ballots Archives - California Political Review

Justice Department tells Orange County to verify citizenship status of 1,754 people

October 27, 2026 By Kaitlyn Schallhorn 3 Comments

For those whose citizenship cannot be determined, the federal government requests their ballots be ‘segregated’ and not counted.

The U.S. Department of Justice told Orange County election officials on Friday it wants their help to determine the citizenship status of 1,754 people within 48 hours.

And for those whose citizenship cannot be determined, the federal government asked that election officials “segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said in the letter obtained by The Orange County Register.

Federal prosecutors sent letters to county registrars across California on Friday demanding that local officials set aside and verify ballots that the Justice Department said may belong to noncitizens.

The letters are the latest escalation in a legal battle between California and President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, which has recently focused on the state in its efforts to root out noncitizen voting ahead of the midterm elections. Data shows illegal voting by people who aren’t U.S. citizens is incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of races.

In Orange County, the letter was hand-delivered to Clerk-Recorder Hugh Nguyen late Friday afternoon, instead of Bob Page, the county’s registrar of voters.

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Page said county counsel would inform the Justice Department that it’s the registrar’s office that maintains voter registration records and administers elections, not the county clerk-recorder.

“County counsel is evaluating the requests in the USDOJ letter,” Page said.

The letter said the federal government had identified 1,754 “likely aliens” registered to vote in Orange County, although county officials had not yet reviewed the accuracy of that list by late Friday evening. It was not immediately clear if any of these people had actually received a ballot or attempted to vote.

There are more than 1.9 million registered voters in Orange County, according to the latest voter registration statistics from the California secretary of state.

Ballots were mailed to all registered voters at the beginning of the month, and voting is well underway, with less than two weeks left until Election Day.

“I write to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by-mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified,” Essayli, a former Republican California Assemblymember, said in the letter.

It goes on to say that “anyone who aids, abets, counsels, induces, or procures the commission of a federal offense is equally liable. If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

“The Department is not asking Orange County to adjudicate immigration status; it is asking it to temporarily set aside ballots from individuals whose eligibility is credibly in question — a standard election-administration practice implemented nationwide,” Essayli said in the letter.

Click here to read the full article in the OC Register

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: ballots, Essayli, Illegal Immigrants

‘Borders on the absurd.’ California fights Trump lawsuit to set aside 20,000 ballots

October 22, 2026 By Ryan Sabalow 3 Comments

California’s top attorney called on a federal judge to block the Trump administration’s efforts to force the state to set aside up to 20,000 ballots that prosecutors claim could have been mailed to noncitizens.

In a court filing Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, Attorney General Rob Bonta said the lawsuit the Trump administration filed last week “borders on the absurd.”

“At best, this litigation is a reckless political stunt,” Bonta’s filing reads. “At worst, it threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election.”

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Bonta’s filing came a day after federal prosecutors announced they’d charged 28 California green card holders for allegedly voting or registering to vote in violation of laws prohibiting noncitizens from participating in elections. In his filing, Bonta noted the arrests represent just .0001 percent of the 23 million registered voters in California.

In announcing those charges Monday, federal authorities said they also asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would force the state to segregate the 20,000 ballots. Bonta is urging the court not to issue the order.

The case has profound implications across the country with the midterm elections two weeks away. The U.S. Constitution gives states primary authority to independently conduct their elections. The Trump administration is testing whether it has the legal right to pause a state’s vote counts based on a list of possible noncitizen voters that federal officials acknowledge may be inaccurate.

In his filing Tuesday, Bonta said the Trump administration has lost 26 different lawsuits as it sought unredacted voter rolls from states in its hunt for evidence to support President Donald Trump’s unfounded voter fraud claims.

“The government has lobbed allegations of widespread voter fraud at the states, only for those allegations to crumble under scrutiny,” Bonta wrote. “As one court recently noted, the federal government’s citizenship records are ‘known to be unreliable.’”

The Department of Homeland Security recently claimed that Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls. DHS sent the state the names of only 185 voters. Nevada officials confirmed they were all U.S. citizens. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, DHS alleged the state had more than 14,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls, but prosecutors have only charged nine with illegally voting.

Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Trent McCotter said Monday that the 20,000 possible noncitizen voters in California were enough “to fill a small stadium,” but he acknowledged that number could be an overcount.

“There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens,” McCotter said. “We’re not perfect, and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us.”

McCotter said its list of possible noncitizens was based on public voter rolls the federal government obtained from California, which it then cross-referenced with “other government databases, other public information.”

McCotter said all 28 defendants charged Monday are on the list of 20,000 names, a number that he said was “just the floor” and likely to grow.

