County

Jamie Smith, with a majestic 166, has now scored a century in each of Surrey’s opening two County Championship matches as he bids to hold on to his England Test place this summer.

And Ollie Pope, dropped during the winter Ashes series defeat in Australia, also hit 103 as Surrey piled up 412-6 against Leicestershire in front of a 5,000-plus day one crowd at the Kia Oval.

Smith and Pope put on exactly 200 for the third wicket, after Leicestershire had decided to bowl first on a green-looking pitch and initially reduced Surrey to 42-2.

Pope’s hundred, the 25th of his first-class career, was more of a workmanlike affair as he looked to spend time at the crease following two low scores in Surrey’s high-scoring draw at Warwickshire in the season’s opener last week.

Smith, however, looked in prime touch throughout his high-class innings after making a six-hour 132 on the final day against Warwickshire on Monday. Overall, he faced 240 balls and struck 19 fours and two sixes before edging seamer Ben Green to slip seven overs before stumps.

Intriguingly, Smith has been handed the number three specialist batter role by Surrey despite playing his 20 Tests to date as a wicketkeeper batting in the lower middle order.

In those Tests he averages a credible 41.48 with the bat, with two hundreds, but in Australia he managed only a disappointing 211 runs at 23.44, passing fifty just once and drawing criticism for the manner of several of his dismissals.

Surrey, who have Ben Foakes as their long-established number one keeper, clearly see Smith’s powerful stroke-making as a key asset in their top order – particularly when he can concentrate solely on his batting – as they start a quest to reclaim the championship after being pipped to a fourth successive title by Nottinghamshire last September.

Dan Lawrence briefly enjoyed himself with a 36-ball cameo of 31, smashing New Zealand Test spinner Ajaz Patel straight for six from the second ball he faced, and also swinging Green over the deep mid-wicket ropes before chopping on against Rehan Ahmed’s leg-spin.

Foakes, meanwhile, also showed he is in fine form with the bat, unfurling some lovely strokes in a poised unbeaten 62 to follow up scores of 128 and 36 not out against Warwickshire and add a further 105 with Smith.

Leicestershire, who won promotion from Division Two last year, struggled to contain the commanding Smith and a busy Pope once they came together in the 15th over.

That followed Dom Sibley’s second-over departure, leg-before for four to an inswinger from left-arm paceman Josh Hull, and Rory Burns chipping Tom Scriven’s medium pace to mid on after a largely untroubled cruise to 24.

Pope finally fell in the 60th over, caught behind pushing at one tossed up by slow left-armer Patel, and by the end of a long day in the field Leicestershire – who lost by 222 runs to Sussex last week on their return to the top flight – are up against it once more.

Report by ECB Reporters’ Network, supported by Rothesay.

Spectators have been told to stay away from Durham’s Riverside ground at Chester-le-Street after it was hit by Storm Dave overnight.

The start of the third day’s play in the County Championship Division Two match between Durham and Kent has been delayed.

A club statement said “damage has been caused within the venue” and fans have been advised to stay away.

The statement continued: “The club have been in discussions with the match officials and venue staff this morning and following the impact on the pitch and structures within the ground it is confirmed that play will not commence on time, and a further update will be provided in due course.

“The safety of all in attendance is our number one priority in any decisions we make.”

The extent of the damage at the Riverside, an international cricket venue, has not yet been disclosed.

SACRAMENTO — As Democratic leaders in California challenge President Trump’s latest effort to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, they also must grapple with a troubling development in the last election.

A significant number of mail-in ballots arrived too late to be counted in the Nov. 4 special election for Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful measure to reconfigure the state’s congressional districts, according to state data.

Ballots came in late at an average rate four times higher than that of the 2024 election, with rural counties seeing some of the biggest increases, according to a Times review.

“Something changed,” said Melvin E. Levey, who heads the Merced County Registrar of Voters. “We don’t like seeing late ballots and if someone has made the effort to vote, we want to count it.”

Merced saw almost a sevenfold increase in late-arriving mail ballots in the November election compared with the year before.

Vote-by-mail ballots are considered late if they are not postmarked on or ahead of election day or do not arrive within seven days of election day.

The issue appears to be linked to the U.S. Postal Service, which last year reduced the number of trips to pick up mail at post offices in mostly rural areas. Election officials warned before Nov. 4 that the Postal Service changes could delay the postmarking of ballots and lead to votes not being counted.

During the Nov. 4 election in California, an average of 8 out of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected by counties because they arrived too late, according to Secretary of State data. In the 2024 general election, which included the presidential race, an average of 2 of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected for being late.

In Kern County, for example, 3,303 mail-in ballots — or 1.95% of returned mail-in ballots — were not counted in the 2025 special election because they arrived too late. In 2024, that number was 332 — or 0.14%. And in Riverside County, 5,831 ballots — or 0.95% of those mailed in — were deemed too late to count, more than double the number of late ballots rejected in 2024.

Postal Service spokesperson Cathy Purcell recommended that voters mail their ballot a week in advance of when it must be received by election officials to ensure it arrives on time.

“You should never be mailing your ballot on election day,” Purcell told The Times.

Before last’s year’s special election, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber issued a similar warning about the delays. Anyone dropping off their ballot at a post office on election day should get it postmarked at the counter, she said.

“We don’t want anyone to just toss it into the mailbox as we have been able to do in the past and have it counted,” she said. “The Postal Service has said that they may not be counted in certain areas.”

California voter data expert Paul Mitchell expressed astonishment about the Postal Service’s guidance.

“We’ve had six, eight years of elections where people were feeling confident about mailing in their ballot,” said Mitchell, vice president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc. “Now the USPS is saying they have to mail it in a week early.”

“That is a dramatic change that can disenfranchise voters who are just following the same pattern that they’ve used in prior elections,” he added.

Democrats have been defending the vote-by-mail system in the face of Republican attacks. Trump recently signed an executive order to impose federal restrictions on mail-in ballots and, without evidence, has long criticized mail-in ballots as a source of fraud and a factor in his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

The Nov. 4 special election on Proposition 50 was the Democrats’ attempt to counter Trump’s push for Republican-led states, most notably Texas, to redraw their electoral maps to keep Democrats from gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms and upending his agenda. The ballot measure overwhelmingly passed.

Nearly 89% of votes in the Nov. 4 election were vote-by-mail ballots, according to Weber’s office. In addition to Proposition 50, tax measures were also on the ballots in some counties.

Postal Service changes

About a month before the Nov. 4 election, Weber and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta held a news conference to encourage California voters to vote early because of service changes at the U.S. Postal Service.

Bonta told reporters that voters living 50 or more miles from six large mail processing centers in urban areas who mailed their ballots on election day would not have those ballots postmarked in time. The centers are in Los Angeles, Bell Gardens, San Diego, Santa Clarita, Richmond and West Sacramento, according to Bonta’s office.

The changes at the U.S. Postal Service are part of a 10-year plan that kicked off several years ago aimed at improving services and reducing costs at the independent federal agency.

In the 17 counties that are mostly or entirely within the 50-mile distance from the mail facilities, the average rate of late ballots doubled in the November 2025 election compared with the election the year before — from 2.5 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 5.6 per 1,000 in 2025.

But in counties that are entirely or mostly outside of the 50-mile radius, the average rate of late ballots quadrupled — from 2 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 9.3 per 1,000 in 2025, state election records show.

Similar complaints about late ballots because of the mail changes have been reported in other states, including in Snohomish County, Wash., according to the New York Times.

The U.S. Postal Services told the Times that there are “any number of factors” that may affect the timeliness of mail.

“The Postal Service has successfully delivered America’s election mail, and we are confident that we will do so again this year,” spokesperson Nikolaj Hagen said. “We rely on long-standing, robust and tested policies and procedures, which have proven successful in the secure and timely delivery of election mail.”

Hagen added that “adjustments to our transportation operations will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed.”

Postmarks are generally applied at those processing facilities, Hagen said, so the postmark date may not reflect the date the mail was collected by a letter carrier, dropped off at a retail location, or placed in a collection box.

While the U.S. Postal Service uses postmarking as an internal tool to track the place and date the mail was accepted, outside entities also use the postmarks for their own purposes, including the Internal Revenue Service, which requires federal tax returns to be mailed by April 15.

Several U.S. senators, including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), sent a letter in January to USPS Postmaster Gen. Dave Steiner warning that changes to postmarking will make it more difficult for people, particularly those in rural areas, to vote by mail and pay tax bills on time.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to put new federal controls on voting by mail in states, repeating his long-held but unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots are a source of widespread fraud in U.S. elections.

The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to take control of mail balloting by designing new envelopes with special bar codes that will allow the federal government to ensure that such ballots go out only to eligible voters.

States must follow the USPS process if they plan to use the federal mail system for sending or receiving ballots. They also must submit to the USPS lists of eligible voters in advance of such ballots passing through the mail system.

Separately, the Republican National Committee is challenging a Mississippi law that allows ballots that arrive up to five days after election day to be accepted and counted. The case was argued before the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court in March.

Times staff reporter Kevin Rector contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump is singling out the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority as a cautionary tale about Democratic mismanagement of publicly funded programs, using it to justify proposed cuts to homeless assistance services across the country.

