California’s elections aren’t secure enough – Daily News

California’s elections are less secure than a game show.

I used to work on game shows, and they had a lot of security—not just the typical gates and guards, but elaborate procedures to prevent cheating. Not cheating by the contestants. Cheating by the producers.

In the early days of television, there was a quiz show scandal. To boost the ratings, the producers ensured that a popular contestant would have no trouble answering the big-money questions. Then they got caught.

So outraged was the country that there were congressional hearings about it.

As a result, even decades later, game show producers were policed by “standards and practices” executives from the major television networks whose job was to ensure that the TV stations airing the shows would never have to deal with these scandals again.

To prevent potential rigging of our question-and-answer game show, the staff members who worked with contestants were not allowed near the game material, and the writers and production staff were not allowed near the contestants. On a day when we were taping five shows, we were required to have seven shows’ worth of game material and contestants, so “standards and practices” could randomly select five sets of each.

One day during a taping someone discovered an error in the question that was coming up in the big-money bonus round of the show. The director stopped the taping during a commercial break so a new question could be substituted.

You would have thought an air raid had started outside the studio.

All of a sudden there was chaos, people running into the control booth in a panic, shouting about shutting down the production and demanding to know why the question was being changed.

They thought we were tampering, like the 1950s quiz shows.

We weren’t tampering. But if we were tampering, that’s exactly what it would look like. There’d be a suspicious pause, a substituted question, and then a big win.

In our elections, the security procedures that had been put into the law over the years to prevent various methods of tampering have all been removed in the name of empowering voters. From automatic voter registration to later deadlines for ballot delivery, vulnerabilities to error and cheating have been opened up like a chasm.

Consider the combined effect of three changes to election law in California: the legalization of ballot harvesting (signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown after being vetoed by both Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger), the decision to mail a ballot to every active registered voter without a request (an emergency measure in 2020 during the pandemic that was made permanent), and the use of unattended drop boxes for ballot collection.

Here’s what the “standards and practices” department would demand to know: what’s the safeguard to prevent people from collecting unwanted or undelivered ballots, marking them in a back room someplace, and dropping off stacks or sacks of them on Election Day, or even later?

There is no safeguard. In California, a ballot will be accepted for seven days after the election and it isn’t even required to have a postmark. State regulations require county officials to accept ballots even if the only date on the envelope was written by the voter.

There’s supposed to be a signature match, but the regulations now make it much more difficult and time-consuming to disqualify a ballot for that reason.

Given the new regulations and procedures, it is virtually impossible to prevent or detect tampering in an election. Even if someone were to confess to it, once the ballots are out of the envelopes, it’s impossible to know which ballots came out of which envelopes, so the vote count can’t be corrected.

“Standards and practices” would halt the production immediately.