GOP cries foul after California thumping
‘What they call strange and bizarre, we call democracy,’ says the Democrat who oversees the state’s elections.
By CARLA MARINUCCI
11/29/2018 07:40 PM EST
SAN FRANCISCO — A growing chorus of Republicans are casting doubts about the integrity of the voting system in California, where the party lost at least six House seats in the midterm election — including a handful where the GOP at first appeared to have emerged victorious on election night.
A sentiment that began as a murmur among hard-line conservatives jumped to the Republican mainstream Thursday when House Speaker Paul Ryan suggested that the state’s “bizarre†voting system “just defies logic to me,†and may have contributed to the GOP’s historic thumping in California.
"We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,’’ Ryan said Thursday. “This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.â€
In part due to mail-in and provisional ballots that delivered the margin of victory to Democratic challengers in a handful of seats, California’s Republican delegation appears to have been slashed in half — in the new Congress, Republicans are likely to hold just seven of the state’s 53 House seats, the party’s lowest number since the 1940’s.
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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/29/california-2018-midterm-elections-results-voting-republicans-1031072
