other state

Nearly two-thirds of California voters are worried that the Trump administration may try to halt the vote count early, stoking disquieting levels of election anxiety on the eve of the midterms, a new poll shows.

Those fears arise as the Justice Department continues its aggressive efforts to challenge or wrest control over state voting processes, including threatening to prosecute uncooperative elections officials in California, after years of baseless claims of widespread election fraud by the Republican president.

Among California voters, 63% worry that the federal government may attempt to stop the counting of votes in California and other states in the days following Tuesday’s election, according to the poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times. Around half of voters — 49% — are not confident that the state’s election will be free of federal interference, the survey found.

“Both of the items, together, I think should raise alarms for threats against democracy in California,” said Matt Barreto, director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

California voters also have grievances with the state’s ballot propositions, a slate of 14 measures that include new taxes on billionaires and funding for cancer research. More than 8 in 10 of the state’s likely voters said that this year’s propositions were worded in a way that made them hard to understand and that special interests groups have too much influence over which propositions appear on the ballot.

Those concerns were shared across partisan lines, unlike how Californians felt about the threats posed to integrity of elections by the Trump administration. The high level of fear in the state reflects the fact that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by nearly 2 to 1 in California.

While 58% of Democrats are not confident the election will be free of federal interference, 27% of Republicans feel the same way, according to the poll. Similarly, 85% of Democrats are worried about the vote count being halted, compared with 22% of Republicans. A majority of California voters not affiliated with either party also expressed fears of interference by the Trump administration.

“I think voters are reflecting the reality,” Barreto said. “For the past month, the president and the Department of Justice have been attempting to directly interfere and take over California elections and voters are aware of that.”

The Department of Justice has sued California requesting the state set aside some 20,000 ballots the federal government has flagged as being potentially from noncitizens. Federal prosecutors have threatened criminal actions against election officials who refuse to comply. On Monday, the Trump administration escalated its effort to discount the flagged California ballots to the Supreme Court, which rejected its request to set aside the ballots.

Over the weekend, Newsom sent a letter to U.S. District Court judges across California sharing his “grave concerns federal agents will seek search warrants to seize ballots and ballot materials before the election results are certified” and urging judges not to comply.

Newsom wrote that President Trump’s history of weaponizing the Department of Justice to carry out his partisan agenda supports “legitimate concerns about further attempts to disenfranchise voters and undermine election integrity.” Newsom said this could include an attempt to prevent the certification of California’s election.

Concerns have also been raised about the presence of immigration agents around voting centers and performing door knocks and street stops to try to identify voter fraud.

Court rulings have recently dealt a series of blows to the Trump administrations efforts to intervene in the state’s voting process. Nonetheless, distress over election integrity remains extremely high, according to the poll.

Fears of federal meddling in the election are slightly higher among voters of color; 64% of Black voters and 54% of Latino voters said they are not confident the election will be free of interference, compared with 44% of white non-Hispanic voters, according to the poll.

Voters of color tend to lean more liberal, but the historic and ongoing efforts to disenfranchise minorities probably also contribute to this disparity, Barreto said.

Black voters have been a target of voter suppression efforts from the post-Civil War Reconstruction era through the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he said. More recently, the Trump administration has singled out Latino Californians, accusing them of being noncitizens and voting illegally.

Professor Eric Schickler, co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, described the level of alarm over election integrity in California and across the nation as without precedent.

He noted that both parties are distrustful about different things, with Republicans focused on allegations of fraudulent voting and Democrats fearful that the federal government may attempt to overturn results.

The last time America saw extreme political polarization paired with widespread claims of illegitimacy over election outcomes was during the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century, when there were widespread accusations of voter suppression in the South and of people voting illegally in the North, he said.

“That hasn’t happened really in the United States for well over a century now,” Schickler said, “so what we’re seeing now is really unusual, especially for a modern and long-lived democracy.”

Schickler said his highest level of concern with possible federal efforts to halt California’s vote count would be with congressional races. A handful of California races could play a pivotal role in deciding which party takes control of the U.S. House of Representatives. However, he said current polling data do not indicate that a Democratic path to victory in the lower house will rely on Golden State voters.

Trump in the past has criticized California for being one of the slowest states in the nation to finish tabulating its election results due to its large population and high number of voters who mail in their ballots. He’s also complained about late arriving ballots. Votes processed after election day in California typically contain a higher proportion of Democratic ballots than those processed on election night.

