The California Supreme Court excoriated Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco over his seizure of hundreds of thousands of Proposition 50 ballots earlier this year, ordering the former gubernatorial candidate to immediately hand over all remaining material in a pair of scathing decisions on Thursday.
“We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful,” wrote Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero. “While allegations of election improprieties are a very serious matter, our Elections Code contains numerous established mechanisms for investigating and proving misconduct that do not compromise the integrity of voted ballots — contrary to the means employed here.”
The ruling comes less than two weeks before Californians will start casting ballots in the race for governor and a handful of hotly contested congressional midterms — nationally watched elections that would be vulnerable to similar interference unless the court gave clear orders, advocates warned at oral arguments last month.
“It’s bound to be repeated again,” said Chad W. Dunn of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which led the first of two election interference suits against Bianco, a popular MAGA personality and former Republican candidate for governor.
Bianco has long flirted with President Trump’s election fraud conspiracy movement. Though the ballot seizures in February were widely seen as a campaign stunt, the legal theory behind them — that local lawmen can commandeer voter materials from elections officials, and that sheriffs are unanswerable to officials who outrank them, including attorneys general — belongs to a larger “constitutional sheriffs” ideology.
California‘s seven Supreme Court justices appeared by turns perplexed by and incredulous of those theories during oral arguments last month.
“You are walking into a very dense thicket of very specific laws that govern elections in particular and I think it’s a very established cannon of interpretation that the specific trumps the general,” Justice Goodwin H. Liu said.
The ballot battle emerged from a Riverside County pilot program meant to boost voter confidence, a handwritten tally that ultimately fell about 46,000 votes short of the official count, sparking claims of fraud.
Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco met with the county board of supervisors and the citizens’ group behind the claim and carefully explained how the discrepancy emerged. Yet, Bianco pursued warrants to seize more than 650,000 ballots, alleging they were evidence in an investigation of wide-ranging election fraud.
When he learned of the warrants, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta ordered Bianco to stand down. Instead, the sheriff accelerated his plans, dispatching armed deputies from Riverside County’s Special Investigations Bureau, Emergency Response Team and SWAT unit to sweep up the votes.
Later, Bianco directed his underlings to begin counting those ballots by hand — a potential felony under state law, which forbids anyone other than an election official from so much as touching a ballot container.
When Bonta again ordered him to stop, Bianco argued the attorney general had no authority to command him, later claiming in court that the law conferred only an “advise and consent” role.
In fact, California courts have spent more than a century delineating power between the state’s attorney general and local sheriffs and prosecutors. Voters took the matter a step further in 1934, endorsing a ballot initiative that clearly named the attorney general as California’s top law enforcement official, and put the state’s other lawmen beneath him.
In a footnote, justices also took a swipe at Bianco’s initial effort to have the case tossed for lack of standing — a move apparently undertaken on the legal advice of an elaborate artificial intelligence hallucination.
“In his preliminary briefing, Bianco challenged petitioners’ standing based on misquoted passages from, and an incorrect recitation of our holding in, Common Cause v. Board of Supervisors,” Guerrero wrote. “We disapprove of the improper use of artificial intelligence tools, which apparently contributed to the significant error that occurred here and remind counsel of attorneys’ professional duties of competence and candor to the court.”
SACRAMENTO — Three state bond measures are on California’s November ballot. You probably haven’t paid much attention to them. So here’s my read on these big-ticket proposals.
One is a no-brainer “yes.” It would help middle-class Californians buy a new home by allowing them to borrow most of the down payment. And it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. That’s Proposition 37.
Another housing measure is probably worthwhile, but gives me pause because it accommodates too many interests in order to attract broad political support. And it burns a barrel of money. That’s Proposition 1.
The third proposal would fund important medical research. But I wince because it was written to largely benefit one institute that was co-founded and is headed by the measure’s chief backer. That’s Proposition 38.
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Propositions 1 and 38 combined would add $18.4 billion to the state’s general fund bond debt, which already is about $80 billion, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst‘s Office.
Plus, there is $40 billion in previously authorized bonds waiting to be sold. The new bond proposals would cost the state at least $1 billion annually for 20 to 25 years. Taxpayers are paying about $6 billion annually to retire state bonds.
Bonds are boring, but they’re also tax eaters. So we should pay some attention before voting on them.
“People think about bonds as free money. And, of course, they’re not,” says Mark Baldassare, polling director for the Public Policy Institute of California. “People don’t think bonds are going to raise their taxes.”
But most bonds are repaid by the state’s general fund, the main cash box that finances major programs such as education, healthcare, prisons and fighting wildfires. Bond debt has No. 1 dibs on the money. When revenue runs short — a common dilemma in Sacramento — other programs must be cut or taxpayers are hit harder. So bonds aren’t necessarily tax-free.
Baldassare released a PPIC poll last week that found a majority of likely voters supporting all three bond measures — especially Proposition 37 to ease homebuyers’ down payments.
The pollster noted that fall election campaigns are just starting and opposition arguments could reduce support for the measures.
But there’s no organized opposition to the two housing proposals. And although the medical research measure has some outspoken critics, there’s no money for an opposition campaign.
OK, a few specifics on each measure.
Proposition 37 is a taxpayer freebie, a $25-billion bond repaid solely by homebuyer beneficiaries. Here’s how it would work:
Middle-income people could pay 3% down on their home purchases rather than the normal 20%. They’d borrow the other 17% as a second mortgage and repay it along with the first mortgage.
The proposition defines middle class as household income that’s less than double the median for the area. Statewide, that income ceiling would be around $200,000 but would vary greatly by locale.
The purchased dwelling must be a brand-new home, whether stand-alone or a condo. That’s to increase the housing supply and create construction jobs. Politically, it gains the support of developers and unions.
No vacation home. It must be owner-occupied full-time. And the buyer must be a California resident.
The state’s sale of revenue bonds would create the down-payment pot. Regular lending institutions would arrange the loans and charge minimum fees. Loan repayments would replenish the pot and make it self-sustaining.
This was the brainchild of Bob Hertzberg, a former Democratic Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader from the San Fernando Valley.
Hertzberg tried several times to sell his proposal to the Legislature, but lawmakers wanted to juice it up with their own pet ideas. “I couldn’t get something just focused on the middle class,” he says. So he crafted this citizen initiative.
Proposition 1 proposes $11.25 billion in bonds for a smorgasbord of affordable housing.
This is the political establishment’s creation — Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic-controlled Legislature and housing interests. There’s no organized opposition.
It was dressed up with $1.25 billion in popular CalVet loan bonds for military veterans. They repay their home loans through mortgages, costing the state nothing.
But the remaining $10 billion in bonds would be repaid through the state general fund, costing at least $500 million annually for 25 years.
The measure is mainly designed to generate affordable rentals for poor people. But to assure legislative passage, money was added for affordable student and farmworker housing, plus other goodies.
It’s a lot of money and makes only a small dent in California’s unaffordable housing plague. Moreover, it seems too scattershot.
But it could spare more people from becoming homeless — living in their cars or on sidewalks, ultimately costing taxpayers even more.
Then there’s Proposition 38, the problematic $8.4-billion general fund bond for medical research, including cures for cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
The hang-up for me and others is that the ballot initiative was crafted to virtually assure that half the bond money would go to one outfit, the UCLA-affiliated California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy. The institute was co-founded and is headed by the proposition’s originator and chief backer, billionaire Gary Michelson.
“I know opponents want to create a billionaire boogeyman, but isn’t curing cancer and other terrible diseases exactly what we want billionaires to spend their money on?” says Robin Swanson, a campaign spokesperson.
Sure. But being backed by a billionaire isn’t the problem. It’s being written to substantially benefit one research institute that’s led by the billionaire.
Two cancer survivors and political opposites — conservative consultant Jon Fleischman and liberal consultant Steve Maviglio — co-authored an op-ed that declared:
“Imagine either major political party proposing to borrow billions of dollars and writing the qualifications so narrowly that an organization founded and chaired by a principal campaign benefactor appears positioned to collect half the money. The other party would rightly howl. So should voters.”
