers of registered voters included college dormitories, convents and a monastery. Lists of voters whom activists claimed no longer lived at registered addresses and should have their voter registration canceled included members of the military away from home on active service. 

Four dozen people accused of voting twice in the March 2020 primary — among 9.6 million ballots cast — turned out to include 32 cases in which election computers erroneously listed them as voting twice. Among the remaining suspects were a set of twins whose names differed by a single letter and elderly people who election officials said probably forgot having voted before doing so a second time. 

In 2016, the Institute for Fair Elections alleged in testimony before a federal voting commission that one person, Jung Kim, illegally voted 14 times in five elections. The Times found the votes were cast by three different people who share the same first and last names but live in different apartments in the same large downtown Los Angeles complex. The three had different ages and were all registered under different political parties.

...Paine this year announced that the Election Integrity Project aims to recruit 30,000 people for the recall election to monitor polling places and vote processing centers, where fraud-seeking observers challenged voter signatures.

...The claim of mass voting by undocumented immigrants remains a motivating force. At a 2019 Placer County recruitment meeting with Paine, a local tea party leader said he was moved to join Paine’s group as a poll observer after hearing secondhand that a van carried migrant workers from poll to poll during a local assembly election at the behest of the United Farm Workers union. “I can’t say I actually [saw] vans pull in loaded with undocumented illegals,” he said, according to a video of the event. “What I can tell you is this: In my heart, in my gut, I know I stopped many buses and many vans from coming in.”

...Election Integrity Project observers protesting that they could not stand close enough to hear everything poll workers said to voters; complaining about couples voting together, even though they are legally allowed to; and calling out procedural deficiencies, such as the orientation of voting booths or presence of water bottles.

Paine apologized by email to the registrar of Nevada County after one of her group’s observers raised concerns about the registrar’s wife, who is Black, removing ballots from a drop box outside the county building. Paine said the volunteer would be dismissed, according to emails reviewed by The Times. “She was gushing with apologies. ‘That’s not what we’re here for,’” the county’s registrar, Gregory Diaz, told The Times, “but in my eyes, that’s exactly what they’re here for.”

...Other conservative and political organizations are also recruiting for the Election Integrity Project."