California public schools routinely rank among the lowest in national education testing for mathematics, and it’s tempting to connect this statistic to the Golden State’s glacial vote counting process. Sadly, the failure of California’s election officials to discover a winner in certain key House races can’t be written off to anything as innocuous as poor math skills. In CA-13, for example, GOP incumbent John Duarte was about 3,100 votes ahead of Democrat challenger Adam Gray on Nov. 6. The total number of votes cast in this district was less than 210,000 but, after more than three weeks of ballot counting, election officials now say that Gray leads by 190 votes. At the risk of repeating myself, now is the time to rein in one-party fiefdoms like California with national election reform. Meanwhile, in CA-27, Republican incumbent Mike Garcia led Democrat challenger George Whitesides by about 4,800 votes on Nov. 6. But the vote counters soldiered on and inevitably they found enough ballots for the Democrat to declare himself victorious. Likewise, in CA-45, GOP incumbent Michelle Steel led Democrat challenger Derek Tran by about 10,000 votes shortly after Election Day. The counting continued, of course, and after a couple of weeks the Democrat found himself with a 102 vote lead. The rest was as inevitable as Greek tragedy. Both Garcia and Steel conceded without a fight, presumably to avoid being slandered as “election deniers.” Thus, three GOP House seats succumbed to the counters. How Does California Do It? It’s possible, of course, that these Democrat wins were achieved legitimately. But how could it have taken weeks to discover this miracle? The most likely answer is that Democrat vote counters in Merced, Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Orange counties mined their caches of defective ballots and “fixed” enough to put their candidates over the top. California is a universal mail-in state where Voter ID is literally illegal and every person listed on its voter rolls is automatically sent a postage-paid ballot. This system guarantees election skullduggery. The state can’t track what happens to ballots once they are mailed out. As the Public Interest Legal Foundation reported at the time, millions evaporated in 2022: After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them. It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass mail elections, we can only assume what happened. Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap. The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address. A major source of temptation for unscrupulous Democrat election officials involves ballots that are returned pursuant to some defect. Many bounce back because they are mailed to bad addresses, for example. Why are so many sent to invalid or even nonexistent addresses? Dozens of California counties, including those noted above,  have refused to update their voter rolls as required by the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993 (NVRA). Section 8 of the NVRA requires States to maintain accurate and current voter registration rolls. It is no coincidence that other districts that just flipped from red to blue after weeks of counting are dominated by officials who have consistently declined to comply with NVRA. California has been repeatedly sued for ignoring this statute. The most recent lawsuit, Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al., was filed after the plaintiffs discovered that 16 counties had no mechanism in place for identifying invalid registrations. Another 16 possessed the capacity to do so but had removed none from their voter rolls, plus 5 additional counties that removed five or fewer. These 37 counties include Merced, San Joaquin, and Stanislaus (CA-13) and Orange (CA-45). A previous Judicial Watch lawsuit forced Los Angeles County (CA-27) to remove 1.2 million invalid registrations. Inevitably, the corporate media have dismissed concerns about voter rolls. CNN is typical: Questioning the accuracy of voter rolls has long been a hallmark of right-wing efforts to raise doubts about the integrity of elections and featured prominently in 2020 when allies of the former president pushed false claims that scores of fraudulently cast votes helped Joe Biden win the presidency … Meritless or not, the Biden administration has taken note. This month, the Justice Department reiterated that states have an obligation to comply with the National Voter Registration Act, a 30-year-old federal law that sets out rules for when and how most states can update their voter rolls. The Time Is Now for Reform That the Biden Justice Department — hardly a beacon of light in the storm of attacks on election integrity — recognizes the importance of the National Voter Registration Act is not nothing. But it almost certainly means the Biden DOJ sympathizes with out-of-control states like California. The good news, of course, is that Attorney General Merrick Garland is about to be replaced with former Florida AG Pam Bondi. She will be an advocate of the voters rather the vote counters. And, despite the best efforts of California Democrats, the GOP will soon control all three branches of the federal government. At the risk of repeating myself, now is the time to rein in one-party fiefdoms like California with national election reform. READ MORE from David Catron: Can Musk Dismantle the Deep State? We Need National Election Reform … Now! The post The Indefatigable California Vote Factory appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.