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The Tulare County elections office in the Central Valley was suddenly getting peppered with questions from baffled voters.

On the afternoon of Oct. 13, residents began calling and showing up in person at the registrar of voters’ office in Visalia, worried they would be accused of committing fraud by trying to vote twice.

That’s because, much to the surprise and chagrin of county elections staff, thousands of voters had accidentally been mailed duplicate ballots for the Nov. 3 midterm election.

In the agricultural city of Tulare, a place surrounded by walnut and almond orchards as far as the eye can see, 7,791 voters received extra ballots because of an error by the private printing vendor, said Michelle Baldwin, the county registrar of voters, who noted that safeguards were in place to keep the extra ballots from being counted.

The county’s longtime ballot printer, Porterville-based ProVote Solutions, “has accepted full responsibility for the mistake,” she said.

ProVote Solutions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It is unfortunate that it happened,” Baldwin said. “Of course, we would have preferred this didn’t happen, but it did, and we tried to get right on it and respond within 24 hours.”

It’s the kind of error that, in most election years, probably would be just a minor news story. County elections officials would be trusted with their explanation for the mistake, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

But this midterm has been beset by a growing distrust in the integrity of mail-in ballots following President Trump’s attempt to restrict them before the November election — an effort that was blocked last month by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump, who remains fixated on his 2020 election loss, has repeatedly alleged — without providing evidence — that voting by mail leads to widespread cheating and fraud. He has focused specifically on California, where every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail. Seven other states do the same.

On Monday, federal officials charged 28 people with election-related crimes in California, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application. Among them were several green card holders, some of whom said they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

In this tense political climate, Becker said, even straightforward election mistakes are magnified on social media and become the subject of conspiracy theories, making the job of local elections officials much more difficult.

“Accidents do happen,” Becker said. “Our elections are incredibly decentralized, run by hundreds of thousands of human beings. As a result, we know there is going to be human error, but our elections are not designed to be perfect. That’s impossible. What they are designed to do is be resilient against human error.”

Becker said it is not unheard of for a voter to receive two ballots. Sometimes, a voter will call the local registrar to request a new one because theirs has not arrived by mail — only to have the original eventually show up. And in other states where voters are required to formally request a mail ballot, they may forget they have done so and show up to vote in person.

That’s why, he said, there are well-established checks to protect against double voting. When a voter casts a ballot, they are “marked immediately” in statewide systems that show they’ve done so, he said.

Ballot errors are rare but not unheard of.

On Monday, the Imperial County registrar of voters announced that a “mailing error” caused duplicate ballots to be sent to 160 voters who requested confidential voter status, meaning that, for safety reasons, their identity and contact information are kept off public voting rolls.

“The error occurred as the Registrar of Voters’ Office was updating its procedures to follow changes in California law,” the elections office said in a statement, adding that, on Jan. 1, elected officials and candidates for public office became eligible for confidential voter status, “requiring changes to how their ballots are processed and mailed.”

Tulare County is a mostly rural place that voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections. Portions of the city of Tulare — population 74,000 — are in the redistricted but perennially competitive 22nd Congressional District, where a close race between Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) and Democratic challenger Randy Villegas, a political science professor at College of the Sequoias in Visalia, could determine the balance of power in Congress.

Robert Jones, a strategist for the Valadao campaign, told The Times on Tuesday that the campaign had been in close communication with the registrar’s office and was not overly concerned.

“We have a lot of faith in the Tulare County registrar and elections office,” Jones said, “and we would imagine that, with the extra scrutiny, it will be diligent in making sure that only registered voters vote and that they vote only one time.”

Villegas’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mark Martinez, a political science professor at Cal State Bakersfield, said conspiracy theories about the error in Tulare add to what is already a tense political climate in the Central Valley, where a recent surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations has disrupted agricultural communities, sent families scrambling to find detained loved ones, and led to a drop in school attendance.

“People will walk away, stay away or avoid political events especially if you look like me — if you look brown or Latino,” Martinez said.

The duplicate-ballot error in Tulare last week quickly went viral in conservative social media circles, with claims that something nefarious was going on in the middle of a House battleground district. One post on X by right-wing media personality Eric Daugherty said, “Trump is right, this is the MESS mass mail-in voting creates!” and “Stop the cheat!” It was viewed more than 450,000 times on that platform, and screenshots of the post were widely shared on Facebook with additional commentary.

The Republican-leaning city of Tulare has just over 34,500 registered voters, according to the California secretary of state’s office. Not all of them are in Valadao’s district.

About 23% of voters in the city received duplicate ballots.

Countywide, about 3% of the 227,000 registered voters were affected.

Baldwin said that as soon as residents started reporting their duplicate ballots, elections staffers immediately contacted the vendor, which confirmed the evening of Oct. 13 that the batch of nearly 7,800 ballots had been accidentally reprinted and mailed.

The vendor, she said, quickly printed postcards explaining what happened and drove them more than three hours to a postal facility in Sacramento so they would be promptly processed and received by voters by the end of the week.

The mailer, in English and Spanish, instructs those who got two ballots to “securely destroy the duplicate ballot” instead of returning it.

Baldwin said that if anybody submits two ballots, “it will be flagged” by safeguards already in place.

The barcode on each voter’s mail return envelope is connected to his or her voter record, she said. Before a mailed ballot is accepted for counting, elections staff scan the barcode, record that the ballot has been received, compare the envelope signature with the signature on a person’s voter record, and check to see if the person has already voted.

“Your vote stays private,” Tulare County elections staff wrote in a Facebook post explaining safeguards against voting more than once. “After verification, your ballot is separated from the return envelope before counting. The envelope barcode tracks your ballot’s return, not your voting choices.”

In the comments section, one resident was frustrated but circumspect.

“I am livid this happened THIS YEAR OF ALL YEARS!!” the resident wrote. “And also, glad there are protections in place in case any fools try to use both. Good grief!!”

Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being U.S. citizens — again escalating an election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.

Authorities said 11 of the 28 were arrested as of Monday morning and that the 17 others “will be in custody in the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are lawful permanent residents of the U.S., are charged with lying about registering or voting on their naturalization paperwork, officials said; 21 of them are suspected of casting votes, some in multiple elections. None are undocumented immigrants, a favorite target of President Trump and a group he has accused of infiltrating U.S. elections in the past.

Those charged represent a tiny fraction of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” that the Justice Department alleged are on California rolls just last week, and an even tinier fraction of the more than 190,000 noncitizens the Trump administration alleged were on state rolls as recently as July.