Trump’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, released Friday, asks Congress to eliminate the Continuum of Care — a federal program that funds housing and services for homeless Americans — citing concerns about “fraud and corruption” among local agencies that administer it.

The White House points to LAHSA, which manages many homeless services for the city and county, as the example of why the program needs to go.

The agency has faced criticism locally for years for lack of proper oversight and the county is in the process of transitioning programs to an internal department.

“LAHSA has an abysmal record of reducing what is the highest number of street homeless individuals in the United States, and an independent audit issued in March 2025 found that the authority failed to accurately track billions of Federal and local dollars,” the budget says.

The local agency pushed back in a statement after the budget was released.

“Cutting this funding or destabilizing the Continuum of Care program would directly result in more tents on our streets, not fewer,” said Gita O’Neill, the agency’s interim chief executive, adding that under its leadership unsheltered homelessness in Los Angeles has fallen 15% and that 90% of the program’s funding goes “directly to rental assistance.”

Local officials are already grappling with homeless service cuts at the state and county level given budget constraints and LAHSA warned Trump’s proposal would make matters worse.

“If anything, we need additional funding to cover rising costs, not fewer, to maintain our current momentum,” the agency said Friday.

The funding dispute over homelessness services is one front in a broader budget assault on California programs by the Trump administration.

Trump’s proposal also asks Congress to eliminate millions in funding from state initiatives the White House is characterizing as wasteful, ineffective or “woke.”

The cuts, if enacted, would cancel $4 billion in unspent funding for the state’s high-speed rail project, which the White house called a “boondoggle,” and strip grants from the Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, which the budget criticized for “actively working to dismantle systems of power and privilege that favor whiteness.”

Smaller items are also targeted on the White House’s chopping block: a Los Angeles gelato festival, a dance building in Santa Cruz — which the White House dubs “one of the richest cities in the nation” — and a $3-million grant for a playground tied to an unspecified performing arts center in California.

Trump’s proposed cuts to California projects are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reshape federal spending priorities, largely by trading social programs for a massive military buildup.

The president is asking Congress to approve $1.5 trillion for defense and to slash $73 billion from domestic programs, a massive restructuring that would leave states, including California, to absorb costs Washington no longer wants to carry.

Trump made that vision explicit at a private Easter lunch at the White House on Wednesday, telling guests that the federal government should no longer be responsible for funding social programs that many Americans rely on.

“We can’t take care of daycare. We are a big country,” Trump said. “We are fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare.”

If states want to offer those services, Trump said, they should raise taxes to pay for them.

“Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis,” he said. “We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

His proposed budget reflects that priority, which lawmakers will need to contend with as they grapple with the mounting costs of the Iran war and an economic fallout from a military operation that has left Americans paying more items, including gas pump.

Under the proposed budget, Trump is also seeking to make some investments in California projects.

The White House, for example, is seeking $152 million from Congress to turn Alcatraz back into a maximum-security prison, an idea the president has talked about for several years.

He also called on Congress to establish a National Center for Warrior Independence at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.

Times staff writer Andrew Khouri, in Los Angeles, contributed to this report.

Before the start, Yorkshire confirmed that Joe Root will play three Championship matches and fellow England batter Harry Brook two games as their preparations for the Test summer.

Glamorgan gave debuts to ex-Somerset batter Sean Dickson and New South Wales paceman Ryan Hadley, while Yorkshire’s new faces are Western Australia batter Sam Whiteman, born in Doncaster, and Dutch all-rounder Van Beek. Australian paceman Jhye Richardson was not pressed into early service.

Intermittent rain, combined with a chilly wind, meant that play did not begin in grey, windy and inhospitable weather until 16:15 BST.

Asa Tribe and Eddie Byrom, a rare bespectacled pair of batters, formed a new opening partnership for Glamorgan and Byrom hit his first ball back in the team to the square-leg boundary.

But Ben Coad beat him several times before forcing him to edge to slip where Finlay Bean clung on well.

In the next over, England contender Tribe feathered White through to Bairstow for 11, and the same combination accounted for Dickson without scoring as Bairstow took a good grab in front of slip.

The chaos continued as new captain Kiran Carlson flicked White to leg slip where Dom Bess clung on to take a catch above his head.

Despite some tentative shots early on, Ingram and England Lions all-rounder Kellaway settled in to stop the slide against the change seamers, with Ingram slapping Van Beek over point for the first Glamorgan six of the season.

The half-century partnership marked the first stage in Glamorgan’s recovery before Bairstow’s early exit for treatment, with Bean taking the keeper’s gloves.

Glamorgan survived a second blast from White and a token over of spin from Bess to reach the close with some batting resources intact, although Yorkshire will be more content with their work.

DENVER — A Colorado appeals court ruled Thursday that a former county clerk convicted in a scheme that sought to prove fraud in the 2020 presidential election should be resentenced because a judge wrongly punished her for statements protected as free speech.

Tina Peters is serving a nine-year prison term after being convicted of state crimes for sneaking in an outside computer expert to make a copy of her county’s election computer system during a software update in 2021. A photo and video of confidential voting system passwords were later posted on social media and a conservative website.

Calls for Peters’ release have become a cause celebre in the election conspiracy movement. President Trump has sought unsuccessfully to pardon Peters and pressured Colorado to set her free.

Judges on the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld her conviction in a 74-page ruling that rejected the notion that Trump has authority to pardon her state crimes. But they said a lower court judge should not have considered Peters’ continued promotion of election fraud conspiracies when he sentenced her in 2024.

One of Tina Peters’ lawyers, John Case, said the court’s ruling affirmed the importance of free speech.

“Tina Peters was punished for words that she used to criticize our insecure and illegal voting system,” Case said. “The decision affirms that people are free to speak what they believe in Colorado as well as the rest of the United States of America.”

Case said he would likely ask at resentencing for Peters to receive the approximately 540 days she’s served already. That would allow her to be freed.

Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who has been considering granting clemency to Peters, praised the court’s decision for rejecting Trump’s pardon but upholding her free speech rights.

“This case has been very challenging and a true test of our resolve as a state to have a fair judicial system, not just for people we agree with but a fair system for Coloradans that we vehemently disagree with,” Polis said in statement.

Peters was the former clerk in Mesa County, in the far western part of Colorado, and convicted by jurors in the Republican stronghold that has supported Trump.

She was unapologetic when she was sentenced by Judge Matthew Barrett and insisted that she tried to unearth what she believed was fraud for the greater good. He ripped into her, calling her a “charlatan” who had used her position to “peddle snake oil.”

The appeals court found that Barrett violated her rights to free speech by punishing Peters for persistently alleging fraud in the 2020 election. They noted that because Peters is no longer serving as an election clerk, she can no longer engage in the conduct that led to her conviction.

“The trial court obviously erred by imposing sentence at least partially based on Peters’ protected speech,” Judge Ted Tow wrote in Thursday’s ruling.

The court sent Peters’ case back to a lower court for a judge to issue a new sentence.

Trump has threatened to take “harsh measures” against Colorado unless the state releases Peters. In February, Trump said Colorado was “suffering a big price” for refusing to release her.

Colorado Atty. Gen. Phil Weiser, a Democrat who is running for governor, has accused the Trump administration of waging a revenge campaign by choking off funds and ending federal programs over the state’s refusal to free Peters.

Weiser said in response to the ruling that the original sentence had been “fair and appropriate.”

“Whatever happens with her sentence, Tina Peters will always be a convicted felon who violated her duty as Mesa County clerk, put other lives at risk, and threatened our democracy. Nothing will remove that stain,” Weiser said in a statement.

The Justice Department inserted itself into Peters’ bid to be released while her state appeal was considered. The federal Bureau of Prisons also tried to get Peters moved to a federal prison. After both efforts failed, Trump in December announced a pardon for Peters.

However, the appeals court judges said they could find no prior example of a president pardoning someone for a state crime. And they rejected her attorney’s claims that Peters actions had been carried out while “defending a federal interest.”

“We have found no instance where the presidential pardon power has been stretched in such a way as to invade an individual state’s sovereignty,” they said, adding that the president’s pardon has “no impact” on the state’s case against Peters.

The Associated Press left messages with the White House for comment.

She was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with the requirements of the secretary of state.

Peters’ lawyers didn’t deny that she used the security badge of a local man she pretended to hire to allow an associate of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to make a copy of the Dominion Voting Systems election computer server during an annual software update in 2021.

But they said she only wanted to preserve election data and find out whether any outside actor had accessed the system while ballots were being counted. They said she didn’t want the information made public.

Slevin and Brown write for the Associated Press.

NASHVILLE, N.C. — Ricky Brinkley has lived in rural North Carolina nearly all of his 65 years, and he likes it “out in the county,” past the street lights and bustle of the small towns that carpet the landscape.

But the former truck driver can feel left out when elections roll around in this battleground state.

“People don’t come out like they should and ask you how you feel about things,” Brinkley said while he manned the counter at his daughter’s beauty supply store down the street from the Nashville courthouse. “You want somebody to vote, but you don’t want to do nothing to get the vote. No, it don’t work that way.”

Brinkley is among the rural Black residents who Democrats have often failed to mobilize as they try to dent Republican advantages here. It’s an urgent demographic puzzle for the party, which is normally strong with Black voters but tends to fall short in rural areas.