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed legislation to increase security for the state’s voting systems and protect Californians’ ability to cast ballots in an effort to guard against potential interference in the Nov. 3 election, including by the Trump administration.
Newsom pointed to the Trump administration’s recent effort to restrict mail-in voting through the U.S. Postal Service, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the presence of federal monitors at California polls last year as evidence that Trump “will continue his efforts to interfere with the November election.”
“Donald Trump won’t stop until he can exert dictatorial control over your free vote and disenfranchise millions of people this November. California will stop him at every opportunity,” Newsom said in a statement.”We have no bigger task than fighting to protect the right to vote from interference and meddling — the future of democracy is on the line. These bills today build upon the wall California has built to safeguard our electoral process.”
The governor signed the package of bills at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, where a year earlier federal agents gathered outside a political rally he was hosting. Then Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who had been leading the immigration operations in California, was among those outside the event, joined by agents in helmets, camouflage, masks and holding guns. Newsom described their presence as political intimidation.
One bill Newsom signed Saturday cites efforts to “weaponize law enforcement authority for political purposes,” including Republican “Sheriff Chad Bianco’s seizure of ballots in Riverside County,” and the election monitors sent by the U.S. Justice Department to polling sites in five counties during a 2025 special election on redistricting.
Such moves “have given rise to unprecedented concerns about law enforcement interference” in elections and “[demonstrate] that these threats are not merely hypothetical,” the bill by Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) reads.
The law, Senate Bill 884, which takes effect immediately, requires counties to open ballot drop-off locations 30 days before an election — two days earlier than usual — and allows counties to ban electioneering, or trying to influence voters’ decisions, within up to 200 feet of polling sites. It also bans police from making arrests near voting locations except for crimes against people, property, or disrupting the voting process.
Bianco, a GOP candidate for governor who placed fourth in the primary, drew swift condemnation and legal challenges this spring after he ordered deputies to seize more than 650,000 ballots from the Riverside County elections office. Voting rights groups and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta challenged the move, which is being decided by the California Supreme Court.
Bianco carted off truckloads of ballots from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters in February after securing a warrant based on claims that the office allowed fraudulent votes in the special election to redraw California’s congressional districts under Proposition 50 in 2025.
Earlier this year, Newsom signed a bill preventing local and federal law enforcement agencies from taking ballots without a warrant.
On Saturday the Democratic governor signed a bill making it a felony to seize or order the seizure of ballots, election records or voting machines. Future seizures could be punishable by up to four years in prison.
“The federal administration and those seeking to spread lies about our democracy continue to call for interference in elections in ways we have never seen before in this country,” Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), the bill’s author and a former longtime county elections chief, said last month. “AB 282 helps ensure that every lawfully cast vote can be counted, and that the will of the voters of every political party will be respected.”
Republican lawmakers argued in previous hearings that the bill is unnecessary because it is already a crime to steal ballots.
Another bill, Senate Bill 259, makes it a crime to interfere with a mail ballot on the way to or from a voter or order the seizure of ballots that are in transit to a local elections office.
Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1664, which requires elections officials to immediately notify the attorney general and secretary of state immediately upon learning of any warrants, subpoenas or law enforcement investigations involving election records or voting equipment.
Newsom also signed bills to boost protections under the California Voting Rights Act, including an explicit ban on voter suppression and expanded access to election materials in languages other than English.
The governor also signed legislation to require more transparency from social media influencers who are paid by political campaigns. The measure, Assembly Bill 1130, came in the wake of a controversy in the June primary election when social media influencers took on a more visible role in the campaigns.
Candidates including Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer paid thousands of dollars to influencers who posted videos endorsing Steyer or talking about him in a positive light. These videos did not always disclose that influencers were paid by a candidate’s campaign.
Russians head to the polls from Friday to Sunday to elect members of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, in the first parliamentary election to be held since the country launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The vote comes as Russians face a slowing economy as well as Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries and warehouses far from the front line.
United Russia, the governing party that backs President Vladimir Putin, is expected to keep its dominant position.
The authorities are presenting the election as a chance for voters to have their say. Critics argue that with no genuine opposition on the ballot, the result is largely settled in advance.
So why are the elections worth watching? Here is what you need to know:
How do Russia’s elections work?
Starting Friday and lasting through Sunday, Russians will elect members of the lower house, the State Duma.
They will also cast ballots in local elections.
Voters in 11 regions will elect their governors, and 39 regions will elect members of regional legislatures.
Voting is spread over three days to boost turnout among the 111 million eligible voters and includes areas Russia occupies in Ukraine. Electronic voting is allowed.
Half of the Duma’s 450 seats are filled by party lists and the other half are contested in single-ballot races.
Election officials hang a list of political parties at a polling station before the parliamentary elections in Podolsk, Moscow region [Ramil Sitdikov/Reuters]
What is United Russia?
Russia’s governing party, formed in 2001 from a merger of pro-Kremlin parties, has backed Putin and dominated the parliament ever since.
United Russia won more than two-thirds of the Duma’s seats in the 2021 election. It is again poised to dominate the body.
The party’s list is led by political heavyweights: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat for 22 years, and Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s powerful mayor.
In an apparent bid to add fresh faces to what is widely seen as a party of bureaucrats, its third-highest-ranking official is war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny, who was badly wounded by a Ukrainian drone.
Members of United Russia have pledged to back the war effort and Putin’s maximalist goals in what the Kremlin calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council and leader of the United Russia political party Dmitry Medvedev [Ekaterina Shtukina/Sputnik/Government press office/EPA]
Who else is running in Russia’s elections?
Alongside United Russia, other “systemic opposition” parties that vote in sync with the government on key issues are also expected to remain.
The liberal Yabloko Party, the only registered political party that opposes the war, was initially on the ballot, but the Supreme Court ordered it removed in August.
It cited, among other reasons, that the antiwar stance was akin to seeking the violation of Russia’s territorial integrity. Yabloko now runs only single-ballot races.
The Communist Party has been a leading force in the Federal Assembly since the 1990s, led for more than three decades by 82-year-old Gennady Zyuganov, a former Soviet official.
Throughout Putin’s rule of more than a quarter-century, the Communists have criticised some aspects of government policy but carefully avoided any criticism of him. They steadfastly support the war in Ukraine.
Alexander Bratersky, a political analyst and independent journalist, told Al Jazeera that the race for second place is worth watching.
If the Communist Party nab second, it would “suggest voters are angry about economic hardship and falling living standards”.
Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, centre, and Deputy Chairman Dmitry Novikov, second right, take part at the ‘Reds in the City’ all-Russian patriotic rally [Maxim Shipenkov/EPA]
The Liberal Democratic Party, an ultranationalist force that has been a significant presence in the legislature since the early 1990s, will also likely retain some influence in the Duma.
Like the Communists, it staunchly supports the war and boasts of having multiple veterans as members.
Other smaller parties round out the ballot.
The party known as A Just Russia has been on Russia’s political scene for 20 years. A social-democratic party, it competes with the Communists for older and middle-aged voters nostalgic for the Soviet past, and it supports the war in Ukraine.
The New People Party was founded shortly before the last parliamentary election in 2021, seeking to position itself as a liberal voice representing younger voters and technocrats. It won just more than 5 percent of the vote, allowing it to form a small faction.
Bratersky described the party as “a liberal-leaning party backed by some Kremlin people who are more technocratic and more pro-peace”.
He said it appeals to the “middle-class audience”, and after the Kremlin banned Yabloko, it has been viewed as its substitute.
“So, if they come third with a good number of votes, this is a sign that those who are antiwar used them as their legal avatar,” he said.
Other parties seeking seats include Communists of Russia, a small rival of the main Communist Party; the Party of Pensioners; the Green Party; the Party of Direct Democracy; and the Motherland Party.
A candidate for Russia’s liberal Yabloko party running in a single-mandate constituency in the upcoming parliamentary election, hands out flyers to passers-by on a street in Moscow, Russia [File: Yulia Morozova/Reuters]
Why do the elections matter to the Kremlin?