State officials have previously warned, along with independent elections experts, that the Trump administration has badly overstated voter fraud claims in other states. In Nevada, for example, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens. The administration has repeatedly revised downward its estimate for how many “likely noncitizens” are on California’s rolls.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter cast the arrests during a Monday news conference as proof that California voter rolls are corrupted and need to be purged to prevent noncitizens from negating the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed recent Trump administration efforts to purge the state’s rolls are willfully obstructing justice.

“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.”

State and local officials — some of whom are being sued by the Justice Department over their handling of the broader claims — said voter fraud should be taken seriously, but that isolated cases are not evidence of widespread problems and that any voting allegations from the Trump administration must be viewed with skepticism.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn referred to Monday’s arrests as “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust in our midterm elections.”

“These arrests are being used to paint a picture of widespread voter fraud when we know that is not the case,” Hahn said. “California has laws in place to protect the integrity of our elections, and L.A. County is fully abiding by them.”

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said the 28 individuals charged Monday “represent a tiny fraction” of California’s 23 million registered voters, and that the Trump administration has not shown “evidence of widespread voter fraud, even if the allegations are true.”

Shifting claims

For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California — suggesting a sweeping criminal investigation was underway.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California may have more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens.”

When Weber and Logan balked at the demand — arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, had presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter’s demands.

In a filing in that case Monday, federal authorities cited the latest charges as more reason for the court to intervene, and before the election, to segregate out the flagged ballots until those voters’ citizenship can be verified — again raising uncertainty as to their citizenship status despite alleging during their news conference Monday that all were permanent residents.

“This Court should order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the federal election — including any ballots cast by the individuals charged with [federal election] crimes this morning — until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” federal attorneys wrote.

The Trump administration’s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged — and even those it’s charged — has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others have questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what occurred in Nevada, where federal officials initially flagged more than 15,000 potential noncitizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted those discrepancies.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens are “unreliable.” He wrote that the Justice Department’s demands on California risk “disenfranchising thousands of voters, and from DOJ’s track record, the lion’s share will be eligible voters.”

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens charged represent “.0001% of California voters,” and that the Trump administration charging 28 people days after flagging 20,000 “raises serious questions as to whether DOJ has any evidence at all supporting their claims on the other 19,972 on their list.”

McCotter said the original 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” while “20,000 is the floor” — with the larger figure representing individuals the administration had low, medium or high levels of confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller figure representing only those it has high confidence are noncitizens.

“So there’s not inconsistency between those numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence,” he said.

McCotter also said the notion that a federal list of more than 15,000 alleged noncitizens in Nevada had resulted in zero noncitizens being found was a “false storyline,” in part because the larger group was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 that were vetted — and found to be citizens — were those the federal government had held “high confidence” in being noncitizens.

How the Justice Department further zeroed in on the 28 charged individuals also was not entirely clear.

U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said prosecutors compared information from Homeland Security with voter information they subpoenaed from Weber’s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints said Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, which provided “relevant information regarding alleged voter fraud or related identity-based fraud indicators.”

Kevin Murphy, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said the underlying investigations were not “based on assumptions or a single piece of information,” but required “thorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is supported by the facts.”

Those charged include 13 people from the Central District of California, who live in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Anaheim, West Covina and other cities. They hail from a mix of nations, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five others were charged in the Northern District of California, with one from San Francisco and others from the wider Bay Area; four in the Southern District and six in the Eastern District.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat. “This is not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “This is not made-up stuff.”

Essayli specifically highlighted the case of a 72-year-old Omar Munoz from Belize, who was arrested in a pre-dawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities allege that he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019, voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.

In federal court downtown late Monday, Munoz’s daughter Lliani Orantes, a nurse born in the U.S., said the family was trying to figure out what happened, after federal officials swarmed their block and took her father, who is recovering from a recent surgery.

She said her brother, a registered voter, shares her father’s name, as does a nephew, and the family is wondering if it is all a mix-up. “Did the names get misconstrued,” she wondered.

McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationally in the 2024 presidential election.

What’s ahead

Federal officials said their work — dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” — would continue through the election and beyond.

Essayli said California’s own process for verifying voters’ citizenship, including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register, is insufficient. He said California election officials have “no idea who is a citizen,” but also know “they have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak” and several years ago admitted in an audit that noncitizens were being registered at the DMV.

“When we submit a list of 20,000 noncitizens to California that we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the state is, ‘We don’t believe you and we’re not even going to look at it,’” he said. “That is not good faith actors. They are being complicit.”

McCotter said there “may be some names” on the list of 20,000 flagged voters “who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” He said federal authorities are “not perfect,” which is why they’ve asked California officials to work with them. “We could knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California would work with us.”

He said the timeline — amid an ongoing election — was due to state officials refusing to cooperate sooner. “It’s an emergency of their own creation.”

First came the letter from acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter — just three weeks before the Nov. 3 election — demanding that Los Angeles County’s top elections official launch a sweeping investigation into thousands of voters the Trump administration alleges are “likely noncitizens” and withhold their ballots in the meantime.

The letter arrived with a thumb drive purporting to contain the list of voters in question, and a handwritten note providing the password. Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, said accessing the device broke security protocols, and he wouldn’t open it.

Then came an Excel spreadsheet, listing some 20,000 voters by name, date of birth and address. It appeared to contain voters from across the state of California, not just L.A. County, and provided no information on the Trump administration’s methodology for questioning those voters. Logan’s office again pushed back.

“We cannot withhold or refuse to count ballots based solely on unverified allegations, nor can we disregard the legal requirements governing our election — and we certainly have no authority to act on records that are outside of our jurisdiction,” Logan said.

On Friday, the back and forth escalated yet again, when the Justice Department warned in a letter to L.A. County attorneys that county elections officials who tabulate ballots from the flagged voters could face criminal prosecution for being “aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

For the last week, Trump administration officials and California election leaders have been locked in a fiercely contentious standoff over alleged election fraud that independent elections experts say is like nothing they have ever seen before.

The battle — which escalated into a federal lawsuit filed Thursday by the Justice Department against the state, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Logan — features striking assertions of official misconduct. They include willful indifference to systemic election fraud among California officials, as alleged by Trump officials, and a nefarious effort by the administration to “lay the groundwork” for questioning any unfavorable election results next month, as alleged by California leaders and independent elections experts.

With little public clarity around the voters whose registration is being contested and how the administration came to question their eligibility, the debate has centered instead on the efficacy of vetting voter rolls right before an election and the increasingly bitter claims of political meddling from the many federal, state and local officials involved.

“More dangerous nonsense from a President losing his grip on reality,” Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter sent a letter demanding that L.A. County’s top elections official investigate thousands of voters the Trump administration alleges are “likely noncitizens.”

