Executive Summary
When you legalize fraud, is it still fraud? That is the question I put to researcher Eric Eggers in his first appearance on the show, and it is not a word game — it is the actual condition of elections in our most populous state. California did not sneak its system into the shadows. It built it in the open, one law at a time, over fifteen years. It became the first state to legalize third-party ballot harvesting in 2016. It banned cities from requiring voter ID. It registers anyone who touches a welfare program or a driver's license counter, regardless of citizenship status. It even lets people claim a "residence" at an address that is not a residence — which is how 185 people ended up registered to vote at a homeless shelter with zero beds.
We followed the money, because the money is the whole story. Mark Zuckerberg's hundreds of millions changed the very posture of government in 2020 — from neutral referee to active get-out-the-vote operation. The foreign national Hansjörg Wyss has poured hundreds of millions into defeating a single candidate since 2016. Tom Steyer spent $216 million on one run for governor. And the NGO complex — Open Society networks, Arabella, Tides, CHIRLA — has turned homelessness, welfare, and "voter outreach" into a self-funding harvesting machine. The Assistant US Attorney out there says fraud is real and charges are coming. The Supreme Court has cited that one in eight voter registrations nationally is wrong.
But this is not a despair piece. Election integrity is becoming an 80/20 issue, the Department of Justice posture has flipped, and the receipts are finally being read. Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
How California Normalized What the Rest of America Calls Fraud
There are two words that do not belong in the same sentence in the English language, Eric joked — California and normal. And he is right. For the last fifteen years, California has systematically implemented one extraordinary voter law after another, until the abnormal became routine.
It legalized the paid, third-party collection and delivery of ballots in 2016 — the first state to do so. It eliminated any requirement to prove citizenship in order to register. It mails a driver's license to people regardless of immigration status, and the act of getting that license can trigger voter registration. Then it mails a ballot to everyone on the rolls — and lets almost anyone collect them.
Compare that to how it works the way it is supposed to. When the person casting a vote is removed as far as possible from the place where that vote is counted, the opportunities for abuse multiply. That is not a partisan observation — it is the plain physics of chain-of-custody.
The Government Stopped Refereeing and Started Playing
For most of our history, the role of government in an election was narrow and almost boring. It told you when the polls opened. It kept the polling place politically sterile. It left the work of turning out voters to the campaigns.
In 2020, that posture was fundamentally rewritten. With Mark Zuckerberg's money — hundreds of millions of dollars routed through a tech-and-civic nonprofit — the government became, in Eric's words, a voter-outreach arm. Funding for drop boxes. Deals with counties. And the targeting, he noted, was not accidental — the demographics were chosen.
Then the Biden administration doubled down. Its very first executive order leveraged the entire federal government — engage with any agency, and you get registered to vote. California does the same thing with its welfare rolls, even though being eligible for welfare is not the same as being eligible to vote. The real scandal is not one stolen election — it is the permanent rewiring of what we think the government is even for.
The NGO Racket — Where Homelessness Becomes Votes
I always say they never want to solve homelessness, because it is too profitable for the NGOs. And the receipts are damning. The California Post reported 185 people registered to vote at a homeless shelter with zero beds — a shelter that received $600,000 from a candidate in a Los Angeles mayoral race. Multiple homeless people have said on camera they were paid two to five dollars to vote, that operatives return every few months to register them and collect their mail-in ballots.
The scale is staggering. Eric noted that 600,000 people in New York City alone work for an NGO. Tom Steyer's climate group quietly morphed into a nationwide voter-outreach operation with a built-in ballot-harvesting arm. CHIRLA — tied to the anti-ICE riots and funded with our tax dollars — is run by a man who holds elected office in the Mexican government. This is the ground game, and it has been hiding in plain sight.
They Made the Emergency Permanent
After COVID, most people assumed we would simply roll the voting rules back. We did not — and the reason has a name. Mark Elias, Hillary Clinton's campaign lawyer and a central figure in Russiagate, built Democracy Docket and a network of voter-protection NGOs to codify the temporary COVID orders into permanent election law.
A crisis measure rarely returns the power it borrowed. When Georgia tried to move the other way — barring campaign literature and branded water at polling places to restore the sterile environment — the answer was not debate. It was a boycott, accusations of racism, and the loss of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. The same perpetrator-as-victim inversion showed up in the reaction to the Carmelo Anthony verdict. When the argument cannot be won, the subject gets changed and the messenger gets shamed.
Why There Is Real Reason for Hope
I never leave you in the dark, because the truth does not lead there. Election integrity is becoming an 80/20 issue — most Americans agree on it, and the people defending the California model now own the result. The emperor has no clothes, and people are finally saying so.
The posture of government has flipped. Under the previous administration, the head of Medicaid Services told states they could not remove suspected fraud from the rolls. Today, agency heads compete to name bigger fraud numbers — $22 billion in fraudulent small-business loans, possibly part of $200 billion. The ActBlue operators sat in congressional hearings this week. The Southern Poverty Law Center is under scrutiny. A Department of Justice task force is moving, and states like Ohio are volunteering to prosecute. The spreadsheets exist — and someone is finally reading them. We the People are the answer, and the work in front of us is local, concrete, and within reach.
Key Takeaways
- California became the first state to legalize third-party ballot harvesting in 2016 and has spent fifteen years normalizing practices the rest of the country considers fraud.
- 185 people were registered to vote at a homeless shelter with zero beds — a shelter that received $600,000 from a Los Angeles mayoral candidate.
- In 2020, Zuckerberg-linked money turned the government from neutral referee into an active get-out-the-vote operation; the Biden administration extended it across every federal agency.
- Mark Elias and Democracy Docket codified temporary COVID voting rules into permanent law — which is why a simple rollback never happened.
- Foreign national Hansjörg Wyss and donors like Tom Steyer ($216M) flooded the system with money and faced little accountability.
- Election integrity is now an 80/20 issue, and an aggressive DOJ — ActBlue hearings, SPLC scrutiny, fraud task forces — is finally pursuing the receipts.
Frequently Asked Questions
If California legalized ballot harvesting, is it even fraud anymore?
That is the exact trap the system depends on. Calling a practice legal does not make it honest — it just means the people who benefit wrote the rules. A process designed to remove the voter as far as possible from where the vote is counted is wide open to abuse, legal or not.
Why can't we just roll the voting rules back to before COVID?
Because lawfare operators like Mark Elias and Democracy Docket spent the years after 2020 codifying the emergency orders into permanent election law. The temporary measures were never meant to be returned. That is why the fight to reverse them is so difficult.
How does a homeless shelter with zero beds register 185 voters?
California law lets people claim a "residence" at a place that is not a residence — a PO box, a business, a shelter. Pair that with NGOs that receive candidate money, and homelessness becomes a vote-generating asset rather than a problem anyone wants solved.
Is anyone actually being held accountable?
For years, no one was. But the posture has changed. ActBlue operators were in congressional hearings this week, the SPLC is under scrutiny, and a DOJ task force with cooperating states is pursuing it. The receipts always existed — the difference now is the will to read them.
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