Officials skeptical of federal methodology

State officials and independent election experts have been skeptical of the Trump team’s methodology after federal authorities notified state officials in July that there could be as many as 190,000 noncitizen voters in California.

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: ballots, Bonta, Trump

‘Time is Up for California’ – DOJ Sues to Block California Ballot-Counting As State Officials Refuse to Sequester Noncitizen Ballots

October 18, 2026 By Katy Grimes Leave a Comment

20,000+ Noncitizen Voters Mailed Live Ballots

The United States Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against California Thursday October 15, 2026, seeking an order to sequester, and not tabulate, vote-by-mail ballots from roughly 20,000 people the federal government identifies as “likely noncitizens.

This follows Oct. 13 letters, to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan, by acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, who provided officials in Los Angeles County with a “password-protected thumb drive” with the names of people the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens” and were sent mail-in ballots from California.

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“For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” McCotter wrote.

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security raised broad concerns alleging more than 190,000 noncitizens on California rolls. In a July 16, 2026 letter from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (and similar letters to officials in New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania), DHS stated that a review of publicly available voter registration data indicated “there may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.” It gave an example of 81,336 registrants matching name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number to non-citizens in DHS files. The combined figures cited for the four states were roughly: California 190,832; New Jersey 35,152; Nevada 15,903; Pennsylvania 14,576, totaling over 250,000.

California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada opted not to use a new federal citizenship database, a Homeland Security review found more than a quarter million noncitizens registered to vote, Just the News reported.

25 states ran more than 68 million records through an expanded version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database and reported more than 28,000 potential noncitizen matches plus hundreds of thousands of deceased registrants.

In July, in a speech about election integrity, President Donald Trump shared intelligence findings that the People’s Republic of China “compromised” more than 200 million voter records across at least 18 U.S. states.

California officials did not comply with the 48-hour deadline this week, as the Globe reported Wednesday:

At 5:21 pm Wednesday evening (Oct 14), California Secretary of State Shirley Weber issued a statement about the U.S. Department of Justice’s demand that she and LA County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan review and assess the list of noncitizens who received ballots for the upcoming November election.

Here is SOS Weber’s letter – she’s upset that the US DOJ gave her 48 hours to accomplish this, after more than 9 months to provide verified list maintenance, identified potential noncitizens or other ineligible registrants:

“Logan’s office cited data-security concerns with the thumb drive and protocols,” Fox News reports. “Weber’s office pushed back on the lack of evidence/methodology, the compressed timeline during active voting, potential errors affecting citizens, and the absence of clear legal authority for the demand. California maintains it complies with federal requirements (e.g., NVRA/HAVA citizenship attestations under penalty of perjury) and that noncitizen voting is rare.”

Governor Gavin Newsom said the DOJ action is unsubstantiated, politically motivated interference close to the election, and a threat to eligible voters’ rights. “This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” Newsom said. “Courts have made clear the federal government has no role in running state elections. We will defend free and fair elections in the Golden State and call out every authoritarian attempt to undermine our democracy.”

Au contraire, mon frère.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: ballots, California Elections, DOJ

DOJ sues to block count of 20,000 ballots

October 17, 2026 By Kevin Rector 1 Comment

California leaders blast ‘meritless’ last-minute claims that the named voters are noncitizens.

The Trump administration on Thursday sued California over its handling of voter fraud claims, asking a federal court to immediately bar the state from counting ballots from about 20,000 voters statewide — many in Los Angeles County — who the administration alleges are “likely noncitizens.”

The lawsuit is highly unusual, particularly given that California voters have already begun voting in the Nov. 3 midterms via mail ballots, experts said.

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It’s also “meritless,” highly inappropriate and based on questionable federal data that have proved wildly inaccurate in other states, state officials said.

“This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “Courts have made clear the federal government has no role in running state elections. We will defend free and fair elections in the Golden State and call out every authoritarian attempt to undermine our democracy.”

“Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there’s no widespread voter fraud in the U.S.,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta wrote on X. “The Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, in his own statement, defended the lawsuit.

“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” he said. “If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation’s representative system of government.”

The lawsuit states that “as part of an investigation into unlawful voting,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted a “multiagency and multilevel review” of state voter and federal citizenship data and determined with “high confidence” that about 20,000 “likely noncitizens” are registered to vote in the state.

It then forwarded those names to Homeland Security Investigations, which conducted its own investigation and concluded the same, the lawsuit says.