Success could help former Gov. Roy Cooper win a hotly contested U.S. Senate race this year and tilt the balance of power in Washington. It could also reshape presidential elections, providing Democrats with a wider path to the White House.

“People want to look at the word ‘rural’ in North Carolina and equate it to the word ‘white,’” said state party chair Anderson Clayton, a 28-year-old who won her job three years ago promising to expand the party beyond cities. “In my vision of a Democratic Party, when you talk about reaching out to rural voters, you are talking about rural Black voters.”

The Rev. James Gailliard, a former state lawmaker who leads a large Black congregation in Rocky Mount, put it even more bluntly.

“You don’t win this state in Durham,” Gailliard said. “You win it in the east.”

It’s about more than Cooper’s Senate bid

North Carolina is known for the university-heavy Research Triangle that includes Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill, along with Charlotte’s banking hub. But it also includes large swaths of small towns and rural areas where Democrats have lost ground in recent decades.

That’s not just because of white voters realigning with Republicans. It’s also because Black voters who lean Democratic don’t vote as often as their urban counterparts. Those rural Black voters are concentrated east of the triangle, extending along winding state highways through small towns, flatlands and farmland toward the Atlantic coastline.

Cooper, 68, won two terms as governor and four terms as state attorney general. However, Republicans control the state courts and the legislature, and they’ve redrawn the congressional map to expand their advantage in the U.S. House. Donald Trump carried the state for Republicans all three times he ran for the White House.

A native of rural Nash County, Cooper already in recent months held roundtable sessions with Black farmers, business owners and civic leaders in eastern North Carolina, along with students from North Carolina A&T University, a historically Black school that draws students from across the state. His campaign promises a statewide organizing effort before November.

Gailliard wants a more intentional effort

But Gailliard wants more.

The founding pastor at Word Tabernacle Church, Gailliard was among the Black state lawmakers who lost seats after Republican-led redistricting. He said regaining ground will require neighborhood-level organizing and investment from national Democrats, something he struggled to get from Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.

“I couldn’t get any traction,” Gailliard recalled. “I begged them to bring her to Rocky Mount. I said, ‘Listen, Rocky Mount is the gateway to the East. If we crack Rocky Mount, we’ve cracked the East.’ Could not convince them to come. Two weeks later, guess who’s in Rocky Mount? Donald Trump.”

The Harris campaign sent former President Bill Clinton to the area instead.

Gailliard said Cooper needs people like him to get elected.

“Roy is a great friend, and I’m gonna run my butt off to help him in every way, but I’m not banking on his coattails,” Gailliard said. “I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to grow coattails for him.”

The state party tries to fill gaps

Clayton, the state party chair, said the national party and its donors haven’t prioritized North Carolina early enough in recent cycles.

She said she’s relied mostly on local money to finance 25 full-time staffers, more than three times what the state party had heading into the 2022 midterms.

Bertie County Democratic chairwoman Camille Taylor, whose hometown of Powellsville has fewer than 200 residents, said she’s felt the shift.

She speaks regularly with a field organizer in nearby Greenville, the city closest to the northeastern counties with large proportions of Black residents. But she said it’s especially difficult to persuade rural voters to care about voting beyond the presidency, even though she tells them “these are the races and the people that you’re going to interact with more.”

Democrats have recruited candidates in all 170 legislative districts — two are Democratic-aligned independents — and every U.S. House district. State Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, a noted civil rights attorney and Black woman, is running statewide for reelection.

Gailliard said he’s identified a few hundred nonprofits, neighborhood associations and other groups that can do issue-orientated work in his district as the election approaches. He wants to match each of them to specific precincts, routing money for them to reach voters and persuade them to vote.

He wants volunteers to get training from Democratic and left-leaning organizations rather than have the outsiders themselves knocking on rural Black voters’ doors.

“We can’t have 21-year-old recent college graduates from Utah knocking doors at $22 an hour in the hood,” Gailliard said. “That just does not work. They’re not a trusted messenger.”

Marginal voting changes add up

About 2 in 10 North Carolina voters in the 2024 and 2020 presidential elections were Black, according to AP VoteCast, as well as in the 2022 Senate election.

Roughly 4 in 10 Black voters in North Carolina’s last presidential election said they live in small towns or rural communities, similar to the share who said they live in the suburbs. Only about one-quarter reported living in urban areas.

Small shifts in persuasion matter, particularly when races are close. In 2008, Barack Obama became the last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina, by a margin of just 14,000 votes out of 4.3 million votes cast.

Voter turnout between the 2020 and 2024 elections declined more in North Carolina counties that have larger Black populations.

Counties where Black voters make up about 30% to 40% of the electorate saw the biggest drop, with turnout falling by more than 3 percentage points. Counties with smaller Black populations saw more modest declines of about 1 percentage point. Overall, turnout remains higher in counties with fewer Black voters.

An old Cooper schoolmate just wants to be asked

Gailliard said Democrats cannot underestimate how much it means for someone to simply get asked for their vote.

“Black and rural voters are not transactional,” he said. “They are relational.”

Back in Nashville at the beauty supply store, Brinkley agreed.

“You get to be a big wheel, and you can forget where you came from,” Brinkley said. “I ain’t gonna say Roy forgot. He’s a hometown guy, so to speak, but I don’t expect to see him out here walking.”

Brinkley made it clear that if he votes, it would be for Cooper and other Democrats — but only if he votes.

“I could. I could. I may vote,” he said. “There’s just so much going on.”

Barrow and Sweedler write for the Associated Press. Sweedler reported from Washington. AP journalist Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco says he’d like to be our governor, but more and more, it’s looking to me like the real goal for the far-right provocateur is just to be MAGA-famous.

That’s cool. That’s fine. Honestly, who in Southern California hasn’t dreamed of their 15 minutes? And he certainly has the cop-stache to play the role of rogue Wild West lawman.

But Bianco’s bid for celebrity may help extremists take down American elections, and that is a problem — one California needs to deal with quickly, before the midterms suffer from his antics. There are two separate issues at play here, both of which state courts will be asked to weigh in on in coming days — Bianco apparently is putting his so-called investigation on hold until those cases bring some measure of clarity, and hopefully sanity.

First, are California sheriffs answerable to anyone, or are they a law unto themselves? Second, who in California can legally handle and count ballots according to law, if state law does in fact matter?

The fact that these two issues are coming up now — together— is no accident. President Trump’s election fraud claims have been moving toward this moment for years, largely out of the consciousness of mainstream voters, but very much intentionally pushed by those who would like to see MAGA officials remain in power, even at the cost of democracy.

The real question being answered right now in Riverside — the one we should all be clear on — is, if Republicans want to invalidate election results that don’t go their way this November, what’s the nitty-gritty of actually doing that?

Bianco is attempting an answer.

“This is about more than just what Sheriff Bianco is doing,” said Matt Barreto, faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. “… It shouldn’t happen. And again, it doesn’t matter if Democrats are winning or Republicans are winning, no sheriff should come in and take over possession or counting of ballots.”

By now, you’ve probably heard that Bianco has obtained multiple secret, sealed search warrants from a buddy judge that allowed him to spirit away hundreds of thousands of ballots in his county from November’s Proposition 50 election.

Bianco claims he has the right to seize these ballots and investigate as he sees fit — and it’s not our business or anyone else’s, not even state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who ordered Bianco to stop what he was doing until Bonta could review it.

Bianco has largely ignored that order, instead scooping up even more ballots late last week — all but giving Bonta a certain finger reserved for simple communication. Fox News loved it. Bianco’s admission Monday that he is pausing his effort is the first hint that even he may see he’s gone too far.

But Bianco’s hubris is in line with the attitude of many so-called constitutional sheriffs, a national movement by some far-right elected lawmen that Bianco has been associated with, though he’s never claimed outright affinity.

These extremist sheriffs misguidedly believe that they are above both state and federal law, and get to decide for themselves what’s constitutional or not in their jurisdictions — and therefore what’s law and what’s not.

Since about 2020, empowered by successes in ignoring pandemic restrictions, these sheriffs have dived deeper and deeper into the election fraud movement that Trump loves so much, claiming increasing rights to investigate alleged fraud. Though their national organization doesn’t publish its membership list, media and other tracking show there are at minimum dozens of these like-minded lawmen across the country, likely closely watching Riverside County.

Some election experts now worry that if Bianco is successful in the courts in retaining the right to take ballots, it will give a dangerous legal precedent that empowers other constitutional sheriffs to do the same at the midterms. Only then it would be fresh, uncounted ballots — leaving these far-right sheriffs in charge of providing results instead of trained, trusted elections officials.

“What happens if the ballots have not been properly counted by the right people yet and a sheriff decides they want to go confiscate them?” said Chad Dunn, co-founder of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project and the trial lawyer who successfully halted Texas’ gerrymandering effort, for now anyway.

“Once the chain of custody … is broken, as they have been with these, you’ll never count them in a way that you’ll be able to get reasonable confidence from the public,” Dunn said. “It puts the entire election process in jeopardy.”

The constitutional sheriffs would become the boots on the ground for Trump’s election deniers to implement their will, seizing ballots as they see fit and creating such a crisis of confidence that it’s likely we the voters would never accept the results, Republican or Democrat.

It could even give Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson a plausible reason — an ongoing fraud investigation — not to seat elected Democrats, stalling as he did with Arizona’s Adelita Grijalva last year after she won a special election.

