Harry Kane was crowned winner of the men’s Ballon d’Or on Monday night, but a few hours earlier that confirmation appeared to have been announced prematurely.
At 17:15 GMT, an article from the award’s official website titled ‘Harry Kane wins the 2026 Ballon d’Or’ began to circulate online.
The widespread sharing of the article caused confusion online, with some wondering whether France Football – the organisers of the award – had fallen short at the final hurdle of keeping the winner, who was voted for by journalists at the end of September, under wraps.
That was until further digging on the Ballon d’Or website revealed that some of the other favourites to win the award – including Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal, Real Madrid’s Kylian Mbappe – also had similar pieces penned and published about them.
When asked about the articles by BBC Sport, a Ballon d’Or spokesperson said: “Some profiles of nominees prepared by BallonDor.com were inadvertently published online.
“These articles had been prepared for all nominees and should in no way be considered as an indication of the final results or rankings.”
By 17:40, the articles about Kane and Mbappe had been removed from the website.
Similar articles were also written about London City Lionesses star Alexia Putellas and Barcelona’s Ewa Pajor. Putellas went on to be officially confirmed as the winner of the women’s Ballon d’Or.
That premature announcement may have sparked some excitement in Kane that this could be his year, but he only had to wait a little longer to find out for sure.
At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.
Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.
Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.
Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.
Both were among the 28 people charged with federal election-related crimes Monday, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application. Federal prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials had touted the arrests during a news conference hours before as proof that California elections are corrupted by noncitizen voters — as President Trump has long alleged.
State officials said the isolated instances of noncitizens voting, if accurate, are not evidence of widespread voter fraud. They also raised questions as to whether the charges could be trusted to be accurate — citing similar accusations being disproved elsewhere in the country.
Election experts have said many instances of noncitizens registering to vote are a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of the immigrant — not intentional criminality.
“We know from past experience that sometimes people register to vote accidentally, as when there is a mistake at the DMV,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote Monday in a blog post. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law.”
Four of the defendants charged Monday had initial court appearances later that afternoon. Beforehand, more than a dozen of their loved ones milled around the federal courthouse in downtown L.A., antsy and clearly worried.
One woman, her baby and young daughter in tow, struggled to find the right courtroom. Another woman — Domínguez’s daughter — cried in the hallway as she waited for her mother’s case to get called up. When Domínguez moved to stand before the judge, she blew a kiss to her husband and daughter in the second row. She wore a black back brace and her legs were cuffed.
A third defendant — Omar Muñoz, 72, a lawful permanent resident from Belize whose arrest at his home in Commerce was captured by photographers in images transmitted around the world — shuffled into a court room shackled at the waist, his feet cuffed, still wearing the red and black pajama pants he’d been arrested in.
Homeland Security Investigations task force officers escort a suspect accused of illegally registering to vote to a processing facility at Federal Building in Los Angeles on Monday.
(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo)
Muñoz was charged with fraudulently registering to vote in September 2019, and then voting in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, when he claimed to have never falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen in the past.
In the court room, Muñoz held a hand over his heart as he waved to his family in the first row of the gallery.
Hasen, the UCLA expert, wrote that the government’s blasting out images of Muñoz being arrested was clearly “meant to convey that the problem of noncitizen voting in California is both pervasive and serious, crimes that are undetected by willfully ignorant California election officials.”
But the reality, he wrote, “is likely far different,” with voter fraud limited to isolated cases, some with less nefarious intent.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said Monday that the cases represent strong federal work to ensure that noncitizens aren’t negating the votes of eligible U.S. voters — a problem he said California officials have refused to recognize despite federal authorities providing the proof.
Essayli dismissed the idea that those charged may have been unaware of what they were doing. “You have to go out of your way to register to vote, it’s not something that just happens to you,” Essayli said.
José Antonio Bañuelos-Díaz, 42, a Mexican national and West Adams resident, appeared in court wearing a reflective vest with the name of a landscaping company, blue jeans and boots with the American flag on them. He’d been on his way to work when he was arrested.
During the hearings, the defendants only spoke to acknowledge that they reviewed and understood the charges against them. In every case, the federal prosecutor said the government was not seeking detention.
