What Is Ballot Harvesting

Republicans uniformly call it ballot harvesting implying that election results are planted and plucked from a field of voters.

What is ballot harvesting. It s ballot harvesting a long disputed practice implicated in fraud that s come to the fore with the nationwide embrace of absentee voting in recent years and especially in last month s. Ballot harvesting got so egregious in 2018 in north carolina where it s illegal as it is in texas that republican congressional candidate mark harris saw his 905 vote victory annulled in. This practice known as ballot harvesting has been effective and unsurprisingly has generated controversy. Others see it is a political tool that can easily lend itself to fraud.

Assemblywoman lorena gonzalez d san diego who authored the bill proclaimed it was just a public service. Those efforts involved identifying voters who might support democratic candidates and ignoring those who wouldn t. Ballot harvesting also called vote harvesting is the collecting and submitting of absentee or mail in voter ballots by volunteers or workers. Democrats and voting rights advocates prefer the term ballot.

Ballot harvesting allows anyone even a paid political campaign worker to collect and return ballots harvesting them. It occurs in some areas of the u s. Ballot harvesting or the practice of allowing political operatives and others to collect voters ballots and turn them in en masse to polling stations has drawn bipartisan concerns of fraud. Some see the practice of ballot harvesting as a voter service that has long assisted elderly voters and native american voters living on remote reservations.

Many of the field plans included ballot harvesting as an option to deliver voters or their ballots to the polls. Ballot harvesting is the process where organized workers or volunteers people you don t know collect absentee ballots from voters and drop them off at a polling place or election office.