(Finn Gomez / Getty Images)

“No, Governor. You are violating federal law by facilitating voting by noncitizens,” responded First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, whose office is leading the lawsuit.

“Mail ballots are already in most voters’ hands, and Election Day is less than three weeks away. Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there’s no widespread voter fraud in the U.S. The Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta wrote on the same platform.

“We produced a list of 20,000 noncitizens on your voter rolls, and your response is ‘it’s too late’ because you already mailed the ballots. Not good enough,” Essayli shot back. “It’s a violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law for California to dilute the votes of American citizens.”

Both sides have accused the other of being unreasonable and of ignoring practical concerns about voting and election security, though in very different ways.

Trump administration officials have said their effort “should not be controversial,” and reflects a common-sense approach to election oversight. “The law is clear, aliens in the United States cannot vote in federal elections,” McCotter said.

In its lawsuit, the Justice Department argued it is “not practicable or feasible” for the federal government to investigate “thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of individuals” before the November election alone, so California and local officials should be required to help them do it.

California officials — joined by independent elections experts — have accused the Trump administration of breaking the law to bolster a grand election conspiracy the president has propped up for years without evidence, including by trying to purge voters from rolls right before an election.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from conducting systemic maintenance of voter lists within 90 days of an election, and that the U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed that limit.

Bonta said the timing of the Justice Department’s demands “reeks of desperation and bad faith.”

Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, attends the opening of a new ballot processing center in City of Industry in 2024.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

State officials and election experts also have questioned why Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested California had some 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls as recently as July if the number now stands at 20,000.

“What happened to the 170,000? You just got those wrong?” Bonta said. He also noted with derision that the administration’s lawsuit repeatedly hedges its assertions by saying that federal officials “believe” that noncitizens “may be” registered in California.

“You believe, or you know?” Bonta said. “They may be or they are?”

Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the 20,000 flagged voters “are the ones that have been manually verified” as ineligible, but that number “can and will go up” as federal authorities continue their work. She referred additional questions about the figures to Homeland Security, which did not respond to questions.

Becker said the administration’s figures “should be treated with serious skepticism,” given similar claims falling apart elsewhere. He cited a Homeland Security claim of about 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada voter rolls dropping to 185 voters before Nevada officials investigated and found every single one of those voters was a citizen.

California officials have not shown a similar interest in launching their own investigation.

In a letter to McCotter, Weber wrote that treating the 20,000 voters on the Justice Department’s list as “ineligible until proven otherwise” would not only violate the 90-day quiet period before an election, but amount to “an unprecedented suspension — and even denial — of voting rights.”

She said if the Trump administration has any proof for its claims, California would “review that evidence and any supporting data or methodology” and “take the appropriate steps in compliance with federal and state law” to address any problems. “However, I will not disenfranchise thousands of Californians — or order any county elections official to do so — based solely upon an unsupported and likely inaccurate ‘belie[f]’ that certain voters are ‘likely’ noncitizens.”

A spokesperson for Logan’s office said Friday that it was reviewing the Justice Department’s spreadsheet — in part to determine how many of the voters are actually in L.A. County — but had yet to receive requested information on the methodology used for flagging those voters.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, chair of the Democratic Assn. of Secretaries of State, said the Trump administration’s efforts in California are “another attempt by the federal government to harass and intimidate elections officials,” and that their timing is “obviously a political attempt” to prevent voters — particularly Latino voters —from holding the Trump administration accountable for its failed leadership.

But he also said that California officials — to the extent they can under the law, and working closely with Bonta — should work to refute the Trump administration’s claims through their own review of the data, just as Nevada officials did.

“We are not afraid to defend our elections,” he said. “And California should take that same approach. You cannot be reactive to these situations. You have to be strategic.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also said, “The Federal Government notified California months ago that numerous noncitizens may be registered to vote in California. Despite knowing that California must send vote-by-mail ballots to every registered voter, the State made no serious attempt to work with the Federal Government to determine whether noncitizens are registered to vote.”

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

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

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

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

“This is an emergency of the DOJ’s creation,” Weber wrote. “California’s election administration will continue to be governed by applicable federal and state law, not by unsubstantiated claims and outrageous demands.”

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, posted about the lawsuit on X, noting the 48-window given to Weber and Logan had lapsed and writing, “Time is up for California.”

“This is not political or controversial,” he wrote. “We will not allow California to dilute the votes of American citizens.”

The Trump administration’s lawsuit says that while the U.S. “actively investigates and prosecutes incidents of unlawful voting,” it “is not practicable or feasible for the United States to investigate before the 2026 election concludes thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of individuals that two federal investigative offices identified on the California voter roster as likely being sent vote-by-mail ballots.”

Because of that, it argues, “California is thus knowingly imposing an obstacle on the United States’ ability to enforce [federal election law] by facilitating unlawful voting rather than working with the Federal Government to prevent it,” and the state is therefore legally barred from sending mail ballots to the 20,000 voters Homeland Security has flagged.

It asks the federal court in the Central District of California to declare the state’s actions — including providing and counting ballots for those 20,000 people — to be barred by law and in violation of the Supremacy Clause, and to issue an injunction barring the state from counting those ballots in federal elections “until those individuals’ citizenship status can be verified.”

The Trump administration’s attempts to use immigration data to reach conclusions about California voter rolls and intervene in California’s election is already being challenged in a separate federal case in the district of Washington, D.C., brought by attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo.

The UCLA attorneys filed their own emergency petition Thursday to preclude the Justice Department from moving forward with such actions against California, citing the letters McCotter sent to Weber and Logan.

A judge in that case ordered the parties to meet and file a status report with the court by Friday as to when each side would be able to brief the court on the issue.

Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.

The U.S. Department of Justice has ratcheted up its pressure campaign on California election officials to ferret out alleged voter fraud ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm election, demanding that officials statewide prove the U.S. citizenship of thousands of voters flagged by the federal government as potential noncitizens, or withhold or set aside their ballots.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter made the demand — which experts called highly questionable at a time when votes are already being cast — in letters to state election officials Tuesday, including Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.

The letters, reviewed by The Times, call on the state officials to respond to the Justice Department within 48 hours.

McCotter wrote that the Justice Department had provided Logan’s office with a “password-protected thumb drive with a list of names the Federal Government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot” for the Nov. 3 election.

“We request that you review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed. For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections officials to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” McCotter wrote to both Weber and Logan.

The demand letter came from U.S. Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter, shown entering a news conference in September 2026 in Washington.

(Finn Gomez / Getty Images)

Voters on the federal list who haven’t already been sent a ballot should not be sent one until their citizenship is verified, while ballots already returned by voters on the list should not be counted until their citizenship is verified, McCotter wrote.