In addition, to highlight the unprecedented anxiety many California voters are feeling, the poll also shines a light on frustrations voters have with the state’s ballot propositions. Among likely voters, 82% agree that the wording of this year’s propositions made them hard to understand and 82% also agree that special interest groups have largely taken over which initiatives qualify.

In addition, 62% of likely voters feel that there are too many propositions on this year’s ballot. There are 14 statewide propositions, with many voters also seeing additional initiatives at a county and city level.

“The initiative is meant to be an outlet for voters when special interest groups lead legislators to fail to respond to their concerns,” Schickler said. “But now most voters believe the initiative process is itself too beholden to special interests.”

In the last 20 years, California’s ballot initiative campaigns have become increasingly controlled by large corporations or union groups. Part of this is due to the fact that it takes at least $50 million to run an effective campaign capable of reaching the state’s 23 million registered voters, making it challenging, but not impossible, to run a grassroots campaign, Barreto said.

The poll surveyed 2,787 registered voters in California from Oct. 19 to 25 in English and Spanish and has an overall estimated margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. Among likely voters, the estimated margin of error is about 3 percentage points in either direction.

Times staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.

Two decades ago, political scientists identified a certain breed of self-defeating gerrymander that backfired on mapmakers who tried to rig congressional district lines for partisan advantage.

They called it a “dummymander.”

“A dummymander is a gerrymander by one party that, over the course of the decade, benefits the other party, and actually looks as if it was designed by that party rather than the party in power,” Bernard Grofman and Thomas Brunell wrote in “The Art of the Dummymander.”

The phenomenon came out of Democratic legislatures in the Deep South in the 1990s. Attempting to protect incumbents amid a political realignment toward Republicans, they spread what was left of their voting strength across too many districts after the 1990 census.

Grofman and Brunell compared their situation to a lifeboat. “The carrying capacity of any lifeboat is limited,” they said. “If you try to overload it, the boat may sink, or at least tip over, washing a number of people overboard.”

Over the last two years, Democrats and Republicans have battled to redraw House districts, in a process kicked off by Texas Republicans’ adoption of a new map — at the direction of President Trump — that shifted as many as five seats their way. Other states joined in, including retaliation by Democrats in California. Courts blocked some of both parties’ efforts, with the resulting national map tilted toward Republicans by about nine seats, on net.

Now, as analysts forecast a potential “blue wave” of support for Democrats, election watchers are studying whether Republicans’ efforts could backfire. The upshot? Probably not this year. But the election will test just how much partisan advantage mapmakers can squeeze out before a gerrymander starts working against them.

‘A perfect storm’

The Democrats’ 1990s dummymander wasn’t apparent immediately: For one election, in 1992, the Democratic maps worked. Across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, Democrats won 18 of 29 House seats. Their only misstep: In trying to gerrymander Republican Newt Gingrich out of his district, they forced him to move to a new district where he won narrowly.

Two years later, the weather turned. Gingrich led the “Republican Revolution” during President Clinton’s first midterm and was rewarded with the speaker’s gavel. The 18 dummymandered Democratic seats were reduced to 10.

Today’s potential dummymanders are different. For starters, House districts are meant to be redrawn once a decade, following the U.S. census. The Democratic dummymanders in the ‘90s came after constitutionally required reshuffling. The mid-decade gerrymanders of 2025 and 2026 were purely opportunistic. Republican-led states such as Texas and Florida redrew maps at Trump’s urging, not to protect vulnerable seats, but to extend their partisan advantage.

These gerrymanders are also different in that they could conceivably backfire in their first election, rather than producing the delayed reaction of the Southern Democrats’ earlier dummymander.

“We are in a perfect storm for dummymanders,” said Brunell, now a political science professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. The formula: extreme partisan gerrymandering — mostly by Republicans — and a midterm election with an unpopular president and economic headwinds.

Margin for error

Some dummymanders are dumber than others. The real test isn’t whether Republicans lose seats in Tuesday’s elections — it’s whether they’re left worse off than if they had left the old districts in place. “There can be degrees of dummyness,” Brunell said.

Republicans drew their maps to withstand a blue wave that crests at about a 10- to 12-point margin. The RealClearPolitics average of generic congressional polls now gives Democrats an advantage of just over 8 points — meaning that if the polls are broadly right, Republicans will still likely end up benefiting from the new maps.