The magistrate judge ordered the four released on personal recognizance and said they were not required to be under supervision. They are all set to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on November 9. Their deputy federal public defenders did not respond to a request for comment.
Lliani Orantes, Muñoz’s daughter and a nurse who was born in the U.S., said her father had been hauled out of the family home by federal authorities after they swarmed and cordoned off the block. She said the family was rushing to figure out what happened, including whether Muñoz could have been confused with younger relatives of the same name, including a U.S.-born son who is a registered voter.
Orantes also expressed frustration with the handling of her father’s arrest — to which federal authorities had clearly alerted some media, who were brought along for the raid.
She said her father is recovering from cervical surgery, rotator cuff repair on a shoulder and a double knee replacement, and that he was pulled out of the family’s home “like he was a dog” as part of what she described as a “political ploy, an example used for the operation” — which federal authorities dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”
“They’re trying to instill fear in society,” she said.
“We have so much more in the world to be dealing with, do we really need to focus on these little things that could be taken care of in a different fashion? In a different way? Like, hey, somebody from immigration visit the home,” she said.
Acting United States Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter speaks at a news conference Monday to announce charges against 28 people in California accused of illegally registering to vote as noncitizens.
(David Butow/For The Times)
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta — who is defending the state and top election officials for the state and Los Angeles County against a lawsuit from the Justice Department alleging they are not treating alleged voter fraud by noncitizens seriously enough — said Monday that voting illegally is wrong and “one off, isolated incidents” of it should be prosecuted.
But Bonta denied that there is widespread voter fraud in the state, called 28 cases brought out of the 23 million registered voters in California a “drop in the bucket,” and said he’d be watching how those cases play out in court.
“We’ll see what the facts show, and whether they’ll have to drop charges or whether they’ll be able to prosecute,” he said.
About 3 p.m. Monday, the four defendants at the downtown courthouse were released and exited the court room, some to family members waiting in the hallway to hug them.
Domínguez wiped away tears as she recounted her arrest, showing bruises on her wrists from the handcuffs.
“They were accusing me of voter fraud since 2006,” she said. Domínguez said the accusations don’t even make sense considering she has never voted.
“If I would have committed all those frauds about voting registration and whatever they’re saying, since 2006, wouldn’t you imagine that I would have been voting all these other years?” she asked.
In a visual presentation at their news conference, federal authorities alleged that 21 of the 28 people charged had actually voted. Domínguez was not one of them.
Domínguez said she’s been a lawful permanent resident since the late 1980s, and that she applied for U.S. citizenship earlier this year. As part of the application process, she said she told an immigration agent that the only people registered to vote in her household were her husband, who previously became a U.S. citizen, and her daughter, who was born in the country.
Since then, Domínguez said she has just been waiting on the citizenship ceremony, “but it never came through.”
Instead, she was arrested Monday when she was about to leave for work as an administrative assistant.
“I never, ever in my entire life … thought this would ever happen to me,” she said.
Acting U.S. Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter stands next to a display showing photos of people charged with illegally registering to vote during a news conference on Monday.
(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Muñoz and his family gathered outside the courthouse. Muñoz, who declined to comment on the charges against him, said he’d been up to have coffee early that morning when he heard the commotion outside. Agents said if he didn’t open the door, they’d break it down.
He described seeing helicopters, at least eight cars and several agents from different agencies descending on his home, and recalled thinking, “What movie am I in?”
“That’s a lot of money. Taxpayers paying for that,” he said. “They could have sent me a letter saying report to the court.”
Muñoz — who said he came to the U.S. legally in 1975 and has “paid all my taxes” since — said he explained to the arresting agents that he’d had six surgeries recently and they “didn’t care.” He said he didn’t learn about the charges against him until four hours later.
Muñoz’s son, Omar Muñoz Jr., questioned why federal agents didn’t take his father’s age and ailments into consideration.
“We understand that there’s a procedure that has to be addressed at court. But 5 in the morning, handcuffed? It’s just the way everything was done, and what my mom had to go through. It’s not just an impact on my father’s health, but also on my mom,” he said. “There is a law, we understand that. But innocent until proven guilty.”