While these elections may seem routine, the fact that they are the first since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is what makes them important, Bratersky told Al Jazeera.
He said that Putin has linked the elections to support for the war: Endorsing United Russia at its party congress in August, Putin said the party’s duty was “to do everything for victory” in the war in Ukraine.
“This shows that the Kremlin is a bit worried since the elections are the only legal way to show disrespect for the Kremlin,” Bratersky said. “Even Putin’s core fans hate United Russia as a corrupt force.”
How have past elections gone?
Since Putin first came to power in 2000, United Russia has won every Duma election, usually by a wide margin.
The results have repeatedly been disputed.
In 2011, allegations of vote-rigging set off the largest street protests of Putin’s rule.
After the 2021 vote, independent monitors and statisticians said the party’s real support was far lower than the official count.
The authorities have rejected claims of widespread fraud. Opposition parties and critics of the war have increasingly been kept off the ballot.
Fewer than half of Americans believe the upcoming midterm elections will be “free and fair,” amid a broader decline in confidence in vote counts, according to a new nationwide poll.
While 49% of respondents said they expected the elections to be free and fair, 23% said they did not expect them to be, and 28% said they didn’t know what to expect.
Americans are more confident that ballots, once cast, will be counted accurately, though their trust in that varies depending on their political affiliation — with 63% of Democrats, 58% of Republicans and 49% of independent voters saying they are either “somewhat” or “very” confident in an accurate count, the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections at UC San Diego poll found.
That is a sharp decline from after the 2024 election, when 77% of Democrats, 82% of Republicans and 73% of independents expressed such confidence, the same pollsters found then.
Lauren Prather, one of the center’s co-directors, said the latest findings reflect a decline in trust but also nuance in how respondents understand what it means to have a “free and fair” election — with an accurate count of cast ballots being a major factor, but not the only one.
Of those respondents who said they don’t know if the election will be free and fair, about a third — 31% — also said that they were “somewhat confident” that the vote would be counted accurately, Prather said.
The poll also asked an open-ended question, inviting respondents to share what a “free and fair” election means to them, she said, and trust in the count was a “central part of people’s definition” and a “dominant theme.” However, they also identified other things, she said — with about a quarter of respondents also pointing to “voter access and voter eligibility, as well as freedom from interference and intimidation and having a real choice of candidates,” Prather said.
“In other words, trust in the count is the anchor of how Americans understand what it means to be free and fair but it sits within a broader set of concerns about the integrity of the whole process,” she said.
The polling reflects an American electorate that has grown increasingly concerned about U.S. elections amid unprecedented claims of widespread voter fraud from President Trump and his administration, and increasing warnings from Democrats and independent election experts that those claims — which Trump has made without evidence and which experts deny — are part of a broader effort to interfere with the election and intimidate voters.
Thad Kousser, the center’s other co-director, said the findings are in line with a broader era of distrust in civic institutions in the U.S., but also a result of the fact that “people are following different signals from their leaders” as to the trustworthiness of U.S. elections — with vastly different messaging coming from leaders on the left and the right.
Poll respondents shared some concerns about the fairness of the November midterms, he said, but also split by wide margins on other concerns based on their political affiliation.
Voters across party lines shared concerns about gerrymandering, the poll found — with 48% of both Democrats and independents and 36% of Republicans saying they distrust that congressional district lines are drawn in a way that fairly reflects what voters want.
“Nobody has loved the redistricting wars that have been a big story throughout this year,” Kousser said.
After Trump urged Texas and other Republican-led states to launch unprecedented mid-decade efforts to redraw their congressional lines to bolster their party’s chances of retaining control of the legislature through the remainder of Trump’s term, Democrats fought back — including in California, where voters passed Proposition 50 to allow state Democrats to redraw congressional lines in their party’s favor.
On potential foreign interference, 32% of Democrats, 42% of independents and 48% of Republicans said they didn’t trust that U.S. elections are well-protected.
More than three-quarters of Americans — including 79% of Democrats, 76% of Republicans and 75% of independents — said they were “concerned that misleading audio or video ‘deepfakes’ created using AI will impact” the midterms.
But on other issues — including those most discussed by the political establishment — the political divide was much starker, the poll found.
For example, while 53% of Republicans said they distrust that ballots are counted accurately, just 19% of Democrats said so. While 52% of Republicans said they distrust that noncitizens are prevented from voting, just 12% of Democrats said so.
Meanwhile, Democrats and independents were more concerned than Republicans about eligible voters being able to cast their ballots without facing obstacles or intimidation, the poll found.
Many poll respondents said they expected to face intimidation from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at or near polling locations — with such fears being particularly pronounced among voters of color, who were about four times as likely as white respondents to say they expected such intimidation, the poll found.
While 49% of Black respondents, 45% of “Hispanic” respondents and 40% of Asian American and Pacific Islander respondents said they expected to face intimidation, just 11% of white respondents said so, the poll found.
Overall, 35% of respondents said an ICE presence would make them less confident of an accurate vote count, compared with 23% who said it would make them more confident. Those responses also varied greatly by race — and partisan leaning.
White respondents were nearly split, with 29% saying it would make them less confident and 28% saying it would make them more confident. Respondents of other races were vastly more likely to say an ICE presence would make them less confident — with 38% of Black respondents saying they would be less confident and 10% saying they would be more confident; 43% of “Hispanic” respondents saying less and 18% saying more; and 57% of AAPI respondents saying less and just 6% saying more.
Nearly 60% of Democrats said an ICE presence would lower their confidence, and less than 8% said it would increase their confidence. Among Republicans, meanwhile, about 46% said it would increase their confidence, and less than 9% said it would decrease it.
Kousser said the polling gives the sense that a “free and fair” election “means something more to people than simply tallying up correctly the votes of those who were able to cast a ballot.”
“You might doubt that the election was free and fair if you are concerned that congressional districts are gerrymanders, or that some voters stayed away from the polls because of worries about intimidation, or that some people cast a ballot who were not, in fact, eligible,” he said. “These concerns, which can come from all different parts of the ideological spectrum, could lead people to be concerned that [a] ‘correctly counted’ election was not, in fact, fully free and fair.”
Kousser and Prather said what effect diminished trust in elections will have on the midterms and how Americans view the results remains unclear, but will depend in part on how close the election is and what messaging leaders — particularly Trump — share about the results once they come in. Prather said she did not expect it to diminish turnout.
The national survey of 5,016 American adults was conducted Sept. 1-9, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.4%.
They “are feeling very pessimistic,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC’s statewide survey director. “You know that comes out not just in the questions we ask about the economy, but generally about the direction of the state and the nation. This just indicates the level of negativity that people have going into this final stage before people cast their ballots this November.”
More than half of the state’s likely voters believe that California is headed in the wrong direction, and 73% predict sour economic times in the state next year. Less than a quarter of likely voters believe the nation is headed in the right direction.
President Trump has an approval rating of 27% of likely voters, but that’s better than Congress, which has a 16% approval rating. Majorities do not have confidence in either major political party’s ability to solve problems.
Ballots will begin arriving in 23.2 million voters’ mailboxes in a little over two weeks. Nearly 80% of likely voters are frustrated by the length of the ballot, which includes 14 propositions as well as statewide, congressional and local elections. This a rare consensus among Democratic, Republican and independent voters.
“This year, there are more propositions on the ballot than we’ve seen for a decade,” Baldassare said. “Overwhelming majorities of Californians say that there are too many propositions on the ballot, too many things for them to decide. And many Californians feel that the wording of ballot initiatives makes it very hard for them to understand what happens if one passes.”
The proposal to tax the assets of billionaires to make up for federal government healthcare cuts, Proposition 40, has a slim lead in the poll, with 52% of likely voters saying they support the one-time 5% levy.
However, there are two ballot measures, Propositions 41 and 42, that would nullify the wealth tax if one is approved and gets more votes than Proposition 40. Narrow majorities support both of these proposals, creating a quandary for wealth tax supporters: ensuring their proposal receives the support of a majority of voters while also tamping down support for the competing efforts.