Weber’s office in a statement late Wednesday criticized the Justice Department for telling it to obtain a list of an unknown number of voters it hadn’t been given directly from Logan’s office, investigate all of those voters and “take action” all within 48 hours, based on inaccurate federal data that has led to U.S. citizens being purged from rolls in other states, and under threat of litigation despite the Justice Department providing no legal authority for the demand.

Weber said the Justice Department’s “relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” and that California already has “robust state law requirements” to ensure only U.S. citizens vote.

Logan said his office was reviewing the Justice Department letter in coordination with Weber and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, but had not accessed the USB drive because state officials “do not consider the device a secure medium” and accessing its contents “would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.”

He said that maintaining accurate voter records is a fundamental responsibility of his office, but also that federal and state laws “are clear on how voter eligibility is established — and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”

Weber previously questioned the basis for a claim by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in July that there may be more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on California rolls, and rebuffed Trump administration offers to work with her office to purge state rolls of such ineligible voters ahead of November without additional information on how it reached its conclusions.

Similar Trump administration lists have been shown in other states to be substantially inaccurate, and to include many voters who are indeed citizens. Election experts say that makes the demand on California — where ballots have already been mailed out — even more concerning.

“One must question why the DOJ would violate its own rules about investigating elections close to election day, and over a week after they knew the state had already mailed ballots out, particularly when their past claims have been full of errors,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Becker noted the Trump administration alleged that there were nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered in Nevada, later reduced that number to 185 after additional scrutiny, and then determined all of them were in fact citizens.

A Justice Department spokesperson, in a statement to The Times, defended the agency’s demands to California — saying it “should not be controversial, as the criminal statute is clear: only American citizens may vote in federal elections. It is a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, and the DOJ is asking California to ensure that is not occurring.”

The spokesperson said the agency could not provide the exact number of voters whose citizenship is being questioned, but that it is in the thousands.

California Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber speaks during the state Democratic Party convention in Anaheim on May 31, 2025.

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

McCotter wrote that if Weber cannot implement his demands for how to segregate ballots and verify voter citizenship for those on the federal list, the Justice Department “will have no choice but to seek emergency relief” — an apparent reference to seeking court intervention.

McCotter copied on the letters First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles whose office previously sent Logan’s office a series of grand jury subpoenas for individual voter records as part of a criminal investigation into illegal voting.

Essayli’s office referred questions to the Justice Department. Bonta’s office referred questions to Weber and Logan.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, said that he is “not aware of anything like this ever happening this close to an election,” and that it may in fact be illegal under the National Voter Registration Act, which “prevents systematic purges of voters 90 days before the election.”

He said that the question of whether that preclusion against purges applies to the removal of noncitizens is an issue that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, in an Arizona case the high court will hear in December, but that the Justice Department’s actions strike him as “legally questionable.”

Hasen said the “whole point of that 90-day rule is to prevent the inadvertent disenfranchisement of eligible voters by mistake in the rush before the election,” and that risk is increased by the inaccuracies of similar lists presented by the Trump administration in other states. “So if there is an attempt to go to court — if DOJ tries to sue over this — they might have a hard time getting a judge to agree that this is something that the registrar must do or even can do.”

The fact that election officials are already busy receiving and preprocessing ballots would only bolster the state’s position in such a case, Hasen said.

“It’s obviously not a convenient time,” he said. “And given the fact that the lists have proven to be wildly inaccurate, at least in other states, it might be sending the registrar on a wild goose chase, when they have more relevant things to do in the election.”

But that “chaos” may be the point, Hasen said. “This is potentially another example of DOJ just making the work of state and local election administrators — which is already quite difficult and stressful — even harder,” he said.

Attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed a lawsuit last month on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo, in which they challenged the Trump administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege registered California voters are not citizens.

On Wednesday, they told the Justice Department that they would be seeking emergency relief from such practices, given McCotter’s letters.

“The federal government’s attempt to pressure California election officials into acting on lists that may misidentify eligible voters is an alarming abuse of power as election season gets underway. This puts our communities and our fundamental rights at risk,” said Carl Bergquist, a CHIRLA attorney.

The Justice Department in recent weeks has announced scattered arrests of alleged noncitizen voters around the country, and Trump administration officials — including Essayli — have pointed to such arrests as proof that noncitizens are voting illegally.

Such voting does happen, Hasen said, but after months of the administration aggressively searching for such voters, the relatively small number of arrests “belies the contention that it’s widespread” or criminal, with many of the few cases identified the result of “administrative error or misunderstanding” rather than an intent to illegally cast ballots.

In his letters to Weber and Logan, McCotter wrote that allowing “noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” and that ferreting out illegal noncitizen voters is a joint responsibility of state and federal officials.

“States are responsible for voter registration, and the Federal Government is responsible for maintaining immigration records to enable verification of citizenship,” he wrote. “Working together, we can more effectively protect against voter dilution and promote election integrity.”

WASHINGTON — As President Trump zigzags across the country in the final weeks before the midterm elections, he has made California his favorite foil as he tries to fire up his base.

On Monday, he blamed the Golden State for the rising cost of gas prices, claimed without evidence that its elections are rigged, and at a Nebraska rally suggested Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego.

“It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe,” Trump said. “They can take out a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.”

The president’s team on Tuesday said his remarks were misunderstood, arguing the president “clearly” stated that U.S. cities would have been threatened “if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.” Trump declined to clarify what he meant by his statements when asked by a reporter Tuesday.

But by then, Trump’s remarks had already drawn fierce condemnation from California leaders, including Republican Jim Desmond, a Navy veteran running in a highly competitive race that is key to helping Republicans retain control of the House.

“I vehemently disagree with President Trump’s comments,” Desmond wrote on social media. “America must stand up to Iran and defend our interests, but the first responsibility of our Commander in Chief is to protect the American people and our homeland.”

The backlash exposed the risk of Trump’s closing midterm strategy. Bashing California is a reliable applause line in red states like Nebraska, Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma, where the president has been holding rallies trying to ensure his supporters get out to vote. But in this modern era, an incendiary comment can travel fast online and leave Republicans running in competitive districts in awkward spots, trying to distance themselves from Trump.

Overall, political observers see the episode as an example of how the president’s political strategy can be unpredictable at a time when Republicans are trying to control the message the most.

“Whether you like Trump or not, he is good at getting his message out and coming up with a message that can resonate and catch fire,” said Mindy Romero, founder and director of the nonpartisan Center for Inclusive Democracy. “I think the question now is: Is he starting to fail himself when it comes to his messaging?”

California Democrats were quick to use Trump’s remarks as a line of attack against him. Gov. Gavin Newsom called him “deranged and dangerous” and opened the state emergency operations center to assess potential threats. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria told Trump to “keep our city out of your reckless war talk.” And Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said his comments could “potentially compromise our safety.”

