Key points:
- Reisig’s image as a moderate prosecutor is increasingly being tested.
- Reisig’s claims about mail ballots undermine public trust in elections.
- “Ballot harvesting is a massive election vulnerability that delivers untrustworthy and/or corrupt results.” – Jeff Reisig
Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig has long worked to craft a careful political identity. For years, he has pitched himself as a prosecutor who could embrace elements of reform without abandoning his roots in traditional tough-on-crime politics.
He has pointed to diversion programs, neighborhood courts, and modest reentry initiatives as evidence that he is pragmatic, not ideological — a DA willing to adapt to public demands for change while maintaining order.
That image has served him well. In a state that has seen progressive prosecutors rise to prominence in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Alameda County, Reisig has cast himself as a middle road — not a hardliner, but not a progressive either. It is a positioning that helped him survive politically in a county that is often skeptical of law-and-order campaigns.
But in the past year that image has increasingly been put to a test and, once again this week, the mask of moderation slipped.
Reisig posted on X that “ballot harvesting is a massive election vulnerability that delivers untrustworthy and/or corrupt results.” He went further, claiming he had “witnessed ballot box stuffing during every recent election cycle” and insisted that “just like other civilized countries, mail ballots should not be allowed.”
The language could have come directly from a Donald Trump rally. Assertions of widespread ballot box stuffing have been repeatedly investigated and debunked. Yet they remain at the core of the former president’s campaign to undermine trust in democratic institutions.
For Reisig to repeat them verbatim is not just a matter of poor word choice. It is an alignment with a national movement that has worked to cast doubt on legitimate elections.
California law explicitly allows voters to designate someone they trust to return their mail ballot. Critics deride the practice as “ballot harvesting,” but lawmakers designed it as a safeguard for voters who cannot easily reach polling places or drop boxes.
Signature verification, ballot tracking and audits have consistently demonstrated the reliability of California’s vote-by-mail system.
There is no credible evidence of organized “ballot box stuffing” in recent election cycles. For the district attorney of Yolo County to insist otherwise is to mislead the public he is sworn to serve.
Studies has repeatedly shown that actual incidences of voter fraud in the US are extremely rare. And yet, the political right continues to hit the drumbeat and, this week, DA Reisig appears to have joined them.
The contrast with his reformer image is stark. A prosecutor who has highlighted his willingness to experiment with alternatives to incarceration is now voicing rhetoric that mirrors the MAGA playbook on elections.
The political aspect of this, while intriguing, is far from the most concerning part of this statement by a sitting district attorney.
In Yolo County, residents expect their elected officials to safeguard institutions, not undermine them. When a sitting district attorney — the person responsible for enforcing state law — calls for eliminating mail ballots and dismisses existing safeguards as a “cloak of secrecy and conspiracy,” he is not acting as a neutral guardian of justice.
He is participating in a broader political project to erode trust in the electoral system itself. Reisig’s post is not simply a policy disagreement about how ballots are collected, but part of a larger narrative that encourages voters to doubt the legitimacy of elections altogether.
When a district attorney — someone charged with upholding the rule of law — advances claims that mirror national conspiracy theories, it deepens cynicism, undermines confidence in democratic institutions, and normalizes suspicion in place of evidence. This erosion of trust is the real danger. Once faith in the basic machinery of voting is lost, the foundation of democracy itself begins to crack.
The consequences go beyond partisan positioning. Democracy depends on public trust, and that trust is fragile. When prosecutors, judges or law enforcement leaders echo unsupported claims of voter fraud, they lend institutional credibility to narratives that weaken the foundation of the system itself.
The DA in Yolo County is unmasking himself and revealing the increasingly ugly side of Amerian politics.
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The question should be why are democrats okay with ballot harvesting?
The video the DA shared is out of Hamtramck Michigan and the news there reports it’s a councilman in the passenger seat. The councilman’s FB page linked from ballotpedia has him pictured with trump.