Jonathan Cervas, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has drawn his own maps as a court-appointed special master, said a true dummymander seems unlikely and is “wishful thinking” by Democrats.

And even if it happens, Cervas argues, it won’t be bad mapmaking that loses the House for Republicans, who now control the chamber by just a few seats.

“Everything is so nationalized that the shifts that happen in Texas are the same shifts that happen everywhere,” Cervas said.

Assuming that voters move toward Democrats in roughly equal measures across the country, Republicans will have lost dozens of competitive districts in states that weren’t redrawn — such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Iowa, Wisconsin and Colorado — before any blue wave gets to Texas and Florida.

“At that point,” said Cervas, “it would not have mattered because they would have lost so many seats anyway.”

Korte writes for Bloomberg. Adrienne Tong of Bloomberg contributed to this report.

RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats, was charged Thursday with leading what authorities alleged was a wide-ranging criminal enterprise that acquired and distributed large quantities of marijuana and laundered the proceeds.

Lucas, who has been in elected office for decades, used her political power to insulate the operation from scrutiny, according to an indictment charging her and six other defendants, including several of her relatives. She “put her own financial interests before the people she was elected to serve,” said U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, who spoke at a news conference with FBI Director Kash Patel.

Lucas surrendered, the Justice Department said. She made a brief appearance in federal court on Thursday afternoon, where she was released on her own recognizance, according to court records. She left the court without addressing media gathered outside and went straight into a waiting vehicle.

The charges, including drug trafficking and money laundering, came after the FBI searched Lucas’ hometown office and a cannabis shop in which she has a stake in May. At the time of the search, Lucas — who has been a vocal critic of Republican President Trump’s administration — characterized it as an attempt to intimidate her.

“This is the circus we always expected it to be,” said Brian Woolfolk, chief counsel for the L. Louise Lucas Legal Defense Fund.

Lucas says she won’t be bullied by the federal government

A statement attributed to Lucas posted on her social media account did not directly address the substance of the charges but said Thursday’s actions amounted to the federal government wielding its “full weight” against a great-grandmother.

“I will not be intimidated. I will not be bullied. And I will not back down,” Lucas said in the statement.

The brash 82-year-old lawmaker has spent decades ascending the ranks of Virginia politics and has served since 1992 in the state Senate, where she’s the president pro tempore, overseeing the chamber in the lieutenant governor’s absence. More significantly, she leads the powerful Senate finance committee, through which all legislation with any budget impact must flow. She’s used the position to kill legislation she opposes.

Justice Department denies politics played a role

The indictment comes as Trump’s Justice Department has faced intense scrutiny over investigations and prosecutions against foes of the president that critics have called politically motivated.

Blanche rejected any suggestion politics played a role in Lucas’ case, noting the investigation began well before the second Trump administration started in January 2025.

“We don’t do political paybacks,” Blanche told reporters.

A person familiar with the May search told the Associated Press at the time that the probe was opened during Democratic President Biden’s administration. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing criminal investigation.

FBI alleges a ‘criminal marijuana enterprise’

Patel said in a statement that “Lucas and a close-knit group of family members and associates orchestrated a multi-year scheme to enrich their own criminal marijuana enterprise, ‘the Lucas Enterprise’ — using Lucas’ position as Chairwoman of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee to insulate the enterprise from criminal scrutiny and influencing legislation to financially benefit themselves.”

The indictment describes Lucas as the “leader of the enterprise” who “approved and directed criminal activities,” including arranging for the acquisition and distribution of marijuana and supervising the laundering of the proceeds.

The indictment alleges Lucas worked this year with another of the defendants to use her political position to obtain a recreational marijuana license for him, with the understanding that the proceeds from sales under the license would be shared with her to support the “enterprise.”

Since 2021, marijuana has been legal to possess in Virginia, and many shops across the state have sold cannabis-derived products. But full recreational sales are not yet underway; legislation enacted earlier this year will allow them beginning in July 2027.

Law enforcement made multiple controlled purchases of marijuana from Lucas’ shop, which purported to sell hemp products, in 2024 and 2025, the indictment said.

In addition to drug and money laundering charges, Lucas faces a charge of racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and maintaining a drug-involved premises. An arraignment is scheduled for next month.

