Written by: Sasha Reva
California’s universal voting by mail will become permanent for every registered voter in the state. It is all because Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 37 into law on Monday.
California has been mailing ballots over the past two elections. Many people are concerned because of the fraud that happened and might happen over and over again. The biggest worry is that ballots might get lost or even get stolen.
California became the eighth U.S. state to make the universal distribution of vote-by-mail ballots permanent. Voters in California still have the option of casting their ballots at polling stations on Election Day if they would like.
The new law will also permanently extend the time mail ballots have to arrive at elections offices from three days to seven days after an election, a practice adopted in 2020.
California legislator Marc Berman said in a statement: “when voters get a ballot in the mail, they vote… We saw this in the 2020 general election when, in the middle of a global health pandemic, we had the highest voter turnout in California since Harry Truman was president.” The biggest worry is that mail in ballots make fraud substantially easier to commit. It is unclear at this moment if Democrats even have a plan to address this concern now that mail in ballots are permanent.
Photo from: Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group