Muñoz’s wife, Esmeralda, echoed her son’s questions about why so many agents were deployed to their home.
“Seriously? All these people just to come for an elderly person,” she said she told a federal agent. “It’s unbelievable.”
The late-September postcard from the Monterey County elections office — with all-caps text saying “ACTION REQUIRED — rattled the denizens of quaint Carmel-by-the-Sea.
The notice said all residents needed to update their voter registration. It was sent days before ballots were mailed for the Nov. 3 election.
Carmel-by-the-Sea just got numbered street addresses for the first time in its 110-year history. After decades of debate — and months of nitpicking a draft map released earlier this year — every house, business and government building was assigned its final number in September.
Indeed, each resident will eventually have to update their street address on their voter registration. But not before the upcoming midterm election, which has already been fraught by nationwide confusion and concern over President Trump’s attempt to restrict mail voting that was blocked last month by the Supreme Court.
“We’re at our wit’s end,” Carmel-by-the-Sea Mayor Dale Byrne said of the city’s attempts to clear up confusion wrought by the county mailer, which led some people to think their registration had automatically been canceled. “The city continues to send out notifications to all our residents that you don’t need to re-register right away, that you can still vote.”
After collecting his mail, Hans Lehmann, 91, walks past a bank of post office boxes at the post office in downtown Carmel-By-The-Sea on January 12, 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Monterey County Registrar Gina Martinez said in an email Thursday that the county began mailing ballots Oct. 1, including to Carmel-by-the-Sea, where there is no at-home delivery and locals pick up their mail — and ballots — from the downtown post office.
Voter registration records are based on a person’s physical residential address, which determines the districts where they can vote. The records can include separate mailing addresses, including post office boxes, where they receive ballots.
The county asked Carmel-by-the-Sea residents to update just their physical addresses.
“They can return their ballot without updating their information,” Martinez said. “If the voter prefers to vote in person and they haven’t yet updated their address, we will assist them with completing an address update form at the polling place.”
Since its founding in 1916, the 1-square-mile town has used directional descriptors — City Hall is on the east side of Monte Verde Street between Ocean and 7th avenues — instead of building numbers. And residents have given their homes whimsical nicknames such as Sea Urchin, Surf Song and A Whistle Away.
The address issue has long been contentious in the woodsy town of 3,200 people on the Monterey Peninsula, where residents once threatened to secede from California if they were forced to number their homes. They argued that the lack of addresses — along with other quirks, such as no streetlights or sidewalks in residential areas, which requires many to walk at night with flashlights — added to the vaunted “village character.”
But complaints about missed packages and mail-order medications, as well as trouble setting up banking accounts and utilities, persisted. And in the aging community — where the median age of 69 is nearly double that of the state — fears have grown that emergency responders may be unable to find people in the midst of a crisis.
The California Fire Code also requires buildings to have and display addresses, meaning the community has long been out of legal compliance.
New addresses, at long last
Last month, residents received city-issued postcards with final assigned building numbers.
While some opposed to street addresses fearing they would lead to at-home delivery and trigger the closure of the post office — where, locals say, serendipitous run-ins with neighbors are an essential part of the small-town charm — that won’t be the case. Residents will retain their post office box numbers and continue picking up parcels downtown.
Locals must now display address numbers visible from the street, at least 4 inches tall and 0.5 inches wide, and in a color that contrasts with their background. Residents who live in the wildland-urban interface, which is more prone to fire, have to post reflective numbers that can be seen in the dark.
“This is probably the most divisive thing in the city’s history,” Byrne said, adding that the rollout has included extensive community outreach and has, for the most part, gone smoothly.
While there are still some holdouts who worry the numbers are chipping away at traditions, the mayor said that “when you’re supporting a tourist economy, which we are, it’s almost punishment to people coming here to do that to them, when they can’t find anything, especially when there’s no parking.”
“‘Old’ is not a strategy,” Byrne said, “and public safety should take precedence over thinking it’s cute to not have addresses.”