Among the other defendants who face a mix of those and other charges are two daughters of Lucas and a grandson. It was unclear if they had obtained legal representation. They were also scheduled to make an initial court appearance Thursday afternoon.

Virginia officials react

A forceful advocate of legalizing marijuana, Lucas partnered in opening the shop, The Cannabis Outlet, in 2021. She has publicly spoken about her ownership stake as recently as June, though her most recent financial disclosure forms do not list the business by name.

At the time of the search — when marijuana was recovered at The Cannabis Outlet, according to the indictment — many Democrats spoke up to defend Lucas.

On Thursday, Scott Surovell, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, said in a statement that the indictment contained “serious allegations” but emphasized that “Senator Lucas has the right to defend herself, and she has my full support as she does so.” Atty. Gen. Jay Jones, a Democrat who is close with Lucas, said the allegations against her must be tested in a “full and fair” legal process.

House Speaker Don Scott, Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger, all Democrats, echoed those sentiments, with Spanberger adding that the timing of the indictment so close to the midterm election would “further erode” Americans’ trust in the Justice Department. Lucas herself is not on the ballot this year.

Ryan McDougle, the Senate Republican leader, said he would not comment while the court proceedings play out.

The senator draws comparisons to Trump

Lucas, who represents a district that includes her hometown of coastal Portsmouth, operates with a sometimes-profane, unapologetic style that’s drawn comparisons to Trump.

She amassed a six-figure following on X and national attention, using the social media platform to advocate forcefully for her priorities and to bash her critics, including former GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin. She’s also occasionally blasted members of her own party, including Spanberger, with whom she’s had disagreements.

Earlier this year, Lucas helped lead Democrats’ ultimately unsuccessful plan to gerrymander the blue-leaning state’s congressional districts into a map intended to elect 10 Democrats and only one Republican. Along the way, she posted quips about four GOP members the intended map sought to oust, joking that they soon would be working at McDonald’s. She and other Democrats defended the maps as a reasonable response to Trump-backed efforts to boost the GOP’s midterm advantage in other states.

Lucas has been in politics for decades

Lucas has notched several historic firsts in her career. According to a biography from the state library, in 1971 she became the Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s first female shipfitter, a physically demanding job that involves working on metal assemblies for vessels.

She launched her political career in 1984, when, the biography said, she became the first Black woman elected to the Portsmouth City Council.

In the state Senate, Lucas has been a staunch advocate for abortion rights and increased public school funding and a leading voice on issues of racial justice and civil rights.

In 2019, after Democrats flipped control of the chamber, her peers elected her to serve as president pro tempore. And in 2024, she was tapped to lead the chamber’s budget committee, gaining enormous sway over any legislation tied to the state budget.

Richer and Rankin write for the Associated Press. Richer reported from Washington and Rankin reported from Richmond, Va. AP journalists Eric Tucker in Washington and Steve Helber in Norfolk, Va., contributed to this report.

A sweeping campaign by federal immigration agents to identify voter fraud by noncitizens through door knocks, street stops and other field interviews in California and eight other states must be reined in ahead of the Nov. 3 election, after a federal judge in Northern California ruled it has intimidated U.S. citizens and interfered with the work of voting rights groups.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin said in a ruling Wednesday that limiting the Department of Homeland Security’s surging operations in those states — which she wrote “sweep in U.S. citizens for investigation” — does not prevent the Trump administration from “exercising their authority to investigate voter fraud by lawful means.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency is “laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote,” and has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.”

The ruling was the latest to come out of an unprecedented legal war playing out between the Trump administration and California in recent days, in which an array of election cases are working their way through the federal courts at breakneck speed.

There is, for example, the lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department filed against California and state and local elections officials last week, demanding that they set aside any ballots from a list of 20,000 individuals identified by immigration officials as “likely noncitizens.”

There are also two cases out of Washington, D.C., in which a coalition of Democratic leaders, immigrant rights groups, voting rights experts and naturalized citizens in California are challenging the Trump administration’s use of Homeland Security data to target voters.

The litigation is playing out amid an intense political debate about election security at the national level — driven in part by President Trump, a longtime election denier — and a sweeping campaign by his administration to root out and parade examples of alleged voter fraud in the final days before the election.