Trump’s remarks about the California cities on Monday were the most striking example yet of the president using California as a foil to rally a base in GOP strongholds.

In Nebraska and other red states in recent days, Trump has repeatedly cast California as a political boogeyman as a means to motivate voters to cast their ballots for the GOP candidates.

At an Oklahoma rally last week, Trump told the crowd that Republicans need to keep the party in control of Congress so that his administration can continue the work of combating fraud in blue states, like California. The administration’s efforts, led by Vice President JD Vance, have sometimes been overestimated or nebulous.

But Trump tells supporters that in places like California, the administration is seeing “billions and billions of dollars of fraud.”

In a social media post Monday, Trump began blaming the cost of fuel — a defining issue for voters this election cycle — on states like California.

“What’s driving up Gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote. The issue, he said, is refineries being “closed up in Blue States, like California, by the Dumocrats.”

Hours later, while rallying in Nebraska, Trump seemed to contradict himself as he promised the crowd that fuel costs would go down once the war in Iran was over.

“That will end very quickly, one way or the other, very soon, maybe a little after the election, maybe a little before, but it is going to end very soon,” Trump said. “When that happens, the oil will come tumbling down.”

Trump’s messaging underscores how the war with Iran, which has gas prices topping $6 a gallon, has emerged as a potential liability for Republicans that the president is trying to address in subtle ways.

Polling on Trump’s handling of the economy has remained low, even among Republicans. A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll last month found that only 22% of Americans perceive the economy in a good or fair state.

In California, a poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, found that 70% of California voters disapprove of Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran, including 1 in 5 Republicans.

The softening of Trump’s approval even among those who still support his performance could translate into lower GOP turnout in the state’s few competitive races, the poll’s director, Mark DiCamillo, said.

Trump’s strategy in the final stretch before the midterms has largely focused on rallying the base in hopes that they will turn out to vote. Part of that strategy includes using California as a punching bag.

One particular line of attack has been disparaging the state’s voting systems. He suggested Monday that Democrat-led cities are trying to cheat in November as he touted the fast count of ballots in foreign countries.

“In Detroit, Philadelphia, California and numerous other U.S. Cities and States, the results, with much smaller numbers, will often take weeks to Rig, I mean, calculate,” Trump wrote on Monday. “Voting in America is CORRUPT!!!”

In another social media post, he said: “California: Took 38 days with 16.1 million ballots in 2024.”’

Trump using California as a foil for any given issue could be a risky strategy, Romero said.

“He’s expanding the types of things that he’s blaming California for, like the gas crisis,” she said, arguing that such statements could “start to lose credibility with those people that he has credibility with.”

For Republican voters in California, the ploy may be even riskier, especially when Trump suggests Iran could “take out” their cities.

“I don’t think that message necessarily plays well here because Californians are Californians,” DiCamillo said. “There is a certain pride in being a Californian, certainly not held by everybody … but I would think that the mainstream would be defending the state.”

A provocative, sexually suggestive ad by GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is drawing heat from his fellow Republicans while drawing millions of viewers online.

Two young women sit on a bed, with an LGBTQ+ flag in the background, with one urging the other to try a new experience.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” one woman says, and the other replies. “Don’t be nervous. It’s not that bad … Just try it. Look, give me your hand. Close your eyes, and I’ll do all the work.”

She leads the hesitant woman’s hand to mark her ballot for Hilton rather than Democrat Xavier Becerra, the front-runner in the race, and says, “Now lick it,” referring to the mail ballot envelope.

Fellow Republicans as well as several Democrats denounced Hilton over the messaging.

Two members of Hilton’s GOP “Golden Ticket” on the Nov. 3 ballot lashed out about the ad’s content.

“I emphatically denounce the use of young women as a political tool,” Michael Gates, the Republican candidate for attorney general who has frequently appeared alongside Hilton at campaign events, wrote on X. “California families deserve better, and as AG, I will fight every day to protect our girls, young women, and parental rights.”

Sonja Shaw, who is running to be the next state superintendent of schools, castigated Hilton, the state Republican party and its chairwoman for promoting the ad, which had been viewed by nearly 5 million people as of Saturday afternoon.

“Shame on you … for reposting and cheering this creepy, weird, disturbing garbage,” Shaw wrote on X. “This is a clear example of exactly why good people are walking away from the Republican Party. As a mother and someone who has fought to protect the innocence of children, this crosses a line. We have lost our way. Embarrassing.”

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), an openly gay member of Congress, and state Democratic Party chairman Rusty Hicks also condemned the ad.

“This is a bizarre and desperate ad from a person who has attacked the LGBTQ+ community and stands with Donald Trump,” Garcia said. “Hilton is losing and more interested in AI slop than actually talking about issues Californians care about.”

Hilton acknowledged the ad has provoked strong reactions, but it underscored the foundation of his campaign — that many Californians may be put off by his party affiliation but want change given the state’s myriad problems, such as growing unaffordability, that have taken place under a Democratic lock of every statewide office and the state Legislature.

“We’re just saying, you know, just try it,” he said in an interview. “It’s a provocative and humorous way of making a point, right? Which often the best communication does.”

He also said the ad does not conflict with his beliefs about restrictions on gender-affirming care and on youth sports because those would only apply to people who are not adults.

A spokesman for Becerra, who led Hilton 58% to 33% in a recent UC Berkeley/Los Angeles Times poll, was gleeful about the rift the ad was creating among Republicans.

“MAGA is melting down over Steve Hilton’s creepy ad because they’re finally seeing him for the sellout he really is, willing to abandon his own twisted values to get ahead,” said Jonathan Underland.

However, some conservatives who were dismayed by the message stood by Hilton’s side.

Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, a Christian nationalist, called the ad “grotesque” and said it promoted lesbianism among young women, on a Facebook Live post Saturday. However, he said he still supports Hilton over Becerra. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Hilton is scheduled to speak on Monday to a chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, an LGBTQ group, at a brewery in Palm Desert. The organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Former California GOP chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said that while the ad wasn’t for her, she understood the campaign’s desire to expand its reach to different voters.

“Does the ad speak to me? No. He’s not going after my vote. He already has my vote. He’s trying to think of new and creative ways to make people who wouldn’t normally feel like voting for a Republican feel safe to do so,” she said. “He’s going out of his comfort zone and going for people that wouldn’t normally feel comfortable voting for him.”

Californian Fred Karger, who made history in 2012 as the first openly gay person to run for president, had mixed views about the ad, calling it shrewd yet hypocritical. And he questioned its effectiveness.