Findings about the proposal to require showing government-issued identification to vote and the governor’s race show less competitive contests that break along predictable partisan lines in a state where registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1.
The voter ID measure is opposed by 55% of likely voters. In the race to succeed termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom, 60% of likely voters support Democrat Xavier Becerra, and 38% support Republican Steve Hilton. The other 2% were undecided or do not plan to vote on the race.
The poll of 1,745 adult Californians was conducted Sept. 4-10, and has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points in either direction, and 3.8 percentage points among the 1,103 likely voters.
WASHINGTON, United States: The US Supreme Court dealt a major blow Monday to President Donald Trump’s attempts to restrict mail-in voting before the November midterm elections, denying his request to lift an order halting the divisive plan.
Only two of the six conservative justices on the nine-member panel offered a dissent.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion with the majority, said Trump’s plan may ultimately be legal in the long run, but “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
Trump signed an executive order in March seeking to restrict mail-in voting, saying without evidence that it is vulnerable to fraud. The order quickly prompted multiple legal challenges.
Democratic-led states sued the administration on grounds that under the US Constitution, states — and not the federal government — retain broad control over the administration of elections.
Trump’s executive order would require the compilation of lists of eligible voters and for the US Postal Service (USPS) to deliver ballots only to voters who are on the lists.
Officials from several states had warned that a lack of legal clarity around the plan was sowing chaos months before the November 3 vote.
Several states, including North Carolina, have already begun sending mail-in ballots to voters.
A USPS whistleblower had also warned that millions of Americans may not receive ballots because the systems being used by the postal service have been put together in a “sloppy and rushed manner.”
Trump has long been a critic of mail-in ballots but has frequently used them himself, including last month when he voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary.
The president has for years claimed without evidence that mail-in voting is highly vulnerable to fraud, repeatedly linking it to his false assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by Democrat Joe Biden.
Polls show that Trump’s Republican Party faces a serious threat of losing its narrow control of Congress in November, particularly the House of Representatives.
If Democrats win, they have signaled they would block Trump’s agenda and could even move to impeach him for the third time.
ATLANTA — Security researchers say rapid advances in artificial intelligence are making it more critical to address a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.
The system’s vulnerability has been drawing increased attention, with election security advocates criticizing state election officials for failing to fix it before the November elections. Georgia election officials say they have taken steps to address the potential harm, but some advocates say the state is not going far enough.
The vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That is important because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution, and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.
While the flaw in Georgia has been known for a few years, the widespread adoption of AI tools and the blistering pace of its sophistication have election security experts raising alarms.
This is “a bit of a wake-up call because it illustrates how much more easily vulnerabilities can be exploited now that AI can do all of the technical work for you,” said J. Alex Halderman, a voting technology specialist at the University of Michigan who was part of the team that exposed the flaw.
Other jurisdictions across the country use the same voting equipment made by Liberty Vote, which was known as Dominion Voting Systems before the company was sold. But many have applied a software update to fix the flaw, and some other states do not allow the public release of records that are needed to exploit it, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology.
Georgia, a presidential battleground with one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year, is the only place where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a “perfect storm.”
“It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility,” Lindeman said.
How does voting work in Georgia?
Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots voters insert into scanners to tally the votes.
Such cast-vote records detail the votes from each ballot. Those records and electronic ballot images created by the scanners are randomized. But the software flaw allows them to be put back in the order they were cast, according to a report by researchers who discovered it in 2022.
Along with other publicly available data, that information could be used to match voters to their ballots, the researchers wrote.
Max Springer, a Princeton University researcher who was not involved in the original research and studies AI, said he gave a publicly available AI assistant that research. He said it was able to reverse the shuffling of electronic ballot records from Georgia’s May primary and then tell him what other records it would need to match names to ballots.
He then gave the AI assistant the early voting list for the counties he examined and the cast-vote record file, which could be obtained through a public records request. It was able to create “buckets of ballots and potential voters,” he wrote in a blog post. In many instances, that made it possible to match voters to their ballots.
In cases where ambiguity remained, he wrote, he got the public audit log for the ballot scanners and precinct check-in records and was able to match most ballots to specific voters.
“AI coding tools are essentially supercharging laymen people to exploit vulnerabilities,” Springer said in an interview.
Why does ballot secrecy matter?
Georgia’s Constitution says elections “shall be by secret ballot,” and state law requires voting machines to “permit voting in absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know any other elector’s votes.”
A lack of ballot secrecy can make it easier to buy or sell votes and increase the danger of coercion to vote a certain way by family members, political organizations, employers or government officials. It also is information that could be invaluable to political campaigns.
Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager in the secretary of state’s office, pushed back on the concerns. He said it would be easier to use mail ballots if vote-buying or coercion was the goal and that it probably would be cheaper for campaigns to just increase outreach to voters who fit a certain profile than try to identify voters this way.
State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a rule during the board’s August meeting that would have required the secretary of state’s office to apply the software update recommended by the manufacturer by Tuesday.
“Each [voter] has one vote, and no one is entitled to know how it was cast,” Grubbs said. “That privacy protects more than the individual voter. It protects the integrity of the entire election.”
In a letter to the election board, an agency lawyer argued that the update has not been certified by the secretary of state, the implementation would take months, and the Legislature has not provided necessary funding. The board rejected Grubbs’ proposal. Some members said they did not believe they had the authority to order the secretary of state to act and they raised concerns about the short timeline before the November midterms.
Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, who voted against the proposal, said it is “intensely frustrating” that the software update has not been applied. But she pointed out that it is a felony to reveal how someone voted, which should serve as a deterrent.
“I hate the fact that it’s even physically possible, but there are very, very severe penalties if somebody were to actually do this,” she said.
What’s being done?
The secretary of state’s office sent guidance to county election officials instructing them to refer open records requests for certain records to the secretary of state’s office. It will release them with the problematic information blacked out and decline to release other information and documents.
Sterling said the office is working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they are made public. Halderman said that precaution would be necessary to keep someone from reconstructing the order.
While some other jurisdictions have applied the software update that reportedly fixes the problem, some have done what Georgia is now trying to do by restricting public access to the records needed to exploit the flaw.
Marilyn Marks is executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election transparency and security and raised the alarm about the vulnerability. She argued that withholding documents is not the solution and that steps need to be taken to ensure ballots cannot be traced to voters in the first place.
“When Georgia’s election records contain identifiers that can be used to trace ballots to voters, the only legal and acceptable answer is to stop recording that information — not restrict public access to sensitive unlawful information to insiders and commercial vendors,” she said.
With time growing short before the elections, Marks said a workable interim solution would be to collect ballots in locked boxes at precincts and then shuffle and scan them at a central tabulating center.
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.”
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 non-citizens. 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.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted requests from the states and the independent groups to halt the plans from being implemented nationwide, issuing a preliminary injunction requiring the Postal Service to cease all work on them.
The Trump administration then bypassed the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to ask the Supreme Court for relief from Talwani’s order.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, the administration’s top litigator, argued that the warnings from states that the changes are unworkable, represent an overreach of federal authority or would cause chaos in November are all baseless.
“The Rule ensures that States remain responsible for determining voter eligibility and eligibility to vote by mail, and it does not dictate ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures,” Sauer wrote. “The Rule thus plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”
Sauer argued that if the court does not allow the changes to proceed, it would cause “serious irreparable harm on the federal government, the States themselves, and the voting public” by “nullifying the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud.”
Experts have consistently rejected those claims — including in their own filings before the high court.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, joined three other election experts to argue to the lower court that the Trump administration’s claims of injury were “speculative and weak.” They noted that the administration had “offered no evidence” in court that the new rules would “stop any appreciable amount of voter fraud or even that voter fraud through the mails is a widespread problem that USPS should address.”
Meanwhile, they wrote, there was “undisputed evidence” presented to the lower court that the Postal Service is “still not prepared to implement its new rule or do so accurately and efficiently, even as states have begun mailing out their ballots,” and that the “harm to the states and to voters is enormous, as the rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red and blue states.”
