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Ideology. According to the ideology: mail voting good. Therefore, we should do as much mail voting as possible. It's a silly affectation that (reasonably!) decreases confidence in elections, but, again: demographics explain everything about California. If Democrats pushing their supporters to vote by mail results in more Democrats voting by mail, that is unsurprising. Even the strictest voting scheme would still result in Democrats sweeping every statewide election.
To your last question: ideology, again. I agree it creates the potential for fraud. But California Democrats don't need fraud to win by the margins they do. The system is less "we need this to beat the Republicans, who are otherwise on the precipice of victory" and more "we want to show just how dominant we are over Republicans by implementing a voting system they reasonably despise."
Let me try this a different way. Under California law, all of the following is completely legal:
California mails out millions of ballots to a list of voters that is not standardized or verified. You can get a ballot with a drivers license. You can get a drivers license without being a citizen. There is an unknown number of ballots in the ether that correspond to no legal voters. But if those ballots are received at a counting facility, they will be accepted as valid.
Activists and organizers are allowed to harvest ballots on behalf of voters. They can collect ballots and send them in the mail. If you can’t sign for your ballot, then those organizers are empowered to sign your ballot as a witness on a different box.
The only thing, the only thing that would be necessary to transform this into fraud is for some of these ballots to not touch the hands of unique voters. It would require a list of ballots that does not actually belong to likely voters, or access to legitimate ballots. Then you simply fill them out and mail them in. It would take a few people at best, in an environment where there are thousands of organizers whose activities look indistinguishable from fraud because ballot harvesting is legal.
Such election fraud is never investigated or even taken seriously, because that’s a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Really, they created a system that looks indistinguishable from fraud, on purpose, that consistently produces suspicious and convenient results, that nobody ever investigates, that produces conduct identical to that used to steal elections throughout history, that no other secure election system on earth uses. What’s the most parsimonious explanation?
I say it’s fraud!
If they were committing fraud, then, by definition, they would need fraud to win by the margins they do. It’s a tautology.
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