Follow the rules when voting or you could end up in the Yolo County Jail

It's best to stand silently in line if you decide to vote in person

With all the talk about election integrity and dead people voting and immigrants barbecuing cats while waiting in line to cast their ballots, it's a wonder anyone shows up at their local polling place anymore.

When our kids were little, my Sweetheart and I would put all of them in their strollers and we'd take a walk in the sunshine - or the rain - and vote in person to show them what this was all about. Generally, this exercise was followed by a leisurely walk downtown for pizza.

Today, the youngest of those kids is 19 and could be pushing us in those strollers if need be.

In the good old days before Vote-by-Mail took over much of California, we didn't worry about every vote being counted accurately. We had recounts, of course, to correct the mistakes that inevitably occur with hand-counting every ballot, but actual fraud was almost never a consideration.

And, to be sure, almost every losing candidate accepted the result as Gospel.

Nowadays, however, charges of fraud have become so rampant - and believed by so many - that the Official Voter Information Guide for the State of California has two full pages of warnings about actions that might land you in the pokey.

On Page 136 we find the scary headline "WARNING: ELECTIONEERING PROHIBITED!"

The exclamation point means the government is extremely serious about this. Such punctuation no doubt raises "electioneering" from a misdemeanor to a felony.