On social media and on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” President Donald Trump is claiming with no evidence that Democrats are cheating in California’s primary election.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
On Sunday, during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” President Donald Trump insisted that the California primary elections were “rigged.” In his view, the only reason “they have an election and five days later, they’re nowhere close to picking a winner” is because “They’re crooked.”
This echoed the bogus claims he made last week on Truth Social. “There is Big Cheating by Dumocrats in California….Dumocrats,” he wrote. In another post, he said, “The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”
The number of mail-in ballots is “massive” because California is one of eight states that automatically sends mail ballots to all registered voters, as does the District of Columbia.
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As the vote counting in the June 2 primary went on, the president observed, “You see what’s happening in California, they’re rigging the election … They found a lot of mail-in ballots last night.”
With the counting not yet complete, one of the two candidates Trump referenced, Steve Hilton, appears likely to be on the November ballot for governor. The other, Steve Pratt, is, as of Sunday, in third place in the race for mayor of Los Angeles.
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So why start denouncing the elections now?
There are two things in play. One is that the president wants a ready-made excuse if candidates he endorsed do not survive in the Golden State’s open primary system. But the president is also using the California primary to ramp up his ongoing efforts to sow doubt about election integrity in the minds of Americans everywhere.
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Trump is rehearsing what he will say if the Republicans lose control of the House or the Senate in the November midterm elections.
No one should be fooled by the president’s allegations about voter fraud in California. The state has lots of problems, but fraudulent voting is not one of them.
Indeed, it takes longer to count ballots and certify elections in California than elsewhere because, by law, election officials are required to count valid mail-in ballots that are postmarked before but arrive after Election Day, verify signatures and give voters time to fix ballot problems.
That hasn’t stopped the president’s allies from launching investigations of voting irregularities in California. It was not surprising when, on June 4, less than one day after Trump made his charges, that U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, whom the president appointed to lead the Central District of California, announced that his office was pursuing “multiple election fraud investigations” in coordination with the FBI in Los Angeles.
Echoing the president, Essayli took to X to assert that “California’s election system has serious structural vulnerabilities. Universal vote-by-mail with no voter ID requirements creates conditions where fraud can go undetected and unpunished, eroding public confidence.”
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Essayli bemoaned the fact that the state did not roll over when the Department of Justice demanded a treasure trove of data on all California voters. “The state has stonewalled every effort to verify that only eligible U.S. citizens are registered to vote,” he wrote. “My office will not look the other way. We will investigate and prosecute. Every legal vote deserves to be counted. Every illegal vote cancels one out.”
Fox News amplified the MAGA message. In addition, a 2017 report of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights singled out the state for what it called “Indiscriminate use of Permanent Absentee Voting.”
And members of the president’s army of election deniers have targeted California, even though it has been reliably blue for a long time. As a story in the Los Angeles Times observed, one of them, Douglas Frank, “explains his California focus by saying that conservatives in the state already know something is off and are open to his message. … Also key, he said, is the sheer population of California counties. Swaying a single California county to stop using machines or to clean its voter rolls affects more people than implementing those changes in some states.”
In one of those counties, Riverside County, Sheriff Chad Bianco, a gubernatorial candidate in fourth place so far, made a splash in 2025 when he seized 650,000 ballots from a special election, citing fraud allegations. However, none of it seemed credible to the state Supreme Court, which blocked the effort.
Indeed, identifying voter fraud in the Golden State is like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, found only one case in 2025, one in 2024 and one in 2023.
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Despite these facts, Trump and his allies know what they are doing.
California Sen. Adam Schiff got it right when he said: “Let’s be honest about what this is: A blatant attempt to cast doubt in our election results, and a phony pretext for Trump to act illegally in the midterms … California has safe and secure elections. And it takes time for every vote to count. It’s called democracy, Donald.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.