White House, Homeland Security and Justice Department officials have all defended the administration’s efforts as necessary to ensure that noncitizens are not illegally diluting the votes of U.S. citizens. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, has claimed to have “overwhelming evidence” that tens of thousands of noncitizens are doing so in California.

‘That is not normal’

Democratic leaders and prominent elections experts, meanwhile, have cast the administration’s claims as baseless and intentionally exaggerated to stoke uncertainty about election security and ultimately challenge midterm results the president doesn’t like, and the Justice Department’s legal arguments as fundamentally flawed and wildly out of line with long-established department policy to stay out of elections in the lead up to voting.

“That is not normal. We have literally never experienced that in American history. Not once,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former Justice Department elections attorney. “The fact that the administration appears poised for the first time to act as an adversary to the states and counties who have [the] undisputed constitutional authority to run elections? That is unusual.”

At the same time, Becker and other experts stressed that those efforts to date have failed, and state and local elections have largely proceeded in recent weeks without incident, with millions of Americans having already cast their ballots.

“California voters need to know that they’re in good hands, that we have leaders at the state and local levels who are protecting our ballots and are ensuring that these attempts by the federal government to root out supposed noncitizen voting are not going to prevent Californians from casting our ballots,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. “Part of the strategy here is to distract people and scare people and raise fears, and the important thing is to continue to stay focused on … making a plan to vote.”

Status of cases

Federal courts have already rejected multiple Trump executive orders seeking to enforce nationwide voter ID and citizenship requirements. The Supreme Court blocked an administration plan for the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail ballots. The Justice Department has compiled a stunning record of losses in its 30 lawsuits demanding state voter rolls — with 26 of those cases, including the one in California, so far dismissed.

And election experts said they expect the Trump administration to rack up more losses in coming days — including in the Justice Department’s case challenging California officials’ refusal to segregate the ballots of some 20,000 voters based on the administration’s unsubstantiated claims they are noncitizens.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, shown in 2023, is overseeing a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice says 20,000 California ballots may have been sent to “likely noncitizens.”

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

That case was taken up — and scheduled for a Tuesday hearing — by Judge David O. Carter, an appointee of President Clinton who in January rejected the administration’s demand for California’s voter rolls, calling it a clear federal overreach that would have a “chilling effect” on voters and threaten American democracy.

California has called for the case to be dismissed outright, on the grounds that the administration has zero authority to make such demands, and that the demands are unlawful. The Trump administration has asked Carter to immediately rule in the matter.

“Every minute of [ballot] processing that occurs without segregating the ballots of suspected non-eligible voters causes untraceable disenfranchisement and dilution of the votes of United States citizens,” wrote Julie Hamill, an assistant U.S. attorney in Essayli’s office.

In D.C. federal court, Judge James E. Boasberg set an Oct. 30 hearing in a case in which UCLA Voting Rights Project attorneys, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo are challenging the administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege California voters aren’t citizens.

Carl Bergquist, an attorney for CHIRLA, said he looked forward to bringing a host of recent Trump administration actions to the court’s attention — including the administration’s lawsuit against California, the charging this week of 28 legal permanent residents in California with election-related crimes, and Trump’s threats to arrest California elections officials who don’t comply with his administration’s demands.

“The events of the last few days, from threats to state and local officials, increased general immigration operations, the random knocking on doors by federal agents and the recent arrests are causing a chill in the community,” Bergquist said. “People, including naturalized citizens, are making their plans to vote and the Federal Government is doing its utmost to quash their attempts to exercise this fundamental right that they have lawfully acquired.”

The argument that naturalized citizens are being intimidated also features prominently in a second lawsuit filed in D.C. federal court Tuesday, in which top Democrats in Congress joined Nevada party officials and a California immigrant named Erick Jose Jimenez to challenge the Trump administration’s unprecedented voter fraud probes.

That lawsuit, also assigned to Boasberg, says Jimenez, a naturalized citizen since 2006, fears being “unlawfully targeted for voting and disenfranchised (or worse).”

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who studies elections and was a senior policy advisor on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said there is “so much noise” around the election right now, in part because the administration has been making wild legal arguments about its authority over elections.

But he said “none of the federal government’s attempts to assert power that they do not have are working,” and voting “for 99.999% of the public” will remain “wonderfully normal.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballot errors are rare but not unheard of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Finn Gomez / Getty Images)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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