Government Accountability Institute Vice President of Research Eric Eggers has laid out the machinery behind the Los Angeles mayor’s race, and his central argument was not about who broke the law.
It was about what California has made perfectly legal.
Eggers pointed past Los Angeles councilmember Nithya Raman to a different operator he says is pulling the strings: billionaire Tom Steyer.
“It’s another socialist, actually, I think, pulling some strings and proving to be quite influential in California,” Eggers said. “And his name is Tom Steyer.”
The irony was not lost on him.
“It’s ironic that he’s getting the support of the socialists in California because he happens to be a billionaire. Yet somehow the socialists said, ‘Hey, that’s the guy we like.'”
According to Eggers, Steyer had the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists and had leveraged his connections and financial influence with the unions, backing a paid ballot-harvesting network with more than $200 million invested in his own effort to be elected.
That money, Eggers argued, connects directly to ballot collection on Skid Row, where the loopholes get exploited. He described hundreds of people registered to vote at homeless shelters “with no actual beds,” and pointed to testimony in the California Post from collectors who said they “been paid with cigarettes and maybe a shower to fill out some ballots and to collect some other ones.”
But the heart of his case was about legality, not crime. “The real scandal, the real crime, from a sociological standpoint, is what’s legal in California,” Eggers said.
He illustrated the point with a striking example: a man who never left Texas could still be carrying an active Los Angeles voter registration, because names are not reliably removed from the rolls. “Your name probably wasn’t removed from the voter rolls,” he said, describing how voters can remain on California’s lists long after they should have been cleared.
On harvesting itself, Eggers explained why the practice is nearly impossible to police. “You have completely removed the filling out, collection, and delivery of the ballot from anyone whose actual job it is to ensure election integrity.”
He then read from what he described as a Democratic Socialist canvassing script. Volunteers are coached that if a voter does not support their candidate, the website tells them to “keep it moving.” But if the answer is yes, “then they tell you to ask three different times, may I please help you fill out this ballot?”
The final irony, Eggers said, comes from the messengers. These are people who believe in big government, yet their pitch warns voters away from it: “You don’t want to trust the post office, you don’t want your ballots to get lost at city hall, aka the government. You should give it to me, a paid volunteer.”
“That’s literally what these socialist websites say,” Eggers said. “And that’s just one group.”
Watch the clip above.