The Democrat-led states also noted that the Trump administration hadn’t proven that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate threat, but had shown it is ill prepared itself to implement the changes without causing widespread disruption — as evidenced in part by the whistleblower’s claims.
It’s unclear when the Supreme Court will rule, though a relatively quick decision is expected given the emergency nature of the appeal.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Sunday renewed its appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge blocked new restrictions on mail ballots ahead of the midterms.
The filing came after U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani extended an order against the U.S. Postal Service enforcing President Trump’s executive order for the November elections.
The legal wrangling comes even as states start sending out mail ballots, leaving the administration little time to make big changes in mail ballot rules.
“Ballots have already begun to be mailed in North Carolina, and more States will begin the mailing process as the injunction remains in place — including Alabama on September 9 and at least five States the week of September 13,” Solicitor Gen. John Sauer said in the filing.
“Once those ballot envelopes enter the mailstream, there is no retrieving them. And while the injunction allows the Postal Service and the States to continue taking steps to ensure that their envelopes satisfy the Rule’s requirements … each day the injunction is in place risks sowing confusion and chaos because the injunction makes those preparatory steps voluntary, rather than mandatory.”
The appeal marks the third time the administration has asked the high court to intervene. The high court has allowed the plan to move forward but not ruled on whether it is legal.
The battle could have major ramifications for this year’s elections, when control of Congress is at stake. Nearly one-third of voters in the U.S. cast mail ballots. Mail ballots are sent to every California voter.
Democratic states and voting rights groups say the changes are unconstitutional and amount to voter suppression. Election officials contend that there isn’t enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new Postal Service directives.
The Trump administration has framed the restrictions as commonsense changes that are within its power to regulate the mail.
“Simply put, the best way to address respondents’ fears about inability to comply with the Rule is to grant an immediate administrative stay of the order, followed by a full stay pending further review,” Sauer said. “That will remove the improper cloud of uncertainty that the district court has cast over the Rule, making clear to all involved that compliance with the Rule is not optional and must start without further delay.”
Trump has long sought to limit mail voting, even though he himself often uses that method to cast his own ballot. He has falsely blamed mail balloting for his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, spreading baseless claims of fraud. But so far, he has been unable to change the long-standing voting procedure.
Whitehurst and Fields write for the Associated Press.
Free and fair elections are foundational to our representative democracy. A government intended to reflect and honor the will of the people works only if the people can express their will. That’s why we have elections.
John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman and hero of the civil rights movement, said voting is precious and “the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society.” Former President Reagan called the right to vote “the crown jewel of American liberties.”
Alas, we have a president who believes his most precious right, apart from lining his silken pockets, is nursing his over-ripened ego. Donald Trump can’t stand the fact he lost the 2020 election — which he most emphatically did — and so he’s built a carapace of lies: about illegal ballots, rigged election machinery, rampant voting by noncitizens, and so on.
Reagan, no less than Lewis, probably is turning cartwheels in his grave.
But there’s a chance to push back. In November, voters in 26 states will elect a secretary of state, choosing the officials who will oversee the 2028 presidential race throughout most of the country. What could possibly go wrong?
What really politicized the office of secretary of state, though, was Trump’s obsessive compulsion with his 2020 defeat.
Spurred by his incessant lies about supposed fraud, allies and opportunists set out to hijack the country’s election machinery and do Trump’s dirty work from the inside. In 2022, a group calling itself the America First SOS Coalition endorsed a slate of cranks and quacks who ran for secretary of state in 14 states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.
FILE – Tina Peters, former Mesa County, Colo., clerk, listens during her trial, March 3, 2023, in Grand Junction, Colo. (Scott Crabtree/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP, Pool, File)
(Scott Crabtree / Associated Press)
Thankfully, all of them lost, save for one candidate in Indiana. Among those defeated was Tina Peters, the former county elections chief in Mesa County, Colo., who went on to infamy, and prison, for orchestrating a security breach aimed at “proving” 2020 votes were stolen from Trump. (Never mind that he won the county by nearly 30 percentage points.)
The SOS Coalition apparently is defunct; its website address now leads to an online gambling portal.
But more than two dozen election deniers ran for secretary of state this year, according to States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that works to promote fair and secure elections nationwide. Six of those candidates won their primaries and made it to November’s ballot, including in three states — Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin — that promise to be key once more to picking the next president.
The stakes in those races are considerable, said Peverill Squire, a University of Missouri expert on state elections. “Who’s going to be administering [election] rules? How they’re going to interpret those rules?” he said, offering examples of the office’s import. “Whether they’re going to try to make it more difficult to vote, or easier to vote. Whether they’re going to try to engage in activities that will further raise doubts in some people’s minds about how fairly the election has been conducted.”
Nevada Republican Jim Marchant is among the election deniers running for secretary of state in November. He lost four years ago after promoting Donald Trump’s false claims he beat Joe Biden.
(Ricardo Torres-Cortez / Associated Press)
The contest in Nevada is a rerun of 2022, when Democrat Cisco Aguilar narrowly defeated Republican Jim Marchant. Undeterred, Marchant continues to spout gibberish about sabotaged voting machines and other far-fetched claims of election chicanery. Among the remedies he’s floated, according to the Nevada Independent, is using technology to measure voters’ heartbeat as a way to verify their identity.
Um…
Meanwhile, in Arizona, incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes faces Republican state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, an attorney who was sanctioned by the State Bar for pursuing baseless claims of 2020 election fraud. One of his Trump-inspired lawsuits was swiftly rejected by a federal judge who noted its conspicuous lack of “relevant or reliable evidence” — thus raising doubts not just about Kolodin’s discernment but also his capacity to cover even the basics.
In Wisconsin, where elections are overseen by a six-member, bipartisan commission, Republican Jay Schroeder is running on a pledge to dismantle that fair-minded system, calling it a “failed experiment.” Had he been secretary of state in 2020, Schroeder told NBC News, he would not have certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
That’s all you need to know, Wisconsin.
Great amounts of time, energy and resources are being devoted this election to races for Congress and for statehouses across the country, which makes sense.
A federal judge again Friday blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enacting President Trump’s sweeping new mail ballot rules for the November election, finding that the Postal Service lacks such authority over elections and that neither it nor states such as California are capable of implementing the changes without causing chaos and disenfranchising voters.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted that election officials from across the country told the court that it is “likely impossible” to comply with the rules, which “makes disenfranchisement more than likely, if not probable” if the Postal Service were to proceed with them.
Talwani’s order — her latest of several halting the plan since this summer — came after a Postal Service whistleblower alleged the agency’s new computer systems for the project are fundamentally flawed; a top Postal Service official acknowledged a key online portal was unfinished; and the Trump administration filed an emergency petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the plans to proceed anyway.
All this unfolded this week as some of the first mail ballots of the election cycle started going out.
The new rules — which Trump required in a March executive order — would require states to submit complete voter lists to the Postal Service and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service, and empower the Postal Service to reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.
Trump’s executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own lists of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.
Trump has said the changes are necessary to combat widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens, though independent election experts say there is no evidence that such fraud exists in large numbers.
Leading Democrats and elections officials in California and other states say the new rules constitute an unlawful federal overreach into state-run elections and a thinly veiled effort by the Trump administration to suppress the vote in a midterm election the GOP is poised to lose.
Talwani, an appointee of President Obama, agreed, finding that the states and voting rights groups are likely to succeed in their claims that the U.S. Constitution reserves the right to regulate elections to the states and Congress — not the executive branch.
Talwani issued her order after holding a contentious hearing in federal court in Boston on Thursday, where she questioned the Postal Service and the dozen conservative-led states supporting it on their ability to implement the changes in time for the Nov. 3 elections. She also heard from California, other liberal-led states and voting rights groups that it would be impossible.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office is helping lead the states’ challenge, hailed Talwani’s order as a crucial reprieve.
“We’ve now secured longer-term relief that will keep the USPS changes blocked while our case moves forward,” Bonta said in a statement to The Times. “We will continue to take all steps to stop the Trump Administration from trampling on voting rights and restricting mail voting.”