“This means that, consistent with state law, nearly 20,000 noncitizens in California have been sent a vote-by-mail ballot to participate in the federal election (or will receive one), with many addresses listed in Los Angeles County,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit comes two days after acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the same ballots in order to investigate those voters’ citizenship status.

McCotter had said the Trump administration would be forced to file for emergency relief in the courts if Weber and Logan did not comply.

The lawsuit — which also names Weber and Logan as defendants — comes about three months after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote his own letter to Weber, alleging that there may be more than 190,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California.

The lawsuit makes no mention of that prior estimate, or why Homeland Security’s initial estimate was so much larger than its current estimate. It does say that USCIS identifying with “high confidence” that a voter is a likely noncitizen “means that the match between voter information on the voting roll and USCIS’ internal records is strong and consistent based on multiple identifiers that support a strong identity link.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for more information as to how the 190,000 figure dropped to 20,000.

In a letter back to McCotter, Weber noted both figures and accused the Trump administration of pushing forward to disenfranchise voters at the last minute before the midterms based on shoddy data work and no certainty that those voters are ineligible.

“Nowhere has the federal government clarified the basis for suspecting — not even confirming with any level of certainty — the listed individuals are non-citizens. And as one court recently noted, the federal government’s citizenship records are ‘known to be unreliable,’ ” Weber wrote, referring to a case brought against the Justice Department by the organization Common Cause. “To give just one example, in a similar incident in the State of Nevada, DHS initially alleged that Nevada’s voter roll included nearly 16,000 potential non-citizens. However, after working with the State of Nevada, DHS officials failed to establish that a single non-citizen was on the voter rolls.”

Weber called it “remarkable” that the Justice Department would demand that her office “review and confirm the citizenship status of each of the approximately 20,000 individuals on the list on the eve of an election and within a mere 48 hours” despite providing no clear evidence that those individuals are wrongly registered.

Logan said Thursday that his office responded to McCotter’s letter by “outlining the legal and operational concerns” it had with his demands — including that the list of voters included people from throughout California, not just L.A. County — only to learn the Justice Department had filed its lawsuit without any acknowledgment of the county’s “timely response.”

Click here to read the full article at the LA Times

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: ballots, DOJ, elections

California’s Ballot Petition Racket Just Got Caught

September 12, 2026 By Jay Rogers 1 Comment

What prosecutors describe is petition signature fraud, identity theft wearing a civic costume

Somewhere in Sacramento a legislative staffer is drafting a press release about “the will of the people.” Down on Skid Row, the will of the people goes for two or three dollars a signature, cash, no questions asked, and you don’t even need to be a registered voter. You just need to be willing to sign somebody else’s name.

That is the plain reading of a federal indictment unsealed this week in Riverside against James Brass, 47, of Victorville, who goes by “Lord.” Brass and two associates, Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron, are charged with pulling the identities of registered California voters from a database, then paying homeless residents of downtown Los Angeles to copy those names onto ballot initiative petitions and sign them as if they were the actual voters. Brass and Herron allegedly then signed sworn declarations claiming they had personally watched real, registered voters put pen to paper. Brass reportedly collected roughly $41,600 from a petition management company for his trouble. He was arrested Thursday morning and made his initial appearance in federal court that afternoon.

I have spent three decades in financial services, much of it as an expert witness untangling who knew what and when in fraud cases. My first reaction to this story is not outrage theater but a professional observation: this is what happens when a system rewards volume and punishes almost nothing.

Get the terminology right. What prosecutors describe is petition signature fraud, identity theft wearing a civic costume, not the separate practice known as ballot harvesting, where a designated third party collects a voter’s sealed, completed mail ballot. But don’t mistake that distinction for an endorsement of harvesting. California lets nearly any designated person haul in someone else’s ballot. A growing list of states doesn’t trust the practice at all. Alabama and Wisconsin require voters to return their own ballots, with only narrow exceptions. Arizona made third-party collection a felony in 2016, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that law in 2021. Georgia followed with its own felony ban. A federal court upheld Texas’s ban on paid ballot harvesting this year. If ballot harvesting were the harmless civic courtesy its defenders describe, half the country wouldn’t have criminalized it.

Here is why California keeps producing cases like Brass. Qualifying a statutory initiative requires 546,651 valid signatures. A constitutional amendment needs 874,641. Nobody hits those numbers with a clipboard outside the grocery store. Campaigns hire petition management companies, who subcontract to coordinators, who subcontract to circulators paid by the signature. Every link in that chain is a place to cut a corner, and a corner cut at six-figure volume gets cut a lot of times before anyone notices.

