Yes, California’s voter rolls need scrutiny

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” says the old Postal Service creed.
What might stay them?
A federal push to clean up California’s voter rolls.
Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate committee this week that the US Postal Service won’t deliver ballots in states that refuse to share voter roll data with the federal government, per a March executive order from President Trump.
The feds are right to press the issue of clean voter rolls, even if the threat to halt ballot delivery is likely empty and legally dubious.
Ensuring that mail-in ballots go only to eligible voters would be a step toward restoring trust in California’s absurdly lax voting system.
In a state that automatically mails ballots to every registered voter — with no controls on who returns those ballots and no allowance for voter ID — voter-roll accuracy is not just “nice to have.”
It’s imperative.
Besides: If California’s voter lists are as pristine as claimed, why fight an audit?
Just open the books.
But no. California Democrats moan instead about voter suppression (nonsense), protection of personal information (silly, as most info’s public anyway) and trusting the state’s voting system (preposterous).
They also say the Trump order, which could block ballot delivery to 22 million voters in November, would politicize the US Postal Service.
That order may have problems, but let’s be real: The Postal Service is already politicized.
The postal workers unions routinely endorse in political races.
In the 2024 presidential election, both the American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers endorsed Kamala Harris.
And those unions’ members deliver your mail.
In fact, your postal carrier may know your political party, because he or she sees which glossy mailers on card stock you receive.
That’s not to say that mail carriers are biased, unprofessional or violate federal laws against interfering in mail delivery. We regard letter carriers with respect.
And Ballot Trax makes it easy to know if your ballot has been counted or not.
But let’s not pretend the Postal Service is an apolitical entity, or that conveying millions of ballots by USPS doesn’t represent a point of vulnerability in a voting system full of them.
That system, riddled as it is with weak points — mass mail-in balloting, legal ballot harvesting, accepting ballots past Election Day, etc. — is a big reason many Californians distrust the state’s election results.
To date, here is no evidence of widespread fraud in the June 2 primary.
But as critics have noted, the system is rife with opportunities for fraud; and that fraud, if it exists, can be hard to detect.
California’s voting system is so loosey-goosey — by design, some say — that it’s hard to know where the sketchiness ends and any fraud might begin.
Democrats insist that we need this super-lax system to encourage voter participation.
Wrong.
There’s no reason California can’t both support voter turnout and build public trust in election results through sensible guardrails. (Voters can make a start on the latter by approving the voter ID measure on the November ballot.)
It’s not complicated. Other states strike this balance every election.
So yes: Let the feds check the state’s voter rolls, and let’s see what comes of the voting fraud investigations the DOJ has underway.
California’s mess of an election system has made us a national laughingstock.
Allowing scrutiny is the least Sacramento can do.