Bonta’s office also criticized Department of Justice attorneys for rushing to the Supreme Court before Talwani could issue her order or the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals could weigh in on an appeal the department had already filed on the matter.
Walter Garcia, a Bonta spokesman, said the Justice Department had “flouted standard procedural rules” by approaching the high court before the lower courts had weighed in, despite the fact that the Postal Service acknowledged Thursday that it was not ready to launch its new portal.
“It defies common sense that they would seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court when USPS is unprepared to implement the rule now,” Garcia said.
State law requires that all registered voters be sent a ballot in the mail, and more than 80% of California voters have used those ballots to vote in recent elections.
In its emergency petition to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration argued that an earlier temporary restraining order by Talwani to halt the new rules from taking effect was “baseless” and would cause “serious irreparable harm” to the federal government, states and voting public.
“To forestall those harms and protect the public interest, this Court should grant an immediate stay, making clear to States that they should begin efforts to comply if they have not done so already,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer.
The swirl of litigation has created uncertainty around the Nov. 3 election. It also reflects the Trump administration’s desperate race to get the lower court orders lifted and the new rules implemented in time for that election — the rushed nature of which was a prime focus of the whistleblower.
The unidentified Postal Service employee alleged in a statement released Tuesday by congressional Democrats and submitted in court by Bonta’s office that the agency has been rushing to implement the changes — in defiance of an earlier court order — using “an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” that could cause “catastrophic problems” and disenfranchise millions of voters nationwide.
The Postal Service in a statement Friday said that while its system was developed on an “accelerated schedule,” quality and security standards “were not compromised,” and the agency stands behind “both the rigor of our process and the resulting system.”
At Thursday’s hearing, Talwani appeared frustrated when a Justice Department attorney was unable to tell her the status of the portal.
In a subsequent declaration hours later, Steven W. Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer, said officials were still making “refinements” to the portal, but anticipated being able to make it available “for voluntary use by sometime next week.”
Talwani previously issued an order blocking the Postal Service changes from being implemented in California and more than 20 other suing states in June. The Trump administration appealed that decision to the 1st Circuit, which declined to lift it, and then on an emergency basis to the U.S. Supreme Court. In early August, Talwani issued a second ruling for the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, blocking the changes nationwide.
On Aug. 24, the Supreme Court set aside Talwani’s order in the states’ case, finding that the states’ challenge was essentially premature because the Postal Service had yet to formally initiate the changes or require state compliance. However, the court explicitly noted that it was not reaching any conclusions as to the legality of the pending rules themselves. “On that score, time will tell,” it said.
The states and voting rights groups promptly filed new lawsuits challenging the legality of the rules, which the Postal Service formally issued Aug. 21. And it is in those cases that Talwani issued her ruling Friday.
She wrote that the voting rights groups had standing to challenge the Postal Service rules nationwide in part because the “chaos” created by the rules’ stiff deadlines significantly interfered with their mission to provide voters with accurate and reliable information about how to vote — and whether to use mail ballots to do so.
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said in remarks prior to Talwani’s Friday order that he was “very, very confident” that the Postal Service changes will be blocked for the upcoming elections, and that “mail voting is going to go forward as conveniently and securely as it always has.”
That’s in part because election officials nationwide are “telling the courts that even if they wanted to, they could not implement it,” he said — including in a legal filing Becker helped nearly 100 local elections officials from red and blue states file in separate litigation challenging the rules.
SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers on Sunday approved bills aimed at preventing interference in this fall’s midterm elections and requiring more transparency from social media influencers who are paid by political campaigns.
They join a growing pile of bills on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk as the legislature nears the end of its two-year session, which adjourns early this week.
Social media influencers took on a more visible role in California’s 2026 gubernatorial primary. Candidates including Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer paid thousands of dollars to influencers who posted videos endorsing Steyer or talking about him in a positive light. These videos did not always disclose that influencers were paid by a candidate’s campaign.
Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) said his bill would ensure “that voters are not misled by paid content” by requiring a disclosure on paid posts and videos. Campaigns will also be required to report funds spent on social media posts.
If Newsom signs the law, it could result in fines for influencers and campaigns that fail to disclose such payments.
Two other bills sent to Newsom on Sunday would make it a felony to interfere with mail ballots or to seize ballots and other election materials before an election is certified. They come amid concern from Democratic lawmakers that President Trump or his supporters will seek to interfere with the casting and counting of ballots in the Nov. 3 election.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco drew outrage and legal challenges when he ordered his deputies to take more than 650,000 ballots from the county elections office over unproven claims of fraud. The case was argued before the California Supreme Court last week.
Newsom earlier this year signed a bill preventing local and federal law enforcement agencies from taking ballots without a warrant.
Legislation by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz) goes even further by making it a felony to take or order the seizure of ballots, election records or voting machines. Such actions would be punishable by up to four years in prison.
“The federal administration and those seeking to spread lies about our democracy continue to call for interference in elections in ways we have never seen before in this country,” Pellerin said Sunday. “AB 282 helps ensure that every lawfully cast vote can be counted, and that the will of the voters of every political party will be respected.”
Republican lawmakers argued in previous hearings that the bill is unnecessary because it is already a crime to steal ballots.
Another bill, SB 259, makes it a crime to interfere with a mail ballot on the way to or from a voter or order the seizure of ballots that are in transit to a local elections office.
They need only flip three seats and, going back well over half a century, the average midterm gain for a party out of the White House is more than two dozen. Even with the advantage the GOP engineered through aggressive gerrymandering, the deadweight of a deeply unpopular president threatens to drag down a number of Republicans in competitive and some otherwise-not-so-competitive races.
There are 35 contests on the ballot in November. Of those, nearly two dozen are effectively over before they’ve even started, given the advantage one party holds over the other. Of the remainder, most are being held in states Trump won in 2024, which makes them, broadly speaking, much friendlier terrain for Republicans.
Democrats need to flip four Senate seats and until fairly recently that inhospitable political map made it seem like an all-but insurmountable challenge.
“Republicans still retain a structural advantage given the partisan challenges of the map, and Democrats still need almost every key race to break their way,” Jessica Taylor, who tracks Senate races for the Cook Report, wrote in a recent analysis. But, she went on, “in a wave election akin to 2006” — when Democrats gained six Senate seats — “even states that President Donald Trump won by double digits could move within Democrats’ reach.”
Not so fast. A toss-up means it’s just as likely Republicans will retain their Senate majority.
Understood. So break it down.
Let’s start with those things Democrats have going for them, with the usual caveats …
… There are no certainties but death and taxes. Got it. Go on.
At one time, Georgia looked to be a toss-up as Democrat Jon Ossoff sought reelection in one of those battleground states Trump carried. But Ossoff has raised a boatload of money and drawn a less-than-world-beating opponent in Republican Rep. Mike Collins. Lately, the buzz around Ossoff has been focused more on a potential 2028 run for president than his November reelection.
Meantime, in North Carolina, where former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is running against former national GOP Chairman Michael Whatley, a Cooper victory seems much more likely than not. A win there would give Democrats one of the four seats they need to flip.
Then there’s a handful of red-state seats that Republicans are fighting to hang on to, in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Texas.
Do tell.
In Alaska, former Rep. Mary Portola managed to win nearly 50% of the vote in the Aug. 18 primary, which is noteworthy given she ran on the same ballot as the GOP incumbent, Dan Sullivan, who finished second. (Another Dan Sullivan also appeared on the ballot; under Alaska’s top-four system both Sullivans will advance to a November runoff, along with Portola. The fourth slot is pending.
In Ohio, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who was elected three times before losing his 2024 reelection bid amid a Trump landslide, faces Republican Jon Husted, who was appointed to fill the seat vacated when JD Vance became vice president. Husted has proved a less-than sure-footed candidate while Brown is waging a strong comeback campaign.
Supporters applaud as Democratic Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown speaks at a campaign event in Akron
(Sue Ogrocki / Associated Press)
In Iowa, Rep. Ashley Hinson (a USC grad and former KABC-TV intern!) is running against state Rep. Josh Turek in a state that’s been hammered by Trump’s tariffs and the surging price of gas — especially the diesel fuel that sustains Iowa’s all-important agricultural economy. Turek could also benefit from the strong campaign being waged by gubernatorial front-runner Rob Sand, who tops the Democratic ticket.
