While reasonable people can disagree about how elections should be changed in response to the unique challenges of COVID-19, there should be universal agreement not to make them more dangerous and less effective.  Yet that is what the left and California are trying to do.

Hillary Clinton's 2016 lawyer and Steele dossier funder Marc Elias has made ballot harvesting one of his four pillars for election reform.  As Logan Churchwell explains in an op-ed entitled, All-mail ballot harvesters could be the next COVID-19 superspreaders:

Picture a harvester in a densely-populated city visiting dozens of houses and apartments each day — often crossing thresholds into living rooms to promote a particular candidate, cause or party. Think of the air they breathe, the touched surfaces and the collected ballot envelopes sealed with human saliva from each home. It only takes one untested, asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier’s ballot being harvested to risk exposure for the rest of the neighborhood as that political operative continues door-to-door.

Proponents have a tough sell in credibly convincing the public that all-mail ballot elections are actually safer with respect to sanitary concerns. 

Incredibly California, where ballot harvesting is legal, has not announced any changes to their laws regarding ballot harvesting. 

However, California is changing their laws in a way sure to harm, that at best is a waste of taxpayers’ money and sows confusion and at worst opens their elections to fraud and abuse.  As John Fund writes over at National Review in an article entitled, Mail-In Ballots Are a Recipe for Confusion, Coercion, and Fraud:

Last Friday, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order requiring that every registered voter — including those listed as “inactive” — be mailed a ballot this November.

This could be a disaster waiting to happen. Los Angeles County (population 10 million) has a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population. More than one out of every five L.A. County registrations probably belongs to a voter who has moved, or who is deceased or otherwise ineligible.

Fund cites a number of sources for concerns for mail-in voting including a couple that many may find surprising:

Experts have long cautioned against wholesale use of mail ballots, which are cast outside the scrutiny of election officials. “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” was the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker. . . .

The Los Angeles Times agrees. In a 2018 editorial it blasted the state’s “overly-permissive ballot collection law” as being “written without sufficient safeguards.” The Times concluded that “the law passed in [2016] does open the door to coercion and fraud and should be fixed or repealed.” It hasn’t been.

It defies common sense to have ballot harvesting in the time of a pandemic.  And vote by mail without safeguards is dangerous to our elections' health.