“The audience that he’s targeting there — the hipster, young hipster, lesbian audience — probably has a 1% chance of voting for him,” Karger said. “So it’s kind of a long shot. But it is a clever ad.”

The Democratic National Committee on Thursday filed a lawsuit alleging that President Trump’s administration secretly changed a postcard used by U.S. citizens overseas in a way that makes it harder to register to vote.

The lawsuit contends that the Department of Defense made the change by declaring an emergency, which allowed it to eliminate a specific box on the form. That box is typically checked by potential voters who acknowledge they are U.S. citizens but who have never lived in the United States.

They are usually the children of U.S. citizens, and 38 states allow them to cast ballots provided they have close family connections. Since 2013, the box has appeared on postcards sent to overseas voters.

Republicans have filed lawsuits in multiple states trying to prevent those voters, who typically support Democrats, from casting ballots. Thursday’s lawsuit contends that the administration simply made the change on its own without giving proper notice.

“These American citizens pay U.S. federal and state taxes, but now a years-old plan has culminated in a manufactured ‘emergency’ to justify impeding their right to vote in American elections and potentially disenfranchising them entirely,” the lawsuit states.

The Department of Defense, which administers the form, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The number of Americans overseas who have never lived in the United States yet cast ballots in the country was estimated at about 11,500 in 2016. The lawsuit contends the number has likely grown.

Some are already registered and are due to receive ballots for November. Others can opt to check other boxes saying they’re citizens who either intend to return to the U.S. or do not intend to return in order to receive ballots.

The move follows Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth urging members of the military to cast ballots en masse, implying they could out-vote Democratic jurisdictions, such as Detroit, if they all cast ballots. The same federal law that lets members of the military who live overseas cast ballots also requires that civilians who live overseas be given the same opportunity.

But as Democratic-leaning civilians overseas have out-voted Republican-leaning members of the military in recent years, the GOP hasstarted to target the law, known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA. Republicans were able to win a court case forbidding the votes of overseas citizens who have never lived in North Carolina from being counted there, but have not yet succeeded in lawsuits in other states, including swing state Michigan.

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat is a U.S. citizen in Munich whose 28-year-old daughter also is a U.S. citizen who has never resided in the country but votes regularly. She said the administration’s move was alarming.

“If this works in slicing off a piece of the electorate,” said Dzieduszycka-Suinat, who is president of the U.S. Vote Foundation, “wait until the next emergency.”

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Konstantin Toropin in Washington contributed to this report.

California voters will decide whether to establish a $7.5-billion state scientific research arm — similar to the National Institutes of Health — after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that will put the proposal on the March 2028 ballot.

The new state fund would aim to blunt federal research cuts by the Trump administration and ensure state and private institutions — including the University of California and California State University — can continue to produce scientific breakthroughs.

If voters approve the measure, $7.5 billion in bonds would fund California scientific and medical research into diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s and ALS. Other research areas include reducing wildfire risk and fighting pandemics and climate change.

“This is a research and science bond that does the opposite of what Donald Trump is doing that will allow us to double down on what makes this state great — what makes America great,” Newsom said Wednesday during a bill signing atop the Golden Gate Bridge. “We are the tentpole of the U.S. economy because we invest in the future so that we can all do well there.”

The legislation to establish the bond measure, state Senate Bill 895, was authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who in a statement called it a “bold step to protect science, improve lives, and continue California’s global leadership on innovation for many years to come.”

The bill was sponsored by the Union of American Physicians and the University of California, as well as the United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents some 60,000 UC academic workers.

The bond measure represents a pullback from what Wiener and supporters first proposed.

Originally conceived as a $23-billion bond measure that the Legislature would approve to go before voters in November, it was whittled down to $12 billion. But lawmakers then did not approve it in time for the November ballot.

Wiener said legislative leaders and the governor’s office then worked out a compromise, deciding on a $7.5-billion bond measure for 2028.

The measure also calls for the new state fund to establish regulations that would allow it to recoup part of its investments while not damaging innovation.

“This is a major achievement, made possible by an extraordinary coalition of people who understand the importance of investing in scientific research,” UC President James B. Milliken said in a statement.

SACRAMENTO — What’s so wrong about requiring every Californian to show a government ID before they’re allowed to vote? That’s what Proposition 39 backers ask. And it’s a fair question.

Here are some valid answers:

• It would make California’s already notoriously slow vote count even more pokey.
• It would be an added hassle for citizens attempting to exercise their voting right.
• It would cost taxpayers a bundle, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
• It’s another solution by politicians to a problem that really doesn’t exist.

Practically everyone, regardless of political affiliation, must understand by now that there simply is no evidence of widespread — significant, meaningful — voter cheating in California or anywhere else in America. This despite conspiracy-theorists’ fruitless searching and President Trump’s lies about “rigged” elections.

It’s my belief that the main reason Republicans placed Proposition 39 on the California ballot was to boost GOP voter turnout in the Nov. 3 election. And recent independent polling shows that the measure does appeal strongly to Republicans — but not Democrats, who are united in opposition.

The proposition appears to be headed for defeat, largely because Democratic voters in this deep blue state equate it with the discredited president. Trump has turned into poison for Republican candidates in competitive races and any cause that reminds people of him.

That’s why the Proposition 39 campaign last week released a new major TV ad that essentially asks voters to ignore the president.

This is how conservative consultant Jon Fleischman summarized the ad’s message to Democrats in his blog: “You can hate Trump and still back Voter ID.”

Proposition 39 would mainly do two things:

• Require voters to show some government-issued identification each time they vote in person, such as a driver’s license or passport. Don’t have one? The state would issue a free ID card to any voter who asked.
• Californians who cast mail ballots — more than 80% of voters — would be required to write the last four digits of a government ID number on the return envelope. The number would be determined when initially registering to vote.

The measure also would impose some basically noncontroversial mandates that make sense separately. It would require election officials to maintain accurate voter registration files, weeding out people who have moved or died and verifying citizenship. But counties already do that pretty well.

The contrived bogeyman for election fraud scaremongers is the undocumented immigrant community. But these people, living on the edge and hiding from the government, aren’t going to risk deportation by trying to vote in an election they couldn’t care less about. And political candidates aren’t going to waste their time and money on them. Their targets are the large numbers of apathetic legal voters who sit out elections.

Currently, Californians must provide identification when registering and swear under penalty of perjury — a felony — that they are U.S. citizens. And they must record their signatures when registering and scribble it on the back of the ballot envelope when voting by mail.

Requiring me to add a four-digit number on the back of my “absentee” ballot envelope means I’d have to register all over again to record the PIN. And then remember it every election. A pointless pain.