The Voting Rights Project, along with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, filed a lawsuit last week asking the state Supreme Court to uphold the laws that govern how ballots are handled in California — basically protecting that chain of custody and making it clear sheriffs can’t ignore it and are not part of it.

“They do not, under California law, have the right to take ballots away from the Registrar of Voters, and they do not, under California law, have the right to count or handle ballots,” Barreto said. “There’s no question that it violates California election law.”

Separately, Bonta’s office filed its own action, with that issue of constitutional sheriffs front and center. Bonta is asking courts to tell Bianco that he’s not a law unto himself, and does in fact answer to the state attorney general.

This issue of whether sheriffs have any legal duty to listen to the state’s top law enforcement officer has long been one of Bonta’s fights — he argued about it with then-L.A. Sheriff Alex Villanueva in another public corruption fiasco over then-L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.

I’m guessing Bianco will refer Bonta back to that simple communication of a single finger, much the same as Villanueva did.

But it’s long past time that the state decide just how powerful sheriffs are, for the good of the country this time. The state Legislature has repeatedly kicked the can on clarifying the issue, a failure on their part.

Legislators could amend the state Constitution to make sheriffs appointed instead of elected — the same as police chiefs. Then boards of supervisors could hire and fire them just like other law enforcement leaders.

With the Legislature’s resounding absence on the issue, we have to rely on courts. That’s likely to be a long battle.

In the meantime, Bianco is up to his mustache in attention. This has become a national story, boosting his profile throughout the MAGA-verse as a champion of election deniers everywhere.

Whether Bianco wins or loses these legal battles, resumes his investigation or not, he’s won the attention battle — he’s even polling at the top in the gubernatorial race, thanks to the 8 million Democrats who refuse to drop out.

Riverside County, once as red as it comes, is increasingly purple, Barreto points out. Bianco’s tenure as elected sheriff may not last forever. His shot at governor, despite the polls, is unlikely.

But maybe Fox News will be so impressed with his aggressive rants that he’ll get an offer. Maybe Trump, known for watching it, will like what he sees. So many possibilities from the publicity.

And so much real damage to democracy.

Nine years on, Flynn is anxiously watching on as a fan, having left the world of football for a new job in media and marketing in the Newport office of CDM Media, his city centre base just across the River Usk within spying distance of his old club.

Christian Fuchs’ team are two points above the relegation zone after Saturday’s crucial 1-0 win over Shrewsbury Town and, with six games to go, Flynn hopes there will be no need for a repeat of his final-day rescue act.

“I hope Christian can keep them up because there will be a big after-effect if things go wrong,” said the 45-year-old, who was born in the city and played for County before managing them from 2017 to 2021.

“My son is in the academy at Newport and if we go down… that could go. That would be catastrophic in terms of how we’re going to bring young players through.

“I think football in the city will drop. It would hit hospitality around match days. It’s going to leave a bad aftertaste.

“If they go down, I think it could be a long, long road back. If they get back.”

Flynn, though, is optimistic about their survival hopes. After all, they’re not 11 points adrift of safety as his 2017 side were after he accepted what looked an impossible survival mission by replacing the sacked Graham Westley as boss.

ATLANTA — Attorneys for Georgia’s Fulton County and President Trump’s administration squared off in court Friday over the county’s demand that the FBI return seized ballots and other materials from the 2020 election.

Abbe Lowell, an attorney representing Fulton County, noted that the January raid was “unusual” because it involved an old election and allegations that have already been investigated in the years since Trump, a Republican, lost the county and the state to Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Lowell contended that the Trump administration seized the materials because it grew impatient with litigation the Justice Department filed to obtain them last year. “There’s abundant law that the left hand of the department needs to know what the right hand is doing,” Lowell told U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee.

Michael Weisbuch, representing the federal government, replied that the separate civil litigation wasn’t “relevant in any respect.” He said the administration has already provided Fulton County with digital copies of everything taken and needs to retain physical copies to carry out its own investigation.

Boulee wrote in a scheduling order that the hearing was needed after the two sides failed to reach an agreement in court-ordered mediation.

Trump’s actions alarm Democrats and election officials

The Jan. 28 seizure from a warehouse near Atlanta targeted the elections hub in Georgia’s most populous county, which is heavily Democratic and includes most of Atlanta. Fulton County has been at the center of unfounded claims by Trump and his allies that widespread election fraud cost him reelection.

The FBI’s move was among several actions by the Trump administration that have alarmed Democrats and many election officials who are concerned it’s using law enforcement to pursue the president’s personal grievances and is planning ways to interfere in this year’s midterm elections. The FBI also used a subpoena earlier this month to obtain records related to an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County in Arizona, another battleground state Trump lost that year.

At the same time, the Justice Department is fighting numerous states in court for access to voter data that includes sensitive personal information. Election officials, including some Republicans, have said handing over the information would violate state and federal privacy laws.

Justice Department says it’s investigating 2020 ‘irregularities’

Lawyers for Fulton County argued in a court filing that the seizure of its documents was “improper and unjustified” and demonstrates “callous disregard” for the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The Justice Department seeks to “set a precedent that would grant the federal government unchecked power to interfere with the local administration of elections,” it wrote.

Justice Department attorneys argued that preparing a detailed affidavit and presenting it to a judge “is the exact opposite of ‘callous disregard’” for those constitutional rights. “Their goal to disrupt an ongoing federal criminal investigation is clear,” they wrote of Fulton County officials.

The Justice Department said it is investigating “irregularities that occurred during the 2020 presidential election in the County” and identified two laws that might have been violated. One requires election records to be maintained for 22 months, while the other prohibits procuring, casting or tabulating false, fictitious or fraudulent ballots.

The filing said the FBI is looking into whether Fulton County properly retained ballot images; whether some ballots were scanned and counted multiple times; whether unfolded, unmailed ballots were counted as mail-in absentee ballots; and potential irregularities concerning tabulator tapes from the scanners used to count ballots.

Fulton County’s lawyers wrote that the “deficiencies” or “defects” in the county’s handling of the 2020 election cited in the affidavit are the kinds of human errors that commonly occur without any intentional wrongdoing and cannot establish probable cause.

Election tech expert cites problems in the affidavit

To support their claims, Fulton County officials submitted a sworn declaration from Ryan Macias, an election technology and security expert who advised the county during the 2020 election. He said the affidavit contains “a multitude of false or misleading statements and omissions” and offered explanations for the alleged “deficiencies.”

Investigations by the Georgia secretary of state and independent reviews contradict the core allegations of the affidavit, which is “rife with statements from witnesses lacking credibility, with extraordinary and undisclosed biases,” Fulton’s lawyers argued.

Georgia’s votes in the 2020 presidential race were counted three times, including once by hand, and each count affirmed Biden’s win.

Federal government lawyers rejected the idea that the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit “intentionally or recklessly misled” the judge, writing that “the supposed misrepresentations and omissions flagged by Petitioners are illusory and/or immaterial.” They also asserted that a lapse of the statute of limitations on the potential crimes does not negate probable cause.

The Justice Department also noted that a federal magistrate judge reviewed the FBI affidavit and signed off on the search warrant. Fulton County sought to have the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit testify at Friday’s hearing, but the Justice Department objected and the judge sided with the federal government.

Brumback writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.

THE must-visit destinations across the UK have been revealed and North Yorkshire has made the list.

With sweeping beaches, beautiful towns and movie backdrops – it’s no wonder Condé Nast Traveller as one of the ‘Best Places to Go in the UK in 2026’ – and here are some of our favourite spots to go in the county.

Knaresborough

Along the River Nidd is this beautiful town which is often described as being ‘postcard perfect’, or looking like a ‘fairytale’.

It’s a few miles away from Harrogate and is known for having a huge viaduct as well as pretty riverside restaurants and cafes.

Sun Writer Katrina Turrill grew up in Knaresborough, and here’s what she suggests visitors do during their visit like popping into its many pubs.

“There are a lot of pubs in Knaresborough – so many, I always lose count. I found 15 online, but I’m sure there’s more.  There are traditional pubs with rich history, such as Blind Jack’s in the market square. 

SIGHT SEA

£9.50 holidaymakers’ favourite Skegness activities… away from the beach

GO SEA IT

£9.50 holiday spot with shipwrecks, seals offshore & horseshoe-shaped waterfalls

“One of my favourite pubs is Carriages, with its cosy atmosphere and tasty food.  The outdoor area is great in summer, with views of pretty Knaresborough train station.”

Some of her other favourite things to do is heading up to Knaresborough Castle which is where you’ll get the best view of the viaduct.

Get onto the river itself in a row boat and get a bite to eat from Marigolds and an ice cream.

One popular attraction is Mother Shipton’s Cave which is named after the Yorkshire prophetess.

Whitby

The charming seaside town of Whitby has red-roofed houses, winding streets as well as huge cliffs.

Of course the nearby Gothic Whitby Abbey was Bram Stoker’s inspiration for his book, Dracula.

If you want to feel like you’re in the novel, walk up the 199 steps from the Old Town to St Mary’s Church and the Abbey ruins.

Travel Reporter Jenna Stevens who visited Whitby said: “In my trip to the North Yorkshire town, I ticked off all the staple activities. A Mr Whippy enjoyed by the harbour, spare change spent in Funland’s Amusements, and fish and chips for tea.