Democrats haven’t won a statewide contest in Texas since 1994, despite no end of hype and hope. This time, they’re pinning their dreams on state Rep. James Talarico, a seminarian and viral sensation. But what’s made the race highly competitive is the singularly defective GOP nominee, Ken Paxton, whose splotchy resume includes indictment, impeachment and alleged adultery. On top of all that, he’s been a pretty lousy fundraiser and has yet to bind the wounds left by a savage GOP primary.
So everything is coming up Democratic roses?
Not necessarily.
Two states they’re counting on to flip the Senate, Maine and Michigan, have grown problematic.
Maine once looked to be Democrats’ best pickup opportunity. Incumbent Susan Collins is the lone Republican running in a state Kamala Harris carried in 2024. Then came Graham Platner, along with his inflammatory social media postings, Nazi tattoo and allegations of sexual assault. He stepped aside in July and was replaced by Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, who has considerable ground to make up after his late start.
Collins, who’s been reelected four times, has a history of winning tough races. The Platner debacle certainly hasn’t helped Jackson or Democrats.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, the progressive Abdul El-Sayed inched past a more centrist alternative to win the Democratic nomination. The question is whether he’s too far left (and, frankly, whether there’s too much anti-Muslim sentiment) for El-Sayed to prevail in that purple state. The Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, ran two years ago and lost by less than half a percentage point.
Good to know. A lot can happen in the next 65 days.
Exactly.
Which is why we stick to columnizing. If you want predictions, ask a mystic or consult your Magic 8 Ball.
Days after the top elections official in Shasta County announced that he planned to hire an election denier who served prison time for tampering with voting machines, county leaders there made an extraordinary plea to state and federal authorities: Please come investigate.
A statement released by the county Tuesday afternoon said Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters, had made “frivolous” claims and “unproven statements” about the June primary election, which he administered and certified.
“The County condemns the conduct of the Clerk-Registrar of Voters and invites all relevant state and federal agencies to review the allegations he has made and to proactively investigate his official actions and practices as Shasta County’s elections official,” read the statement released by Stewart Buettell, the county’s deputy chief executive officer.
Curtis — whose name was on the ballot, in a race he lost — has sequestered primary ballots in a room in the elections office in Redding, sealing the doors with locks, duct tape and red-lettered signs that read: “KEEP OUT PER ROV CLINT CURTIS.”
Curtis has told reporters that the ballots did not look, feel or smell right and that he had directed facilities workers to put a lock on the room and destroy the keys so that if anyone tries to gain access, they will need a warrant and bolt cutter.
Curtis said he, too, had asked the FBI to investigate.
The county fired back, saying in its statement that it wanted the FBI — as well as the California secretary of state and the attorney general — to investigate Curtis, whose short tenure as registrar has been fraught with controversy.
“Mr. Curtis was appointed to enhance transparency, strengthen election integrity, and restore trust in the democratic process,” the county wrote. “While some progress has been achieved, including the promotion of meaningful observation within the Elections Office, Mr. Curtis has failed significantly in other core responsibilities, undermining the very principles he was appointed to uphold.”
Curtis could not immediately be reached for comment. The FBI field office in Sacramento said it was unable to comment.
The new observation area at the Shasta County elections office.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson, in a statement Tuesday, said he was “aware of the controversy involving the ROV and ballots,” including claims on social media that he had been requested “to sequester alleged illegal or illegitimate ballots locked in the ROV’s office [and] addressing threats made to burn down the facility.”
Johnson said Curtis had agreed to provide a statement regarding a person who allegedly threatened the facility and that it was “an active investigation.”
“It is the Sheriff’s understanding that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is investigating the matter; therefore, Sheriff Johnson is urging members of the public to be patient and await the results of that investigation,” Johnson wrote. “At this point, launching a second investigation could complicate a process already in place.”
In an interview on Lindell TV, created by MAGA conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, Curtis said that the ballots “are being held at my office, which is kind of problematic because it’s a really old building and we have a lot of Antifa people,” including one who “once commented how easy it would be to burn that building down.”
The showdown in Shasta comes as Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — who in February used armed deputies to confiscate more than half a million ballots from last year’s special election for Proposition 50 to determine if they were fraudulently counted — is defending that seizure before the California Supreme Court this week.
The Supreme Court justices hammered Bianco, a Republican who came in fourth in this spring’s crowded California gubernatorial primary, in back-to-back hearings Monday. They appeared poised to order the ballots returned and to sharply limit the sheriff’s power to snatch election materials in the future.
Curtis had worked with the Riverside County citizens group whose fraud allegations sparked Bianco’s investigation, even traveling 600 miles south to speak on their behalf.
Potential hiring of election denier sets off alarm bells
Last week, Curtis drew national headlines by saying he wanted to hire election denier Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was released early from prison this summer amid a pressure campaign from President Trump.
Curtis, himself a longtime election denier, told The Times in an email that he wanted to hire Peters as a consultant to “to assist with supervision of the November election.”
Tina Peters speaks at the Colorado State Capitol in downtown Denver on April 5, 2022.
(David Zalubowski / Associated Press)
“None of our consultants have access to the voting systems, so she would be insulated from false claims,” he wrote.
Peters was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nine years behind bars for breaching her county’s voting machines as part of a scheme to show that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.
She was found guilty of helping an outside computer expert, an associate of Lindell, gain unauthorized access to Mesa County’s Dominion election equipment in 2021 and make copies of its hard drive before and after a software upgrade.
Shasta County officials told The Times that any prospective employee or consultant would have to go through the same hiring process as anyone else seeking employment with the county.
Talk of hiring Peters drew swift condemnation from California lawmakers, and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said it was looking into whether a contract with Peters violated state law.
And on Aug. 19, Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, wrote in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that they had “grave concern” about Curtis’ plan to hire Peters.
“We are concerned that this hiring decision in Shasta County has less to do with Ms. Peters’ qualifications, and more to do with the President’s obsession with interfering in the midterm elections,” they wrote.
The senators said that if the county hires her, Weber should “provide the maximum oversight possible to ensure that Ms. Peters does not improperly access ballots, voting systems, or sensitive information that could impact the rights and privacy of the over 100,000 registered voters in Shasta County.”
Controversy and censure
Curtis, a 68-year-old attorney, was appointed by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors in the spring of 2025 to fill the position vacated by two previous registrars who resigned for health reasons.
Curtis lived in Florida then, had no previous ties to the area and had never run an election. He got the position after advocating for hand-counting ballots and bragging in a public job interview that he had worked with Lindell.
He promptly eliminated nine of the vast, mostly rural county’s 13 ballot drop boxes. He accused his predecessors, without evidence, of stuffing ballots to sabotage conservative Republicans, and repeatedly called on federal authorities to raid the office and seize ballots from previous elections.
The Board of Supervisors censured Curtis on Aug. 11 for his treatment of staff.
A ballot drop box at the Shasta Lake Visitor Center in February.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He responded by inviting reporters to the elections office in downtown Redding, where he shared security footage that, he said, showed employees breaking into a room in the building. He allowed reporters to take video of the footage.
The county condemned those actions in an Aug. 14 news release, saying he “has repeatedly been advised of appropriate procedures for addressing and investigating personnel matters and advised of the importance of maintaining confidentiality of such matters.”
Earlier this spring, the county released the findings of two personnel investigations into Curtis’ conduct that were spurred by concerns raised by elections employees and their union representatives.
An internal investigation and an external inquiry by Oppenheimer Investigations Group found that Curtis made phone calls related to his own campaign during county work hours and casually threatened to kill, spank, slap or “throat punch” staffers.
He threatened to have one employee dragged out of the office by their hair, according to an internal investigation report by Monica Fugitt, the county’s director of support services, who wrote that he had “demonstrated a clear pattern of unprofessional and abusive conduct toward staff.”
In its statement Tuesday, the county said he “has made and continues to make unsubstantiated accusations of illegal activities against employees without due process or an investigation.”