In July, Byrne was visiting a friend’s house when the man turned pale and passed out at the table. When Byrne called 911, he spoke to multiple dispatchers, struggling to confirm the home’s location without an address (His friend was fine, just severely dehydrated).
Traditionally, residents locate homes and buildings by giving directional descriptors, such as being on the “west side of San Antonio Street, 3 houses south of 12th Avenue.” When Byrne spoke to the dispatchers, they told him they were accustomed to finding that house by using another cross street and a different direction of travel as a reference.
Due to the lack of addresses in Carmel-By-The-Sea residents post creative names to identify their homes in the seaside town, on January 12, 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“I’m the mayor, and I know how this works, and I was confused,” said Byrne, who again had to call 911 to urgently describe his location a few months later when his wife broke her arm in the middle of the night.
“They got there within two-and-a-half minutes. But imagine if I were a 92-year-old woman and had dementia and my husband did this. I might not be able to describe where I am,” he said, adding that Carmel-by-the-Sea recently outsourced its ambulance service to the Monterey Fire Department and cannot guarantee every dispatcher is familiar with the quirky local addressing system.
Voter confusion
Brandon Swanson, the acting city administrator, said of the addressing process that “for this big of an institutional change, it’s going pretty smoothly.”
That is, he said, until the county sent its mailer saying voters had to re-register. The notice didn’t include a deadline for updating physical address information, and some local news outlets initially reported it had to be done before the election.
Swanson said the city has been scrambling to reassure voters. It has been sending out digital communications and created a detailed frequently asked questions website about registration that says: “Did you receive a postcard from the Monterey County Elections Office? You are still registered to vote.”
“We’re not happy right now with the county,” Mayor Byrne said.
Martinez, the registrar of voters, said in an email that “overall, voters indicated the information provided is clear and straightforward.” Asked when they need to update their information, she said they are being encouraged to do so “as soon as possible.”
Hans Lehmann, who is 94 and lives in a 1929 redwood cottage nicknamed Pine Gates, said he was surprised by the “giant postcard” from the county and worried he wouldn’t get his ballot in the mail. He tried calling the elections office the day he got the mailer, but it was a weekend and it was closed.
He’s been slightly confused but mostly amused by all the messages.
“We got a card saying, ‘You have to re-register!’ then City Hall said, ‘The mail ballot is fine. Forget all that other stuff!’” he said, laughing.
Lehmann, a longtime mail voter who says he is carefully reading up on the proposed statewide billionaire tax, was relieved to get his ballot at the post office, as always.
Lehmann’s house once was a downtown restaurant called Ella’s Southern Kitchen. In 1941, the whole house was put on rollers, pushed up a steep hill and plopped onto a foundation of beach sand. He recently made a trip to Ace Hardware to mark it with its new designation: a big, fluorescent No. 80.
A man sweeps the sidewalk along San Carlos Street, between 5th & 6th Streets, in downtown Carmel-By-The-Sea on January 10, 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“Are the addresses popular? Who knows. Ask someone who voted one way, and they’ll change your mind; ask someone who voted the other way, and they’ll change your mind again,” said Lehmann, who loves the convenience of shopping on Amazon.
As long as his electrician and plumber can find the place, he figured, he’s in good shape.
Karyl Hall, an 81-year-old preservationist who grew up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, has long fought addresses, saying they’re part of the push for convenience and modernity that is destroying the artsy soul of the community, where, she said, too many historic cottages are being plowed down and replaced by sleek, boxy new homes.
The addresses, she said, are “representative of the total degradation of all our historic places and maintaining something special versus Everywhere, USA.”
She was baffled by the notice from the elections office. She said she filled out a form with her information, then heard by word of mouth that the county’s message was “a mistake,” and then saw city messaging saying that residents didn’t have to do anything before the November election.
“It’s confusing,” said Hall, who always votes by mail. “We’re dealing with the bureaucracy of not knowing quite how all this should be handled.”
Hall lives in a house called Jollyhase, German for “Jolly Rabbit.” She said she often shops for her 6-pound Pomeranian, Bubbles, at Chewy.com and has never missed a package, even sans address.
She said this week: “I’m one of the rebels that is not going to put a number on her house.”
