ACCORDING TO LIZ - California county officials rejected almost 150,000 mail-in ballots in June’s primary election.
While California prides itself on voting laws designed to prevent ordinary postal delays and administrative mistakes from costing people their votes this past election reflected a 35% increase over those kicked out in the 2024 primary.
Ideally, every active registered voter receives a mail ballot, ballots can arrive as many as seven days after Election Day and still count if postmarked on time, and every voter can correct signature problems.
So, what happened?
Over 93,000 were rejected for being late. According to the Center for Inclusive Democracy, the share of those ballots tossed out for tardiness rose to 63% from a 45% rejection rate in November’s special election.
This at a time when the integrity of the U.S. Postal Service is increasingly under attack by the president and his puppet-Postmaster General and follows decades of government-shrinking by Republican administrations.
Voting advocates believe many ballots arriving within the state’s mandated grace period were rejected because, although mailed on June 2, the envelopes were not franked until the following day, voiding those votes due to USPS structural ineptitude from budgetary starvation and conflicting internal policy positions.
This was glaringly apparent in large, predominately agricultural counties such as Tulare where postal service consolidation certainly contributed to a rate of rejection double the state average.
Given that, historically Republicans vote early while Democrats and Nonpartisan voters play a wait-and-see game over how political situations play out and mature closer to Election Day, this should be seen as deliberate partisan meddling especially when added to the president’s ongoing efforts to harness the post office in his brazen attempts to strangle voting by mail.
Another 50,000 and more of Californians’ mail-in ballots were rejected because envelopes lacked a signature or election workers thought the voter’s signature didn’t match the one on file.
The evolution of the ballots and return instructions have mutated significantly in recent years for many reasons, mostly legitimate, raising the level of complications for voters already overwhelmed by the complexity of California voting choices.
Evidence from past elections makes clear that the vast majority of these rejected ballots were cast by legitimate voters who were disenfranchised by overly strict rules enforcement.
Signatures change over time; banks routinely reject checks, often of perfectly good customers but whose accounts were opened decades before. People, especially women, develop arthritis, others have accidents, many are in a rush and unused to signing an envelope padded with multiple pages.
Official scrutinizers may have an agenda or just a bad day or feel threatened by the current administration’s aggression. None of these void a voter’s rights.
As provided for in Section 3019 of the California Elections Code, the “presumption exists that the signature on the identification envelope, signature verification statement, unsigned identification envelope statement, or provisional ballot envelope is the voter’s signature and that the vote will be counted.”
If a ballot envelope is missing a signature, or if the signature does not match with their records, election officials are required to notify the voter by first-class mail and, when possible, by telephone, text, and e-mail, to give them reasonable opportunity to fix the issue by the required deadline. A ballot may be rejected only if the issue is not corrected in time.
Voters themselves might have been confused in June as to their rights when online screeds in response to the recent reforms which limit the rights of outside observers to challenge signatures was construed as a denial of the opportunity to demonstrate that their current signature was legit or even sign their envelope virtually after-the-fact.
So why, following outrage over ballot legitimacy complaints in New Jersey and Arizona, Georgia in 2020 and squawks from would-be gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco last fall, isn’t California up in arms over this more documented disenfranchisement?
The contrast between the responses to the New Jersey and California situations is especially striking because the president’s cronies were so quick to criticize the California system while the primary ballots were still being counted.
Trump made unsupported fraud allegations about the state’s slow count, while the DOJ sent a federal observer to Los Angeles.
The administration and alt-right talking heads were out in force when it was revealed that a glitch in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission system automatically registered 6,600 non-citizens. Fewer than 400 of whom voted.
High drama. A federal probe was launched. Histrionic demands to immediately pass Trump’s pet SAVE America Act rose to the rafters. Congressional subpoenas were threatened.
But now? For such an over-the-top disenfranchisement of California voters? Barely a murmur.
The final data revealed that nearly 150,000 California mail-in votes had not counted – 400 times those voting illegally in the Garden State, but there was no equivalent White House outrage complete with social media posts rife with capitalizations and exclamation points driving news headlines across the country.
While squealing over 2020 election “steals” in Georgia and Arizona are still reverberating.
Other than what occurred in California, what these allegations have in common is that they were aggressively promoted by the president and his Republican election deniers.
The midterm elections are coming up all too fast; 11 weeks can pass in a blink of an eye. Especially with all the schmutz Trump keeps pitching in people's faces.
To overthrow the overstepping of a government ripe with corruption, one that is vociferously demanding the entire country kowtow to its falsifications and misleading interpretations, Californians must seize their inner outrage and band together with Americans facing similar injustices to take back the rule of law, of what’s right, and rebuild our democracy.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