Because more ballots get cast if you help people cast a ballot. The more people who voted the stronger our republic.
Here’s an excellent article about the problems with ballot harvesting:
https://www.cato.org/blog/trouble-ballot-harvesting
That’s an example of an excellent article? Really? He even acknowledges that more sensational claims, like those in Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules, lack credible evidence and have been debunked by outlets like the Associated Press. In effect, his essay (it’s not an article) is less about demonstrating actual harm and more about raising caution over what could go wrong. But that’s only one step removed from the Trump/ Reisig scare tactics.
None of that is the point of my article of course.
“That last point highlights one of the first problems with the practice: the person standing there asking you to hand over your ballot may be someone you have a hard time saying no to, owing to dependence, economic or otherwise. What if it’s a union steward at your workplace, or the political boss of your community, or a patriarchal family member? What if they’re pressing you for a faster decision than you’d prefer to make? There’s a requirement that the envelope be sealed before you hand it over, but that might work mostly as an honor system. If you yield to improper pressure, who’s going to complain to the authorities, or verify a complaint?
Contrast all this with the idea behind the secret ballot, the idea of leaving you free to vote your conscience or maybe not vote at all, no matter what powerful people in your life or community may expect of you. As they used to say, it’s just you alone in the voting booth.
Next consider the dangers of ballot tampering. Contrary to some imaginings, the abuse that is probably likeliest is not that the collector will switch the choice of party at the top of the ticket. Far harder to police is the practice of “helping” unsophisticated voters by filling in choices for down-ballot races that they might have left blank on their own.
Gaudier abuses, such as the collection of pseudo-ballots from voters who are dead, never intended to vote, or never existed at all, are not unthinkable – politicos are capable of thinking of anything – but leave a trail that is in principle checkable, differing in this from some of the subtler abuses.”
That’s a lot of words for something that there is no actual real world evidence for.
Maybe Jeff is looking for a US Attorney gig or a Federal Judgeship.
Is there evidence of voter fraud due to use of absentee ballots in Yolo County?
No. Nor is there any evidence of widespread fraud anywhere
Reisig didn’t win as a result of promoting a “reform image”. Whatever gave you that idea?
We’ve seen what happened to actual reformers who were elected (in Alameda county, Los Angeles, and San Francisco).
We’ve also seen what happened to the “actual reformers” who challenged Reisig.
Turns out that voters want DAs to function as prosecutors; not public defenders. (Exactly as the system was intended to work.)
Now if Davis could elect it’s own “city DA”, it might elect an actual reformer. But unfortunately for the reform crowd, you’re stuck with the rest of Yolo county in regard to the outcome of elections.
Some examples of ballot harvesting problems:
***North Carolina (2018): A 2018 congressional election in North Carolina’s 9th District was overturned due to illegal ballot harvesting operations run by a Republican operative, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This included the collection and tampering of absentee ballots, says the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration.
***Arizona (2020): The former Mayor of San Luis, Arizona was sentenced in October 2022 for her role in a ballot harvesting scheme during a 2020 primary election in Yuma County, Arizona.
***Connecticut (2023): A court ordered a do-over of a mayoral primary election in Bridgeport, Connecticut, after evidence of illegal ballot collection emerged.
***Texas (Recent): Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently announced indictments and arrests in Frio County related to a vote harvesting scheme. In May 2025, a Frio Grand Jury indicted six individuals, including public officials, for multiple counts of vote harvesting, according to Texas Border Business. A former Texas House candidate is among those charged in the ongoing investigation, according to KGNS.
***Pennsylvania (2014, 2015, 2016): A former U.S. Congressman was charged in 2020 with conspiring to violate voting rights through ballot stuffing and bribery of an election official in primary elections between 2014 and 2016.
***Texas (2020): Rachel Rodriguez was arrested in January 2021 on charges related to vote harvesting in the 2020 election, including election fraud and unlawfully assisting people voting by mail, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
Just sayin’…