Buettell, the deputy chief executive, told The Times that the county does not have the power to terminate Curtis’ employment because he was appointed to fill a vacancy in an elected position.
“As soon as they assume that office, it’s as if they were elected,” Buettell said. To be removed from the office, he said, Curtis would have to be recalled by voters.
A federal judge on Wednesday lifted a major obstacle to President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, even as Democratic state officials filed a new court challenge with the midterm elections fast approaching.
The fresh round of legal wrangling comes just two days after the Supreme Court handed down a procedural ruling in Trump’s favor, and could mean the issue lands before the high court again before the pivotal contests for control of Congress. The first mailed ballots are set to be sent out next week.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston agreed to lift an order prohibiting the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s order for November’s elections. She wrote that she was “compelled” to do so after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that a similar injunction she granted in a separate case was premature.
Talwani nevertheless said the executive order could unleash “chaos” and referred to it as “likely unconstitutional.”
The administration can now move forward and implement a Postal Service rule published late Friday. It would require states to follow a uniform envelope style for mail ballots and to give the Postal Service a list of voters eligible to receive them. Talwani found on Tuesday that the rule’s issuance technically violated her injunction, but she declined to penalize the administration.
The new lawsuit, filed by about two dozen Democratically controlled states against the U.S. Postal Service, marked a new phase in the high-stakes litigation creating confusion around the midterm elections.
It came after the Supreme Court ruled against them in a separate case, but did not say Trump’s order was legal.
The high court majority found the initial Democratic lawsuit was premature, but that was before the Republican administration issued a rule governing Postal Service delivery of mail ballots. Election officials warn it will be impossible to implement before the first wave of mail ballots are sent out next week.
“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections. Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of 25 Democratic attorneys general filing the lawsuit, said in a statement. “USPS has no authority to decide who can and cannot vote by mail.”
The Trump administration plan faces a third lawsuit originally filed in May in the nation’s capital, though judges there have so far declined to block it.
All previous challenges were filed before the administration published its mail ballot rule Friday night.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis on Wednesday said the Postal Service’s proposals were “commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots” and that the administration would continue to work to implement them to boost “the safety and security of our elections.”
The Postal Service said it would not comment because of the pending lawsuit.
National Democrats on Tuesday cited the rule in asking the federal judge in the Washington case to block Trump’s order after he declined to do so last spring, saying the administration at the time had not taken concrete action. In Boston, Talwani also found that the administration had violated a separate injunction she had placed on the Postal Service in drafting the new rule, although she did not take any action against the government.
Talwani had issued the injunction against Trump’s executive order in the prior Democratic state case, which is the one the Supreme Court overturned on Monday. She also issued a second injunction Aug. 11 in a case filed by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, while the Supreme Court was considering the administration’s appeal of the judge’s first order.
Trump has long targeted mail voting, which he falsely blames for his 2020 election loss and is disproportionately used by Democrats as a result of Trump’s condemnations. Since returning to power, Trump has tried to claim authority over election rules, saying he thinks Republicans should “take over” vote counting in Democratic areas.
He issued his first election executive order just months after retaking office, attempting to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, among other changes. He has also been pushing a sweeping election bill that has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and even some within his own party.
Riccardi and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.
A Maryland court has ruled against a proposed constitutional amendment that could have paved the way for Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2028 elections.
The ruling Wednesday by a judge in the state’s capital city marks another setback in Democrats’ national attempts to counter a Republican redistricting movement pushed by President Trump ahead of this year’s elections. The judge ruled that the amendment cannot appear on the November ballot, but he paused the effect of that ruling to allow for an appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Democrats already control seven of Maryland’s eight congressional seats. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore called lawmakers into a special session in August with a goal of making it easier to claim that final seat.
An amendment referred to the ballot by lawmakers seeks to sidestep a court ruling that struck down a previous Democratic redistricting plan in 2022. It would declare that a constitutional requirement for districts to be compact and take into account “natural boundaries” applies only to state legislative districts, not congressional ones.
That would allow Democratic state lawmakers to draw congressional districts that cross the Chesapeake Bay, reshaping a district east of the bay that is held by Republican Rep. Andy Harris, chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Robert Thompson ruled that lawmakers violated their own deadlines for ballot measures. Earlier this year, lawmakers passed a law signed by Moore that set a July 1 deadline for the secretary of state to certify summaries of all statewide ballot questions to the Maryland State Board of Elections.
The state attorney general’s office argued that deadline didn’t apply to the redistricting amendment because lawmakers wrote their own ballot summary for it, using their constitutional authority. The judge disagreed, instead siding with arguments by the conservative Oversight Project and Republican state lawmakers who sued.
Earlier this year, the Virginia Supreme Court also invalidated a redistricting ballot measure because of procedural violations by state lawmakers. In that case, voters had already approved an amendment in April authorizing mid-decade redistricting when the court ruled that lawmakers last year had waited too long to take an initial step necessary to qualify it for the ballot.
Virginia and Maryland both were seeking to follow the path of California, where voters approved a Democratic-backed amendment authorizing mid-decade redistricting. Democrats hope to gain as many as five congressional seats from California’s redrawn districts, plus an additional seat from new districts in Utah.
But Republicans hope to win as many as 16 additional seats from new U.S. House districts enacted in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.
Redistricting typically happens near the beginning of each decade, after new census data is released. But a mid-decade redistricting battle broke out after Trump urged Republican-led states to redraw congressional districts in hopes that it might help Republicans hold onto a slim House majority in this year’s midterm elections.
JUNEAU, Alaska — A candidate with the same name as Alaska’s incumbent U.S. senator has advanced to the general election in what will be one of the most closely watched races in the country this fall.
Dan J. Sullivan, who goes by Dan Sullivan, was among the top four finishers after the Aug. 18 primary and on Tuesday moved on to the November matchup, which is a ranked choice contest. The incumbent, Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola also have advanced.
The challenger Sullivan, a retired teacher from the island community of Petersburg, sued for a spot on the ballot and succeeded after a judge invalidated a decision by a top state elections official who said he had filed his candidacy with an intent to confuse voters. The allegation was driven by claims raised by the senator and his GOP allies. The state Supreme Court ultimately ordered Dan J. Sullivan eligible for the ballot.
While the challenger sought to appear on the ballot as Republican Dan J. Sullivan, the Division of Elections listed him as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party affiliation. The senator was listed as Dan S. Sullivan, Republican and incumbent.
A call seeking comment from the challenger was not immediately returned Tuesday, and emails to campaign staff for the senator also were not immediately returned.
President Trump endorsed Sen. Sullivan for reelection and called the other Sullivan’s candidacy an attempt to trick voters. Dan J. Sullivan criticized the incumbent for embracing Trump’s endorsement and said the president was “more interested in raising tariffs on our allies than in lowering the cost of groceries, housing and energy.”
It was too early to determine who would fill the fourth and final slot in the Senate general election race.
The Senate race was one of three major contests on Alaska’s primary ballot, which also featured races for the state’s lone U.S. House seat and governor.
In the congressional race, Republican Rep. Nick Begich, seeking a second term, advanced earlier to the general election along with independent Bill Hill. The other two spots remained too early to call.
Democrats Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and Tom Begich, former state lawmakers, advanced on election night in the race for governor, topping a field of mostly Republican candidates all vying to succeed Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Tom Begich is Nick Begich’s uncle. Republican Bernadette Wilson also advanced on Tuesday, with the fourth spot remaining too early to call.
The state accepts absentee and overseas ballots up to 10 days after the primary as long as they were postmarked by election day.
The incumbent Sullivan and Peltola are the leading candidates in the Senate race, after raising the most money and having statewide name recognition. It’s one of a handful of Senate races around the country considered competitive and pivotal for both parties’ hopes of controlling the chamber.
Dan J. Sullivan’s presence on the general election ballot adds a twist to the race because of Alaska’s ranked choice voting system. Under it, candidates who finish third or fourth in the general election can play a crucial role in deciding the eventual winner if their supporters rank other choices beyond them.