This is not an isolated actor. In May, federal prosecutors charged longtime California circulator Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong after she admitted paying Skid Row residents two to three dollars, plus cigarettes and prepaid phone cards, to register to vote and sign petitions, something she had done off and on for two decades. She pleaded guilty in June. Now Brass. Two federal cases out of the same three-block radius in a single year is not bad luck. It’s a business model.

The other side will tell you this sort of thing barely happens, that “voter fraud” is a talking point, not a pattern. Two federal indictments from the same neighborhood in four months say otherwise. It’s the same story we’ve watched for years with stolen Social Security numbers used to secure jobs for people not authorized to hold them: real identities, quietly borrowed, doing work the actual owner never agreed to, discovered only when someone finally goes looking. Nobody would call that a coincidence in immigration enforcement. It isn’t one here either, and the pattern keeps surfacing in the same handful of blue-state cities.

To be fair, neither case proves a specific initiative sponsor knew about or directed the fraud. Federal authorities have not named the measure Brass was allegedly working to qualify, and the government built its case around circulators, not campaigns. It’s possible the sponsor here is a victim of its own subcontractor too.

But that defense is the design flaw. Everyone at the top can claim ignorance, because the sponsor hired a company, who hired a coordinator, who hired Brass, and Brass hired people with every reason to take three dollars and not ask questions. Registrars catch invalid signatures after the petition is filed and the “grassroots momentum” headlines already ran.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: ballots, Fraud, investigation

California, other states warn Supreme Court of ‘chaos’ if it lets USPS mail ballot rules stand

September 11, 2026 By Kevin Rector 1 Comment

The contested rules require states to rapidly overhaul mail voting with new voter lists and bar-coded envelopes.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule relatively quickly, given the emergency nature of the appeal.

California and nearly two dozen other states warned the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday that allowing the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with President Trump’s new rules for mail ballots in the November election would cause “chaos” and could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

“In some States … compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable to vote by mail and some would not be able to vote at all,” the states argued. “In the remaining States, there would be chaos — and a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.”

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The Democrat-led coalition — which includes California, 23 other states and the District of Columbia — also cited objections from lower-ranking state and elections officials in conservative states that have not objected to the Postal Service’s position, including the lieutenant governor and other officials in Utah saying implementation of the new rules would “be an unmitigated disaster.”

Similar warnings have emanated from Florida, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin.

“Whatever else may be said of USPS’ new rule, it would wreak havoc on States and their voters if it takes effect at this late point,” the Democrat-led states wrote, pointing out that some States, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, have already begun to mail out ballots.

The states’ arguments were in response to the Trump administration over the weekend filing an emergency appeal to the high court, asking it to overturn a lower-court ruling halting the plan from being implemented for the Nov. 3 election.

The new rules — developed in response to a March executive order from Trump — require states to submit their complete voter lists to the Postal Service, and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service. They require the Postal Service to then reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.

Trump’s order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own list of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.

Trump and other supporters of the changes — including top officials from a dozen Republican-led states — argue they are necessary to prevent widespread voter fraud, including by noncitizens. Elections experts say there is no evidence of such widespread fraud, despite robust audits and other searches for it.

The Democrat-led states sued to block the changes on multiple grounds, including that neither Trump nor the Postal Service have any authority to regulate state-run elections, that the changes would illegally prevent eligible voters from casting ballots, and that the timeline imposed by the new rule — formally issued by the Postal Service on Aug. 21 — made compliance by November impossible.

Independent voting rights groups also sued, alleging the new rules threatened to disenfranchise voters and make their work educating voters on their options for casting a ballot impossible to carry out.

A Postal Service whistleblower recently added skepticism to the agency’s ability to implement the new rules on its end, alleging in a statement published by congressional Democrats that the agency’s online portal for verifying ballots was built in a “slapdash” manner, is “fundamentally flawed” and threatens as built to reject thousands of ballots if just a single one cannot be properly read.

Click here to read the full article in the LA Times

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: ballots, elections, Supreme Court

Nearly 150,000 mail ballots rejected in California’s primary despite efforts to count every vote

July 25, 2026 By MICHAEL R. BLOOD 3 Comments

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nearly 150,000 California voters had their mail-in ballots rejected for the state’s June primary, a spike from recent elections even as the state attempts to make voting easier with the goal of boosting participation and counting every ballot.

California has become notorious for its ponderously slow vote counts that can drag on for weeks and sometimes longer, largely the result of multiple changes over the years that were intended to increase turnout but have done little to achieve that. Among the changes: Every voter receives a mail-in ballot that can arrive at an election office seven days late and still be counted, provided the envelope is postmarked by Election Day.

