Counting

After President Trump’s unfounded claim that California’s slow vote count during the June primary indicated cheating by Democrats, state and local elections officials made changes to speed things up — in part to dispel any questions about this month’s crucial midterm elections.

The state of California allocated $29 million for new equipment, election staffing and voter awareness campaigns statewide, about $6 million of which went to Los Angeles County. The county, which opened a massive new ballot processing center in 2024, announced it would shift to around-the-clock ballot counting in the days after the Nov. 3 election and used some of its state funding to purchase a third mail ballot processing machine.

A full analysis of the impacts of those efforts statewide has not been completed, and ballot counting is still underway. But one week after the polls closed, officials in L.A. County and independent election observers say the efforts clearly paid off.

A statewide report on unprocessed ballots as of 5:41 p.m. Tuesday found that L.A. County had processed about 99% of nearly 3.2 million ballots cast in the county, with just 37,800 ballots still to process. That’s well ahead of where it was at the same point after other recent elections.

Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, which has for years tracked ballot processing, said that compared to L.A. County having processed 96.9% of ballots a week after the 2024 general election and just 73.3% of ballots a week after the 2022 general election. She said a similar 99.3% of ballots had been counted by the county a week after the June primary — but nearly a million fewer people voted in that election.

Alexander said L.A. County was also well ahead of the state average for ballots processed seven days after an election, which stood at 92.8% processed a week after the June primary, 84.2% processed a week after the 2024 general election, and 71.6% processed a week after the 2022 general election.

On Tuesday, L.A. County, the most populous county in the state, was outpacing other big counties, such as San Diego and Orange counties, which had both processed over 1 million ballots but had 185,000 and 116,660 left to count late Tuesday, respectively. It was also outpacing some of state’s smaller counties, such as Humboldt, which had counted more than 25,000 ballots but had nearly the same amount left to process.

L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan said the success of this election was a result of the state funding, which “came very late in the process,” but also years of support from the county — especially for the new $10 million, 144,000-square-feet processing facility.

Before the new facility was opened, the county processed ballots in multiple different locations. “And even on election day, we had to stop processing vote by mail ballots so that we could process the ballots coming in from the vote centers,” Logan said. “Now we have a space that is designed and — provided we have the resources to staff it — we can keep those operations going on simultaneously.”

The county’s purchase of a third mail sorting machine, Logan said, also helped workers to more quickly process the massive influx of ballot envelopes that voters drop off at vote centers or in drop boxes on election day.

Logan said the count this election also may have been quickened slightly by more voters returning their ballots earlier in the process and voting in person.

Alexander called the quickened count, during an election with high turnout and a long and complicated state ballot, “remarkable” — and all the more so given the tremendous amount of pressure the Trump administration was putting on L.A. County.

“I feel this vote count in L.A. and across the state is remarkable in that it appears to be going smoothly and in L.A. clearly very efficiently, but it’s also remarkable given all of the hurdles that we had to overcome to conduct this election,” Alexander said.

The day after California’s primary election in June, President Trump took to social media to allege — with zero evidence — that Democrats were “trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.”

“Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles,” Trump wrote. “Why the vote counting DELAY???”

While dismissing such claims as baseless and a threat to democracy, Gov. Gavin Newsom in May acknowledged that the longer it takes to count votes, the “more mis- and disinformation spreads.” That’s why, he said, state lawmakers passed legislation in 2025 to speed up the process.

“We must do all that we can to tabulate votes quickly and accurately,” Newsom said in a letter to elections officials. “Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold.”

Other states do count votes and call elections faster than California, though California officials say that is for several reasons.

California counts far more ballots than any other state, provides voters with more options for voting than other states, provides a grace period for counting ballots postmarked by election day but received in the days that follow, and provides opportunities for voters whose ballots have an issue — such a signature discrepancy — to cure them in the days after an election.

None of those explanations have convinced Trump, however. And his comments criticizing California were not just bluster.

Instead, they were part of a much larger, highly-coordinated effort by his administration to wrest control over voting processes in the state to institute stricter rules and new federal oversight for mail ballots, stricter requirements around voter ID and proof of citizenship and stricter rules for when ballots must arrive to county officials in order to be counted, Alexander said.

Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, shot down all of those efforts. The Supreme Court also rejected federal demands that California and L.A. County halt the counting of 20,000 ballots the Trump administration alleged could be from noncitizens — but not before Justice Department officials sent letters to county elections officials across the state, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they counted those ballots. Litigation was playing out right up until election day.

Logan said the judicial branch played a pivotal role in defending California’s elections from the Trump administration, and prevented an election disaster. He and other county officials said in court filings that, had they been forced to begin segregating the 20,000 flagged ballots in the midst of the election, “chaos” would have ensued.

Logan also said that the success of this election “is not guaranteed going forward,” and should be understood by state and county officials as further proof that investments in elections in L.A. County and across the state are not only beneficial but critical moving forward — particularly ahead of 2028, when the Trump administration can be expected to target California once more.

“We will continue to be a target of the administration,” he said.

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.