“Plus my stroll along the sands, backed by spectacular moss-green cliffs, was an ideal way to soak up those breath-taking views of the rugged Yorkshire coast.

One of the things that makes Whitby stand out amongst other seaside spots is its connection to a famous explorer, Captain Cook and the ‘House on the Harbour’ museum is a must-visit.”

Another must-visit in Whitby is Trenchers – which is the best fish and chip shop in the UK.

Trenchers of Whitby secured the Restaurant of the Year title at the National Fish and Chips Awards 2026 – which is considered the ‘Oscars‘ of the fish and chip industry.

A takeaway cod and chips will set you back £13.50.

Robin Hood’s Bay

This tiny fishing village sits on a clifftop overlooking the bay and it’s considered one of the most beautiful seaside spots in the country.

It has winding roads, hilly streets and pokey little shops selling the likes of books and souvenirs.

Assistant Travel Editor Sophie Swietochowski described the village as “something from a fiction tale or a North Yorkshire postcard.”

She continued: “In summer, you’ll find dogs sprinting along the sands, while owners tuck into fresh crab sandwiches from the beachside hut and little ones fish for treasures in the rock pools.

“I prefer the village in winter, though, when visitors can stroll the rows of higgledy-piggledy boutiques and cafes dishing up wedges of homemade cakes piled high with buttercream.

“What’s more, there’s a restriction on visitor vehicles and cars are even banned from the harbour area, making it a great place for a car-free

Scarborough

Scarborough, which is known as England‘s first seaside resort, is split into two bays – the South and North Bay.

Each is worth exploring with the South Bay having most of the shops, restaurants and amusement arcades.

Meanwhile, the North Bay is much quieter and is a great place to simply enjoy the beach or go for a surf.

Senior Feature Writer for Fab Daily, Alex Lloyd went on a family staycation to Scarborough in summer last year.

She described it as the “perfect family day out” where you spend “hardly any money.”

You can rent out a beach chalet from £50 a day and have a go on the cliff-railway for £2.50.

If you’re lucky enough, and bring a pair of binoculars you might spot bottlenose dolphins, porpoises and minke whales.

There is plenty of entertainment too and Alex explored the South Cliff Gardens, a hillside adventure playground and the arcades at Olympia Leisure.

Yorkshire Dales National Park

The Dales are known for glorious views and dramatic scenery and it is seeing a boom in popularity thanks to its appearance in Wuthering Heights.

The new film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi certainly had Brits talking when it came to cinemas last month.

Travel Writer Tracey Davies explored the gothic region and said: “Heathcliff is not the only mysterious, brooding beast in Yorkshire. The scenery provides just as much drama as the Wuthering Heights character.”

She added: “Largely shot on location in the Yorkshire Dales National Park — amid the landcapes of Swaledale and Arkengarthdale valleys and the peaceful village of Low Row — the movie shines a well-deserved spotlight on this glorious corner of England.

“With its scarred limestone hills, scattered with rocks, and rolling green pastures, criss-crossed with drystone walls and peppered with honeyed-stone villages, this region is the picture of a period drama.”

For more on Yorkshire – here’s a ‘world famous ice cream and a hidden beach that’s paradise‘.

And here’s one quaint English village that everyone should visit – says one man who walked 10,000 miles through British countryside.

REDDING — At a Board of Supervisors meeting in rural Shasta County last month, Clint Curtis dropped a bombshell: A sheriff way down in Riverside was going to confiscate all the ballots from a recent election.

Curtis, the county registrar of voters, was the first to announce the planned ballot seizure. Even the sheriff himself, Chad Bianco, had not publicly revealed his intentions.

Later, as Bianco’s move grabbed headlines — he is a leading Republican candidate for governor — Curtis’ behind-the-scenes maneuvering remained largely unknown. The registrar had worked with the Riverside County citizens group whose fraud allegations had sparked Bianco’s investigation, even traveling 600 miles south to speak on their behalf.

Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis poses last month in the new election observation room at the elections office in Redding.

In his short time in Shasta County, Curtis, whose claims about rigged voting machines stretch back to the early 2000s, has solidified his position as a torchbearer of the election denialism movement, vowing to take his message about untrustworthy machines and potential fraud across California and beyond.

Critics here say he has steadily disenfranchised voters. He has eliminated nine of the vast county’s 13 ballot drop boxes, telling The Times he did not trust ballots in the hands of “little old ladies running all over” to collect them. And he has advocated for a local ballot initiative that would limit elections to one day, eliminate most voting by mail and require voter ID as well as a hand count of ballots.

Curtis also has accused his predecessors in the registrar’s office, without evidence, of election fraud and has called for federal authorities to raid the office he now runs.

“Do I think ballots were stuffed? Yes. Have I contacted the DOJ? Yes,” Curtis said at the Feb. 24 Shasta County supervisors’ meeting just before announcing Bianco’s planned ballot seizure.

Curtis, a 67-year-old attorney, was appointed by the Shasta County supervisors last April. He lived in Florida then, had no previous ties to the area and had never run an election.

He got the job based largely on two stated qualifications: He wanted to hand-count votes. And he had worked with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist.

In his public job interview, Curtis promised to grill local elections staffers to “find out what they know.”

Now Curtis is running for election himself, trying to keep his job in this Northern California county where a majority of the supervisors were so swept up in President Trump’s discredited election fraud claims that they ditched their Dominion voting machines in 2023 and opted to hand-count ballots (quickly prompting a new state law that banned them from doing so).

• Share via Close extra sharing options

Curtis says he is running to make elections more transparent by questioning the status quo and hanging cameras everywhere to capture election workers’ every move.

“Republicans love me,” Curtis told The Times. “The Democrats are pretty good. And then I have these crazy socialist people that just hate me.”

Beliefs aside, Curtis has quickly become a colorful local character.

He took a lie detector test to attest that he didn’t rig the November election. He chose as his number two a heavy metal guitarist from San Francisco — stage name “Turmoil” — who is a progressive Democrat.

And last September, surveillance cameras captured him pushing an antique metal safe through the Shasta County elections office on a Saturday while his wife assisted with a pulling harness. Curtis wore blue jeans — and no shirt.

He said he moved the safe, which contained odds and ends, on a hot day to make more room for election observers.

Curtis first gained national attention for election skepticism in December 2004, in testimony before Congress.

He had been working as a computer programmer in Florida and was brought in as an expert witness by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who were reeling over President George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry a few weeks earlier and furious about an error with an electronic voting machine that gave Bush extra votes in Ohio.

Curtis claimed that he had written “a prototype” of software that would allow cheaters to alter votes using “invisible buttons” on touch-screen balloting machines. His claims were largely dismissed. But he continues to tout his congressional testimony to cast himself as an expert on election malfeasance.

A woman passes by a “Greetings From Redding” mural on Feb. 25.

After testifying, he unsuccessfully ran for office multiple times in Florida. He refused to concede after one loss, alleging the machines were rigged.

In Shasta County, he saw a chance for redemption.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Board of Supervisors gained a hard-right majority supported by anti-vaxxers, secessionists, members of a local militia and pro-Trump election deniers.

In 2022, someone hung a trail camera — the kind hunters use to track wildlife — behind the elections office to monitor the staff. Some observers yelled at staffers and got in the face of Cathy Darling Allen, the longtime registrar, who installed a 7-foot metal fence to keep them at bay.

Joanna Francescut, who worked in the elections office for 17 years, is running to be county registrar.

Darling Allen clashed with the supervisors as they pushed to hand-count votes, a process she argued would be slow, expensive and prone to error. She retired in 2024, citing health reasons.

Her successor resigned after less than a year. The supervisors appointed Curtis in a 3-2 vote, passing over Joanna Francescut, who had worked in the elections office since 2008 and was Darling Allen’s number two.

Days later, Curtis fired Francescut. She is now running against him in the June 2 election.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, called Curtis a “nationally known conspiracy theorist.”

“I can’t imagine bringing in someone who is neither an election administrator nor a Californian for a job like that and basically chasing out experienced election officials whose work had withstood scrutiny for decades,” Becker said. “The voters of Shasta County, unfortunately, are paying the price.”

Curtis has accused Francescut and other elections staffers of stuffing ballots to sabotage conservative Republicans.

“I want to laugh because it’s that ridiculous,” Francescut, 43, said of the allegations.

“People that work in this field, they’re doing this work because they care about elections,” she said. “They want the community to be better. They want what both sides want — transparent and accurate elections.”

During her 17-year tenure, the elections office got little public attention. But “once 2020 hit, people went from completely trusting us to, the day after election day, calling and yelling at our staff so much that we couldn’t get the work done to count ballots,” she said.

Curtis was a favorite of then-board chairman Kevin Crye, a hard-right supervisor who enlisted Lindell to support the county’s crusade against Dominion. Crye had survived a 2024 recall effort by just 50 votes.

1

2

1. Carl Bott, co-owner of KCNR 96.5 FM, interviews Joanna Francescut on Feb. 25, 2026, in Redding, Calif. 2. Joanna Francescut’s campaign manager, Mary Williams, wears an orange button that reads “Vote for Jo for County Clerk” as Francescut waits in the offices of talk radio station KCNR.