Yet even with that generous weeklong window, the primary driver of the higher rejection numbers is late-arriving ballots, according to data compiled by the secretary of state’s office. Voting experts suspect the main problem is postmarks on ballots that came after Election Day, making them ineligible to be counted. The culprit could be U.S. Postal Service changes that might affect the timing of when postmarks are applied.

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Late-arriving ballots drove the rejections

According to state data, 148,241 mail ballots were rejected in the June election, or a rate of 1.73% of all mail ballots.

In raw numbers, that’s up from the 2024 primary, when 108,982 mail ballots were rejected, or a 1.56% rate. In 2022, 105,818 mail ballots were voided during the primary, or a rate similar to 2024.

Lateness accounted for 93,479 rejected ballots in June, by far the largest category for disqualifying a ballot. That was up from about 70,000 in the 2022 primary and about 76,000 in the 2024 primary, though turnout in those elections was smaller compared to last June.

Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said the jump in rejected ballots because of lateness is a major concern that — along with postal procedures — might also be connected to a late surge in ballots in June. Many voters waited until the final days to make a decision in a wide-open and chaotic race for governor.

“Ballots rejected due to lateness are caused primarily to being postmarked too late to count, not because they arrived too late to count,” Alexander wrote in an email.

Rejection rates have fluctuated over time, but the growing number of those set aside for lateness compared to recent elections “does really demand the question why this is happening,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a nonpartisan research group.

Click here to read the full article at AP News

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: ballots, California Politics, elections

New California law bans law enforcement from interfering in state elections

May 30, 2026 By Maya C. Miller 2 Comments

With so many candidates running for governor, it’s hard to keep up. We’re here to help: Sign up for our 2026 election newsletter to get the latest on the candidates.

Law enforcement officers will be banned from interfering with California elections under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Wednesday, just in time for the June 2 primary election.

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The law, which takes effect immediately, criminalizes the act of taking cast ballots from the custody of a local election official, as gubernatorial candidate Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco did earlier this year when he seized more than 600,000 ballots from his own county’s registrar of voters. Although Bianco claimed he was checking for proof of fraudulent voting, there was no evidence to suggest any ballots were cast improperly.

“We have to step up, and we have to draw the line. We have to clarify the rules of engagement,” Newsom told reporters before signing the legislation. “It’s a warning to the folks out there that think they can do the bidding of the Trump administration.”

State lawmakers originally introduced the measure, Senate Bill 73, to guard against potential federal interference with California’s elections, given the Trump administration’s animosity toward the state and the president’s desire to keep Congress in GOP hands.

But Bianco’s decision to seize ballots turned a hypothetical threat into a real one, spurring legislators to seize the moment and rush the bill through so it could take effect before Election Day.

The new law makes it illegal for a county registrar to surrender ballots or voting equipment to law enforcement agents such as Bianco or his deputies. Riverside County Registrar Art Tinoco would have violated the law by allowing the sheriff’s department to take the ballots, despite the search warrant they presented.

“Voters should never wonder whether ballots were improperly handled,” said Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, one of the bill’s Democratic coauthors and a former Santa Cruz County registrar. “And law enforcement powers should never be misused in ways that jeopardize the integrity of our democratic process.”

The law also reiterates that the attorney general, secretary of state or local county elections officials can sue any person, business or entity that takes “a package containing ballots” from an election official’s custody.

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: ballots, California Politics, elections

California county finds nearly 600 unopened ballots months after Newsom-backed redistricting measure passed

May 9, 2026 By Alec Schemmel 1 Comment

County officials say the error stemmed from a miscommunication over whether the drop box had been fully emptied

Nearly 600 unopened ballots were discovered in a California county months after voters approved a statewide Democratic redistricting measure, with local election officials admitting they failed voters.

The Humboldt County Office of Elections said in a Wednesday press release that the 596 sealed but uncounted ballots did not impact the outcome of the Nov. 4 statewide special election, which centered on Proposition 50, a redistricting ballot measure pushed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats.

The ballots were found Monday inside a locked drop box, prompting county officials to say they had not been tampered with because the box was locked, and the ballots remained sealed. Officials said the error stemmed from a miscommunication over whether the drop box had been fully emptied before certification.

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“While the mistake occurred after an election worker did not follow proper procedures, the responsibility for what happened ultimately sits with me. I did not have strong enough controls in place to prevent this, but we do now,” Humboldt County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Juan Pablo Cervantes said in the news release. “We have taken corrective action and already updated our protocols. A new lock out, tag out procedure has been implemented for every ballot drop box to ensure each box is physically verified as empty and secured before election results are finalized.”

Click here to read the full article in Fox News

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: ballots, California Politics, elections