Assemblyman Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), a conservative firebrand, instigated and authored Proposition 39. “I do believe that voter fraud is a real problem. Absolutely,” he told me.

But he said the proposition has two main goals: 1, to clean up voter files and make sure ballots are properly validated and counted. 2, to increase public confidence in the voting process. “We have a perception problem,” he says. “Voters have low trust” in the election system.

Republicans mistrust a lot; Democrats not so much.

A California poll released last week by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies showed that 84% of Republican voters had a “major concern” about voter fraud. Only 21% of Democrats did.

Can anyone doubt who’s driving the Republicans’ anxiety? The bellicose president. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” Trump has reiterated. “It’s terrible what’s going on.”

This from the hypocrite who mails in his ballots.

Fortunately, Proposition 39’s crafters left mail ballots pretty much alone, except for requiring a nuisance PIN on the ballot envelope.

That “absolutely” will slow down vote counting, says Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), who heads the Assembly Elections Committee and was the longtime chief elections official of Santa Cruz County. Under Proposition 39, officials not only would need to check voters’ signatures against those on file, but also their PINs.

And voting in person would drag while people dug for an ID and an official checked it, Pellerin says. Some people are bound to be denied their voting right by mistake, she asserts.

Tony Quinn, formerly a GOP redistricting consultant and a longtime political analyst, points out that a disproportionately high portion of in-person voters are Republicans. Proposition 39 is “imposing a burden on them,” he says. “I don’t think the authors realize who’s voting in person these days. They sense illegal aliens.”

The UC institute poll showed Proposition 39 being supported by 39% of likely voters and opposed by 52%. It was backed by 92% of Republicans, but Democrats were 80% against. And they outnumber Republicans by nearly 2-to-1 in California.

The proposition also trailed in a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California: 43% yes, 55% no.

In the PPIC poll, Republicans said 39 was by far the most interesting proposition on the ballot.

Trump’s influence? Among the paltry 27% of voters who approve of his job performance, 88% support Proposition 39. But of the 72% who disapprove of the president, 73% oppose the measure.

Trump is toxic.

Proposition 39 is more government regulation for no good reason.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Tax the rich? California voters are divided, according to new poll
Law & Order: Ballot seizure by Riverside County sheriff was ‘unlawful,’ California Supreme Court rules
The L.A. Times Special: High cost of living tops voter concerns, Becerra remains front-runner in governor’s race, new poll shows

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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DENVER — The office of Colorado’s attorney general is a perch 10 stories above downtown Denver. From his aerie, Phil Weiser has a sweeping view of the city skyline, the gold-domed Capitol and, occasionally, a red hawk on the wing.

But looking toward November, Weiser sees something darker.

Federal agents swarming polling places. Voters intimidated or blocked from casting their ballots. A tyrannical president using his powers, real and imagined, to undermine or try to overturn the Nov. 3 election.

“With this administration what we have seen is it’s important that we not limit our imagination to what … type of harm could happen,” Weiser said during a sunny noon hour in the Mile High City.

For that reason, Colorado’s attorney general and his Democratic peers around the country have spent more than a year strategizing — by phone, via Zoom, sometimes in person — on ways to Trump-proof the midterm election.

They’ve researched history and the law, war-gamed what-ifs, divvied up responsibilities and drafted emergency lawsuits and temporary restraining orders so they can be hurried into court at a moment’s notice.

“We have prepared for a range of contingencies … so that we’re ready to act,” Weiser said.

“We’re not going to be reacting in real time” or pulling all-nighters, he added. “We are going to be following through on plans we’ve made, having looked at what’s possible.”

The efforts of Weiser, California’s Rob Bonta and more than 20 other Democratic attorneys general are part of a mass mobilization aimed at thwarting Trump’s unprecedented efforts to pervert and subvert November’s midterm balloting.

It’s remarkable that kind of man-the-barricades action is needed to preserve and protect the voting franchise in this, the land of the free and home of the brave. But having weighed the threats, Weiser said his greatest fear of election interference comes not from a bad overseas actor or some terrorist group, but rather our own federal government “and what this administration might do.”

So here we are.

To fend off that threat from within, state Democratic parties across the nation are aiming to recruit 10,000 volunteers to guard polling places in the event armed federal agents show up.

Various sponsors have launched education campaigns to explain election rules and offer hotlines for voters who have trouble casting their ballot.

Civil rights groups and democracy-defending organizations have staged their own tabletop exercises brainstorming and rehearsing various scenarios. A group of Democratic U.S. senators has done the same.

“What we’re doing is preparing for the fact that Donald Trump, in 2020, lied about the election in advance, lied about it in the aftermath, went to court … and then he instigated a violent insurrection in this very building,” Marc Elias, a Democratic elections attorney, told MS NOW in a July interview at the Capitol. “So I think we need to take these threats in the 2026 midterm run-up … both seriously and literally.”

In a more courageous, less heedlessly partisan world, Republicans would be working with Democrats to keep the power-drunk Trump in check. (The House and Senate supposedly comprise a separate and equal branch of government, with its own power, prerogatives and such.)

But, as Weiser noted, this Republican-led Congress “has been lacking in backbone, lacking in the role of checks and balances. That has left it to state attorneys general to fill that vacuum, going to court and essentially playing the role of a check on a lawless and often bullying president.”

The nation’s 24 Democratic attorneys general have filed more than 125 lawsuits in Trump’s second term alone, fighting his moves on trade and tariffs, energy and immigration policies and efforts to gut or eliminate programs and whole government agencies. They’ve prevailed in the overwhelming majority of cases that have been adjudicated or settled.

Even before Trump was elected again, some attorneys general began conferring on ways to fight the excesses they anticipated in a second administration. Anyone who didn’t see them coming wasn’t paying attention, said Weiser, who, most likely, will be elected Colorado’s next governor on Nov. 3.

(His victory in Colorado’s Democratic primary stemmed in good part from Weiser’s record battling Trump in court.)

“The worst-case scenario was that a Trump presidency would work to implement Project 2025 and would do things like try to end birthright citizenship, try to interfere with the delivery of ballots in the mail, would seek to use ICE in ways that were a basic affront to the rule of law,” Weiser said. “All those things have happened.”

So why not expect more of the same come November?

Trump is constitutionally (small “c”) incapable of acknowledging the result of any election he didn’t win. He’s openly urged supporters to “cheat like hell.” Thus, one can only assume malign intent when the president tries to wantonly purge voter rolls, hijack the U.S. Postal service to gum up mail balloting and override the Constitution (capital “c”) by federalizing November’s election.

Some might call such fears melodramatic, or overblown.

But as Weiser said, “We need to stay nervous and stay vigiliant because [of] what this president has shown, Jan. 6 being one of the telling examples.”

Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of elections “is historic,” the attorney general said. “It is unique. It’s a threat. And it’s why we have to stand our guard.”

Vote, to bring this rogue president to heel. Stay vigilant, to make sure that vote counts.

Two good watchwords for this midterm election.

The slate of statewide measures on the Nov. 3 ballot provides voters two opportunities to tax the rich, which in past years has proved tantalizing to California’s left-leaning electorate.

Only one of those measures has strong voter support, however, and it’s not the proposition that’s attracted nationwide attention, ignited a nearly quarter-billion-dollar political slugfest and created a rift among top leaders in the Democratic Party.

Likely voters expressed middling support for Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets intended to compensate for an impending $100 billion in federal healthcare funding cuts. They were far more likely to back Proposition 3, a ballot measure that would make permanent a tax increase on the wealthy that funds schools and healthcare, according to a poll released Friday by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies that is co-sponsored by The Times.

Proposition 3 appears to be a much less controversial endeavor, which may explain why it has more voter support. The ballot measure would extend a tax enacted in 2012 on individuals who earn at least $360,000 a year that is set to expire in 2031. Proposition 40 proposes a brand-new tax on billionaires and is opposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who fears that it could hurt the state’s finances in the long run.

“When you’re going about taxing the billionaires’ assets, I mean that’s something kind of new and different, and it’s risky, and the governor’s against it, and you know a lot of people are expressing caution about it,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the poll.

Voters are deeply concerned about income disparity but also skeptical about the unusual approach of the billionaire tax.

Proposition 40 has drawn the greatest attention and campaign spending of the 14 ballot measures voters will decide on Nov. 3.

In the poll, 45% of likely voters support the proposal, while 42% oppose it and 13% are undecided. That’s a decline in support compared with six weeks ago, when 48% of likely voters supported it while 41% opposed it, and comes after nearly $100 million of spending on television ads, social media messages and mailers, largely from opponents.

The billionaire tax was crafted by a healthcare union in response to legislation passed by congressional Republicans and signed by President Trump last year that could result in millions of Californians losing Medi-Cal coverage, rural hospitals shuttering and other healthcare services being slashed unless a new funding source is found.

The proposal would retroactively apply to billionaires who lived in California as of Jan. 1, prompting some to preemptively move out of the state. Ninety percent of the revenue would fund healthcare programs, and the remaining funds would be spent on education programs and food assistance.

There are two counterproposals on the ballot that would nullify the wealth tax if either receives more votes than Proposition 40, and they have raised $144 million. Voters are torn about Proposition 41, which would prohibit any new state taxes from being excluded from a voter-approved cap that restricts how much tax revenue the state can spend each year. The billionaire tax would have such an exclusion. Voters also are divided on Proposition 42, which would prohibit new taxes on personal property, intellectual property, retirement accounts and other assets and would limit situations in which a ballot measure or state lawmakers can impose or raise taxes retroactively — both of which are essential parts of the billionaire tax initiative.

Proposition 42 has greater support, with 43% backing it, 34% opposing it and the remainder undecided, according to the poll. Even more voters were uncertain about Proposition 41: 3 in 10 said they were undecided, while 37% said they supported it and 33% said they planned to vote against it.

The large number of undecided voters this close to the election points to voters being overwhelmed by the sheer number of statewide ballot measures, DiCamillo said.

“It’s confusion,” he said, adding that many voters may make a decision once they receive more ballot information.

That said, the fact that none of these proposals has the support of more than 50% of likely voters doesn’t bode well for their prospects, DiCamillo said.

Ballots will begin arriving in the mailboxes of the state’s 23.2 million voters in days.

Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by nearly 2 to 1 in California, but the party’s leaders are deeply divided about the billionaire tax, given the volatile state budget’s reliance on the wealthy. Newsom, who is pondering a 2028 presidential campaign, and the two men vying to replace him — Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton — oppose it. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), a potential 2028 White House contender, supports it, as does the California Democratic Party.

Additionally, Dave Regan, president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West and architect of the ballot measure, has come under scrutiny. Regan has been accused of threatening and intimidating women who worked for the union’s parent organization, and of physically assaulting one, according to reporting by The Times. He was also accused of trying to extort SEIU’s state council, suggesting that it could face an investigation over “governance issues” if it did not support Proposition 40, according to an investigation commissioned by SEIU.

Regan has denied these claims, describing them as a “smear” campaign orchestrated by Proposition 40 opponents.

Much less attention has been paid to Proposition 3. Californians who earn more than $360,000 now are subject to a 10.3% tax, while those who earn more than $721,000 face a 12.3% levy. The vast majority of the billions raised through this tax go to K-12 schools, while the remainder is spent on community colleges and healthcare.

The other ballot measure that is receiving national attention is Proposition 39, which would require voters to present a government-issued identification document to cast a ballot or provide a PIN or the last four digits of their Social Security number when submitting mail-in ballots.

The measure also would require the California secretary of state and county election officials to verify that registered voters are U.S. citizens by “using government data,” which according to supporters could include information in the federal Social Security Administration database, jury summons information and other government records.

The proposal comes as Trump has continued to make claims that elections, notably in California, are being rigged by Democrats. Americans are increasingly alarmed about the security and sanctity of voting, and growing fears about intimidation efforts at polling places in the midterm elections.

Fifty-two percent of likely California voters oppose the voter ID proposal, while 39% support it and 9% are undecided, according to the poll.

“It doesn’t look like it’s in a strong position,” DiCamillo said, noting that while voters have opposed it in prior polls, the opposition has grown.

Nearly one-third of voters were undecided about two other propositions:

• Likely voters were evenly split about Proposition 4, which would repeal a ban on public funding of campaigns, with 35% supporting it and 35% opposing it, and the remainder undecided.
• Four out of 10 likely voters opposed Proposition 43, which would increase the threshold necessary to pass local taxes from a simple majority to two-thirds, while 31% supported measure and 29% were undecided.

Voters will also face questions about environmental policy, housing, recall elections and other matters, as well as statewide, congressional and local elections. Californians are fatigued by the length of the ballot.

The Berkeley IGS/Times poll findings are based on an online survey in English and Spanish of 6,989 registered California voters, 4,512 of whom are considered likely voters, on Sept. 15-20. The results are estimated to have a margin of error of about 2 percentage points in either direction in the overall sample, and larger numbers for subgroups.

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.

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.”

They should at least be skeptical.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: California health clinics accuse influential union and its leader of racketeering in civil lawsuit
Danger zone: Newsom creates panel on AI safety regulation, suggests possible ‘kill switch’
The L.A. Times Special: Union power vs. MAGA politics in California’s schools superintendent race

Until next week,
George Skelton

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