Citing that close margin, Curtis said he believed recent elections were rigged because Republicans were not winning by large enough margins in a county where registered Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats.

In a letter to the U.S. Justice Department, Curtis said he had learned of lax security and potential ballot stuffing in 2024, the year of the attempted recall against Crye. Curtis sent a copy of the letter to Trump and requested a federal investigation because “the destruction of these ballots is nearing.”

In 2019 and 2024, a Shasta County grand jury investigated local election procedures and found no wrongdoing.

“How does it make me feel? Really angry,” Darling Allen, who is advising Francescut’s campaign, said of Curtis’ allegations. “It calls into question the integrity and character of every single person who worked in the elections department.”

To replace Francescut, Curtis hired Brent Turner, the guitarist from San Francisco. He is a longtime election reform activist who has pushed for nonproprietary open-source voting systems with software code that can be examined by anyone.

Turner described their partnership as: “Republican and Democrat team up to fight outdated software for elections. Oh, my!”

“We have to have the adult conversation in the United States that if the systems are loose enough to allow people — in this case, we’re talking about even people internal to the system — to cheat, they might cheat,” Turner said.

Last October, Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote to Curtis, asking him to detail planned changes to voting procedures. He responded with a 15-page letter.

Election observers, he wrote, were “treated like invaders … corralled behind spiked fences.” And drivers who picked up ballots from drop boxes sometimes left them in their vehicles. Under his watch, he wrote, “no detours or even bathroom breaks are allowed.”

A woman exits the Cottonwood Post Office in Shasta County.

Curtis told Weber that someone had carved death threats on his vehicle and left “antifa” business cards on his windshield wipers.

Weber’s communications team said in an email that her office “continues to monitor new election processes proposed by Shasta (or any county) County to ensure they do not violate state law.”

In his letter to Weber, Curtis promised to take a lie detector test after each election. Answering pre-written questions he had submitted, Curtis said in a January polygraph test that he did not change the results of the November election and believed a predecessor had rigged previous contests, according to a summary obtained by The Times.

The examiner wrote that he “was likely telling the truth.”

Inside the elections office, Curtis created a large room, decked out with American flags, for citizens to observe the vote-counting process.

More than a dozen large TV monitors display close-up video, also streamed online, of election workers’ hands inserting ballots into machines. On June 2, those workers will sit beneath iPhones hung overhead to record them while observers are positioned on barstools a few inches behind them.

The new public observation room at the Shasta County elections office is decorated with American flags.

Curtis has been traveling across California to tout his methods. He told The Times he has spoken about his video setup in Kern and San Joaquin counties and discussed it with candidates for state office.

And he advised the Riverside County citizens group that claimed to have found an overcount of 45,896 ballots in the November election for Proposition 50, which redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats.

Art Tinoco, the Riverside County registrar of voters, has refuted that number — saying it was based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.

After Bianco last week announced that his office had seized more than 650,000 ballots, Curtis appeared on the social media broadcast of a right-wing election integrity advocate who called him “the stealth behind the scenes in making that happen.”

Curtis smiled and repeated what he has been espousing since the early 2000s: “You can’t really trust a computer.”

Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted a former waitress in 1972 after escorting her to one of his shows, a civil jury in California concluded Monday, awarding the woman $19.25 million in damages.

The verdict was the latest turn in a series of legal battles the disgraced entertainer, now 88, has faced since allegations that he repeatedly drugged and raped women exploded publicly about a decade ago. Since then, he served about three years in a Pennsylvania prison on sexual assault charges before the case was overturned in 2021.

Donna Motsinger, now 84, said in her lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court that Cosby had given her wine and a pill that left her unable to move, and that she woke up in her house wearing nothing but her underwear, according to court records, and that “she knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”

Cosby has denied the allegations, as well as those brought by dozens of other women who claimed they had been drugged and raped. Coming in the early years of the #MeToo movement, a broad social media-inspired campaign to name and prosecute men accused of sexual misconduct, Cosby’s attorneys painted him as an unfair target of mass vigilantism gone awry.

Motsinger sued Cosby in 2023, alleging that, at the time, she was working at a Sausalito restaurant called The Trident that was popular with celebrities, including Cosby, according to the complaint her attorneys filed Sept. 27 of that year. One night, Motsinger accepted Cosby’s invitation to go with him to his show at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos. Cosby picked her up at her home in a limousine, according to her complaint, and, on the way to the venue, gave her the wine and a pill that she thought was aspirin.

“Next thing she knew, she was going in and out of consciousness while two men attending to Mr. Cosby were putting her in the limousine,” the complaint said. “The last thing Ms. Motsinger recalls were flashes of light,” before waking up in her house in nothing but underwear.

Motsinger didn’t consent to Cosby’s sexual contact and, having been rendered unconscious by drugging, she couldn’t consent to it to begin with, according to the complaint. As a consequence of her ordeal, her complaint says she suffered lost wages, medical bills, pain and suffering and emotional distress.

Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff and a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election as part of an investigation that he called a “fact-finding mission” to determine if they were fraudulently counted.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the state’s top law enforcement official, has sharply criticized the probe, which he called “unprecedented in both scope and scale.”

In a March 4 letter to the sheriff, Bonta said the seizure of the ballots “sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.” He threatened to seek legal recourse if Bianco does not halt his investigation.

Bianco said Friday that his investigators are looking into allegations by a local citizens group that “did their own audit” and found that the county’s tally was falsely inflated by more than 45,000 votes — a claim that local election officials have emphatically rejected.

Here is what we know.

Why were ballots taken?

According to Bonta’s office, Bianco’s department on Feb. 26 took about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials in Riverside County related to the November election for Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas.

Bianco said that it’s his “constitutional duty” to investigate a potential crime and that he is not trying to change the election results.

The investigation includes all of the ballots cast in the county, where Proposition 50 passed with 56% of the vote, a margin of more than 82,000 ballots. Statewide, it passed with 64% of the vote, a margin of more than 3.3 million ballots.

Bianco said he had been contacted by “a group of citizen volunteers” that said it performed an audit finding that 45,896 more ballots were counted than were cast. He did not name the group, but the allegations match those made by a group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team.

In a February presentation to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco disputed the group’s allegations and said they were based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.

The actual discrepancy, Tinoco said, was 103 votes — a variance of 0.016%.

How did the sheriff get the ballots?

Bianco said his department served the registrar with a warrant “approved and signed by a judge” on Feb. 9.

According to Bonta’s office, an additional warrant was issued on Feb. 23. Bianco said the warrants are now sealed.

In the March 4 letter to Bianco, the attorney general said he had “serious concerns” about whether the sheriff had probable cause to seize the election materials.

Bonta questioned whether Bianco had concealed information from the magistrate judge who approved the warrants, including details from the registrar’s analysis of the citizen group’s allegations.

An official from Bonta’s office told The Times that the attorney general “found out in the middle of the week that [Bianco] was going to execute the warrants on a Friday.” Bonta’s office asked the sheriff to slow down and share information about the investigation, but “instead of waiting, he actually moved it up” and seized the ballots sooner than planned, said the official, who would only speak on background.

Bianco said a Riverside County Superior Court judge ordered the appointment of a special master to oversee the ballot count. His investigators had already begun counting, but the tally would start over under the court’s guidance, Bianco said.

The ballots would have soon been destroyed

California law requires county officials to keep election materials — including ballots and voter identification envelopes — for 22 months for elections involving a federal office and for six months for all other contests.

The materials must be sealed and then destroyed at the end of the retention period.

The Proposition 50 election took place on Nov. 4, so the ballots are scheduled to be destroyed in May.

Why investigate now?

Political observers say that Bianco — a leading gubernatorial candidate — appears to be vying for attention from President Trump and his supporters.

Kim Nalder, a political science professor and director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State, said the investigation appears to be “an electoral ploy.”

“At this stage in the election, most voters haven’t really tuned into the gubernatorial race, and there are a ton of candidates,” she said. “People who don’t know his background will know now. This is clear signaling.”

Trump has repeatedly called on the federal government to “nationalize” state-run elections. He remains fixated on his 2020 election loss and has falsely claimed widespread fraud.

In January, the FBI raided the elections office in Fulton County, Ga., seizing 2020 presidential election records. And this month, the Republican leader of Arizona’s state Senate said he had handed over 2020 election records to the FBI, complying with a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to a controversial audit of the election in Maricopa County.

Bianco is an outspoken Trump supporter.

A poll released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times showed Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton leading the crowded field of gubernatorial candidates by slim margins, with the Democratic vote split among multiple candidates in a left-leaning state.

The top two vote getters, regardless of party, will advance to the November election.

Bianco said the investigation was “not a recount” for Proposition 50 and had nothing to do with his campaign for governor.

IMPERIAL — Whenever the weather changes suddenly, or the skyline becomes shrouded in a windy haze, Fernanda Camarillo braces herself for an asthma attack.

Her condition has become more manageable, but the 27-year-old said it’s still scary when her chest tightens and she starts to wheeze. It was one of her first thoughts when she heard about plans to develop a massive data center next to her home in Imperial County, a farming community near the border of Mexico that struggles with poor air quality.

“A lot of people in the county are asthmatic,” she said, explaining that she worries the new center would add more pollution. “I’ve been anxious — so many of us are voicing our concerns.”

Data centers have existed for decades but are rapidly changing and expanding due to the worldwide boom in artificial intelligence, or AI as it’s known. States and communities nationwide have started pushing back, citing concerns that the projects could strain power grids, increase utility bills and have negative health and environmental impacts.

In California, state legislators are debating how to protect residents and natural resources without creating so much red tape that developers go elsewhere, taking their jobs and taxable earnings with them.

No Data Center signs are posted in the front yard of a home that is right behind the proposed site.

“We can be supportive of innovation and a technology that is needed but also protect our communities and our health and our environment,” said state Sen. Steve Padilla (D-San Diego). “We can do both at the same time.”

The California Legislature is considering bills to prohibit the projects from being exempted from the state’s stringent environmental law and to impose new tariffs on new major energy users that strain power supplies. Lawmakers also have proposed restrictions on new data centers, requiring companies to provide verifiable estimates on expected water and energy usage before they can be granted a business permit.

Imperial resident Fernanda Camarillo, who is an asthmatic, holds some of her medications.

Members of Congress also expressed concerns. Rep. Ro Khanna, speaking at a town hall about AI last month at Stanford University, said legislators must ensure data centers serve the communities that power them.

“We live in a new gilded age,” said Khanna (D-Fremont). “What kind of future are we going to build?”

::

Eric Masanet, a professor at UC Santa Barbara specializing in sustainability science for emerging technologies, described the facilities as the “brains” of the internet. The sprawling centers are filled with banks of specialized computers that process online shopping orders, stream movies, host websites, encode Zoom and other videoconferencing apps, store data and serve as switching stations for the digital world that’s now woven into daily life.

Data centers, particularly those that power AI, use significant amounts of water and energy. The facilities accounted for about 4.4% of the nation’s total electricity consumption in 2023, up from 1.9% in 2018, according to a report provided to Congress from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The researchers projected that figure will reach 6.7% to 12% by 2028.

Many companies, including big tech giants like Meta, Google and Amazon, are making major investments in AI.

“We are building a lot more data centers faster than we ever did — and a new AI data center is 10 to 20, maybe 30 times, the size of the largest data centers we had before,” Masanet said.

The proposed site of the 950,00-square-foot data center is on a dusty parcel that is next to the Victoria Ranch housing community and adjacent to farmland in Imperial, Calif.

It’s unclear how many data centers are in the state. A California Energy Commission spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times it does not track this information. Data Center Map, a nongovernmental website that tracks data centers across the world, lists 289 facilities in California, with more than 4,000 nationwide.

The federal government has, so far, largely left it to states or localities to regulate data centers.

The facilities can generate significant revenue for local governments due to sales and property taxes.

But some new proposals are sparking a backlash. More than 200 community and environmental organizations, including a dozen from California, sent an open letter to Congress in December calling for a national moratorium on new data centers.

Robert Gould, a pathologist with San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility, one of the organizations that signed the letter, explained data centers are causing a shift away from renewable energy and back toward fossil fuels because the facilities need a reliable and constant stream of power.

Cornell University researchers last year estimated that AI growth could add 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere annually by 2030, unless steps are taken to change course.

Gould said fossil fuel emissions are associated with various cancers, an increase in hospitalizations for older adults due to respiratory conditions, and asthma attacks or stunted lung growth in children. Particulate matter from fossil fuel emissions is also linked to cardiovascular events and negative effects on maternal fetal health.

Gould’s organization has noticed an alarming trend.

“These are generally placed in communities that are the least able to defend themselves,” he said.

Farmworkers toil in the noon heat to pick vegetables in Imperial. Agriculture is an important part of the Imperial Valley economy.

::

The debate over data centers is heating up in the Imperial Valley, a rural desert region in southeastern California where a proposed center faces fierce opposition from residents.

The county in 2025 granted the project an exemption for the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA. The landmark 56-year-old state law has been credited with helping to preserve California’s natural beauty and protecting communities from hazardous impacts of construction projects — but also blamed for stymieing construction.

Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, a California-based limited liability company that started two years ago, plans to develop a 950,000-square-foot facility in the county that’s designed for advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning operations. The company says it will use reclaimed wastewater and EPA-certified natural gas generators, and create 2,500 to 3,500 construction jobs and 100 to 200 permanent positions.

“We are committed to Imperial County and to creating lasting economic opportunity,” the company website states. “The project will generate $28.75 million in annual property tax revenue for local schools, fire departments, libraries, and essential services.”

The Imperial County Board of Supervisors is moving toward finalizing the proposal.

Farmland spreads out in front of the Imperial Valley Fair near a proposed data center in Imperial.

Sebastian Rucci, an attorney and chief executive officer of Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, said he commissioned multiple studies assessing the proposed center’s potential effect on issues like traffic or the environment that found no or minimal harms. He threatened to pull his proposal if a CEQA review was required.

“CEQA leaves you in an unknown territory — some of the environmental groups have used it for extortion, they sue, they have no basis for the suit but they delay you, and then they can squeeze money out of you for settling the lawsuit,” said Rucci.

The exemption, however, has alarmed residents, who have spoken up at county board meetings and launched a community organization, Not in My Backyard Imperial, to protest the data center and demand a CEQA review.

“It feels like it’s us against the county,” said Camarillo, adding that many feel the board has dismissed their questions and concerns.

None of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors responded to requests for comment.

Resident Fernanda Camarillo’s home is right behind the proposed site of the data center in Imperial.

The center would be a neighbor to Camarillo’s house in Victoria Ranch, a family-friendly area with beige stucco homes topped with terracotta tile roofs. She worries about noise, pollution and spiking utility bills. Power companies that have to upgrade grids to meet data centers’ energy demands sometimes seek to recoup that cost by hiking up rates for all consumers.

Camarillo, a substitute teacher, is also scared for her students. The air quality in Imperial Valley is already so poor that schools use a system of color-coded flags to signal whether it’s safe for children to go outside during gym or recess, she said.

“I think they see [the valley] as easy pickings because we are a low-income community and we have such a large population of Latinos here,” Camarillo said.

A quick drive around the neighborhood shows others share her concerns. Signs protesting the data center pop up throughout the community, displayed on front lawns or nestled into rocky garden beds.

Victoria Ranch was quiet and peaceful on a sunny Sunday in late February. Francisco Leal, a resident and lead organizer for NIMBY Imperial, said that’s a major part of its appeal.

The colorful dusk sky hovers over a Little League baseball game at Freddie White Park in Imperial. The debate over data centers is heating up in the Imperial Valley, a rural desert region in southeastern California.

Leal wants answers about everything from potential health hazards and impacts on the local water supply to whether the fire department is equipped to handle a large-scale electrical blaze. But without a CEQA review, he says residents are left to trust assurances from the developer or privately hired consultants.

Leal plans to sell his property if the project goes forward, but the thought makes him emotional.

“It’s not just a house; it’s a home,” he said. “This is the only home my kids have ever known and all of our family memories are here.”

Gina Snow, another resident, isn’t necessarily against bringing a data center to the county. But she wants the proposal to undergo a CEQA review.

“Clearly we understand that there is economic development and the potential for that to be positive for the county, but at what cost?” she said.

Daniela Flores, executive director of Imperial Valley Equity and Justice, a nonprofit that works for social and environmental equality, stands on the site of the proposed data center.

::

Daniela Flores, executive director of Imperial Valley Equity and Justice, a nonprofit that works for social and environmental equality, said the community has good reason to be wary. Various industries have come into the region over the years and made grand promises that never panned out.

“We became a sacrifice zone,” she said, adding industries use the area’s resources while ultimately doing little to permanently improve the lives of most residents.

Flores said the community continues to struggle with a range of problems, including poor air quality, high poverty rates, weak worker protections and crumbling infrastructure. She believes a data center could add new and potentially dangerous challenges.

The valley has long, brutal summers with temperatures that swell to 120 degrees. If the data center strains the grid and causes a lengthy blackout, or low-income residents have their power shut off because they can’t afford the rising bills, Flores fears the situation could quickly turn deadly.

The city of Imperial also has concerns. The city has filed a lawsuit calling on the county to halt the project, arguing it should not have received a CEQA exemption.

The controversy has drawn attention from Padilla, whose district includes Imperial Valley. Padilla has echoed residents’ calls for more transparency from the county and introduced Senate Bill 887, which would ban data centers from receiving exemptions from CEQA.

“I am not anti-data center or anti-artificial intelligence,” Padilla said. But, he added, we need to “find a way to do this right and make sure there is adequate review and understanding.”

A dusty haze settles over the city of Imperial at dusk near the site of a proposed data center.

Another measure from Padilla, Senate Bill 886, would direct the Public Utilities Commission to create an electrical corporation tariff to cover the cost of data center-related grid upgrades.

Other related legislation this year includes Assembly Bill 2619 from Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) that would require data center owners to provide an estimate about expected water usage and sources before applying for a business license, and Assembly Bill 1577, by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), which would require data center owners to submit monthly information to a state commission about water and fuel consumption and energy efficiency.

While lawmakers weigh new policies at the statehouse, Camarillo said she hopes the priority will be protecting communities.

“Innovation is important, but innovation for the sake of innovation has never really been something that hasn’t had negative impacts,” she said. “Think about human lives.”

SACRAMENTO — Every two years, elite athletes compete in the Olympics, biennial plants — like carrots and onions — produce seeds and people across America look on with consternation and mounting impatience as California counts its election ballots.

The prolonged tally has become as much a part of electioneering in the Golden State as wall-to-wall advertising, high-flown promises and overstuffed mailboxes groaning beneath the weight of endless campaign fliers.

The tabulation — which can last weeks past election day — is the product, in large part, of a commendable objective: Encouraging as many people as possible to vote.

California, which mails a ballot to every eligible voter, ranks near the top of states in the ease of its elections. That’s something to be celebrated. Voting is a way to help steer the direction of our state and nation and invest, as an active participant, in its future.

Yay, participatory democracy!

Unfortunately, the lag time between election day and the final results has led to all sorts of wild, unfounded claims, peddled mainly by Republicans seeking to curry favor with the sore-losing President Trump by parroting his conspiratorial gabbling.

“They hold the elections open for weeks after election day,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said recently, falsely suggesting that chicanery cost the GOP three House seats in California in 2024. “It looks on its face to be fraudulent.”

That’s a lot of, um, hooey.

There is no rampant cheating or election fraud in California. Period. Full stop.

Still, those sorts of phony statements have deeply diminished faith in our elections and our increasingly rickety democracy.

So — what if it were possible to preserve California’s friendly voting system while, at the same time, speeding up the tabulation of its many millions of ballots?

Kim Alexander believes it’s possible to do both.

“We need to stop explaining why it’s taking so long and start figuring out how to [produce election results] in a more satisfying way,” she said. “There are a lot of things that we could do better and do differently. It just takes some creative thinking and some will.”

Simply put, “The longer it takes to count ballots, the more voter confidence erodes.”

Alexander, head of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, has spent more than three decades working to make the state’s elections more efficient, more transparent and more accountable.

Her interest in politics and election mechanics came about while growing up in Culver City, where her father served as a councilman and mayor.

As a 7-year-old, stationed in the garage, it was Alexander’s job to track the returns in her dad’s first campaign, toting up the numbers at an election night party while her mom, posted in the kitchen, called the city clerk for updates. Even at that young age, Alexander learned the importance of a fair and efficient tabulation process.

Over the years, she watched as her father’s political career was stymied by a Democratic gerrymander, which blocked any hopes he had of being elected to Congress or the Legislature as a moderate Republican. She saw firsthand the influence of money in politics. (Her father told her of turning away donations that came with strings attached.) That helped turn her into a political reformer.

After working as a legislative staffer and serving a stint at Common Cause, the good-government lobbying group, Alexander took over the California Voter Foundation in 1994.

As a political noncombatant, Alexander won’t say how it feels, and whether these days she’s more or less optimistic, watching as reckless attacks on our elections come from inside the White House. “I like to describe myself as a realist with high goals,” is all she’d allow.

There are good reasons why it takes California so long to count its ballots.

First off, there are a lot of them; more than 16 million residents voted in the last presidential election, more than the population of all but 10 states. Voting by mail has exploded in popularity and it takes longer to count those ballots, as many don’t arrive until after election day. Also, there are a number of safeguards to prevent fraud and ensure an accurate count. “We’re checking all the signatures,” Alexander said. “We’re making sure nobody votes twice.”

Simply explaining those facts can help build trust, she said. However, that won’t speed up the state’s vote counting. Here, Alexander suggested, are some things that can:

— Increase funding for California’s 58 counties to expand equipment, staff and the space needed to process ballots. In recent years, the state has been asking local election officials to do more and more without reimbursing their costs.

— Educate voters and encourage them to turn their ballots in earlier. Along those lines, a system called “sign, scan and go” allows voters to return their mail ballots in person at a designated polling place. A pilot program in Placer County found that that shaved three to four days off processing time. The system could be implemented statewide.

— Better manage California’s voter database, doing so from the top down in Sacramento, rather than having counties oversee their data and feed it into the system. That bottom-up approach creates delays and a lag time in processing ballots.

— Create “ballot swap” days to speed delivery of out-of-county ballots where they belong, also saving time. (Under California law, voters can return their ballot anywhere in the state, but it must be routed to their home county to be tabulated. That process can now take more than a week.)

The problem, apart from perennial budget pressures, is that interest in election mechanics — a technical and arcane subject if ever there was one — is episodic and fleeting. It’s like worrying about a leaky roof when the temperature is 95 degrees outside and the sun is blazing.

But even without voters clamoring to address California’s slow-poke vote count, lawmakers should act.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently rose to defend the state’s “safe and secure elections” against one of Trump’s many unwarranted attacks. If he wants to burnish his credentials for a 2028 presidential run — which Newsom very much does — one way would be to speed up delivery of its election results.

That way the rest of the country won’t be asking again in November: What the heck’s with California?

Los Angeles County’s chief executive officer Fesia Davenport, who has been on medical leave since October, has announced that she will resign next month.

In a LinkedIn post, Davenport said she was leaving county service to “focus on my health and wellness.”

A notice to the Board of Supervisors provided to The Times Saturday said she had decided to step down April 16 “based primarily on hereditary and ongoing health issues initially uncovered late last year, the risks of which have become clearer based on more recent medical testing and consultation with my doctors.”

She said the “extraordinary amount of time and energy” required of the chief executive played into her decision.

“Although I originally assumed that I would be able to return to my post, I now know that I would be unable to do the job as it deserves to be done while also prioritizing my health,” she told the supervisors.

Supervisor Kathryn Barger issued a statement Saturday saying, “I’m disappointed by Fesia Davenport’s decision to step down. Her dedication and accomplishments over nearly three decades have left a lasting impact on Los Angeles County.”

Davenport, who was appointed to the county’s top job in 2021, received an undisclosed $2-million settlement last summer to compensate for damage to her “professional reputation” from Measure G, a voter-approved ballot measure that will soon eliminate her position.

In a July 8 letter, released by the county counsel in October through a public record request, Davenport said she sought $2 million in damages for “reputational harm, embarrassment, and physical, emotional and mental distress caused by the Measure G.”

Under Measure G, which voters approved in 2024, the county chief executive, who manages the county government and oversees its budget, will be elected by voters instead of appointed by the board. The elected county executive will be in place by 2028.

Measure G “has had, and will continue to have, an unprecedented impact on my professional reputation, health, career, income, and retirement,” Davenport wrote to county counsel Dawyn Harrison. She said it had “irrevocably changed my life, my professional career, economic outlook, and plans for the future.”

At the time the payout was disclosed, Davenport had begun a medical leave, saying at the time she expected to be back to work early this year.

A lengthy email to her staff, posted on LAist, which first disclosed her resignation, said the unspecified “health crisis” has affected three of her siblings and posed risks to her that “have become clearer based on more recent medical testing and consultation with my doctors.”

Her brother Raymond died in 2018 after “experiencing a sudden health crisis,” she said. Last year, two more of her sisters survived the same health crisis, but one will now require 24-hour care for the rest of her life, she said.

“Although I am not out of the woods yet, I am thankful to the Board for granting me the space to focus on my health and to arm myself with the knowledge I needed to make informed decisions,” she wrote.

The office of chief executive issued a statement Saturday saying chief operating officer Joe Nicchitta will continue serving as acting chief executive officer while Davenport remains on medical leave.

“We appreciate Fesia’s nearly three decades of service to Los Angeles County and all that she has accomplished on behalf of its residents and communities,” the statement said.

Davenport listed a number of accomplishments in her letter to the board, including setting up five new departments maintaining the county’s credit rating when other jurisdictions were being downgraded and “balancing the budget while developing a financing plan to compensate sexual assault victims — the largest settlement of its kind in American history.”

That payout has now come under scrutiny after a Times investigation found that some plaintiffs had been paid to join the class-action lawsuit.

A Christian engineer with L.A. County claims his bosses discriminated against him by forcing him to pass by a Pride flag on the way to his office, the latest legal challenge to the government’s policy of requiring many government buildings display the flag throughout June.

Eric Batman, a 24-year veteran of the Department of Public Works, sued the county March 10 for refusing to let him work remotely in June, when the rainbow-striped flag hangs in front of his department’s Alhambra headquarters.

It’s the second lawsuit to target the county’s 2023 policy ordering the raising of the “Progress Pride Flag,” a modified version of the traditional rainbow flag with additional stripes representing people of color and transgender and nonbinary people.

In May 2024, Jeffrey Little, an evangelical Christian county lifeguard, sued the county for requiring he work feet away from the flag. That case, filed by conservative Catholic legal group Thomas More Society, is ongoing.

Batman said he first asked to work remotely for the month of June in 2024 to avoid the flag, which he found “highly offensive,” according to the suit.

A supervisor rejected his request, according to the filing, noting the county was “committed to fostering an inclusive workplace, including for our LGBTQ+ employees.” The supervisor suggested he use another entrance, Batman’s suit claimed.

“They wouldn’t give it to him because the county said ‘Our interest is in inclusivity — regardless of whether or not that includes you,”’ said Daniel Schmid, an attorney with Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal group representing Batman.

Liberty Counsel frequently takes on high-profile plaintiffs who oppose same-sex marriage, including the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to provide marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

A spokesperson for the county’s public works department said she could not comment on the suit as it had not yet been served.