{"id":285566,"date":"2026-04-25T13:39:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/285566\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T13:39:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:39:25","slug":"california-verifies-the-vote-slowly-fueling-mistrust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/285566\/","title":{"rendered":"California verifies the vote slowly, fueling mistrust"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maya C. Miller<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\""Several\"
\n\t\t\t\tElection workers sort ballots at the Fresno County Elections Warehouse in Fresno on Nov. 5, 2025. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters\/CatchLight Local<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

Political persecution, threats of violence and the seizure of sensitive documents might sound like a plot line for a heist or thriller movie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For California election officials tasked with enabling participatory democracy, these are now everyday realities \u2014 from Riverside County, where Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots<\/a> from his own county\u2019s registrar of voters, to Shasta County, where threats of violence forced the longtime registrar to retire early<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The integrity of the state\u2019s voting systems will be under intense scrutiny this year with control of the U.S. House on the line, as Californians could play a decisive role in which party wins the majority. Yet while timely and decisive results are more crucial than ever, California is famous for its ploddingly slow vote count.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That lengthy wait has increasingly sown distrust in the accuracy of California\u2019s results, especially among Republicans, and particularly in races where a candidate leading on election day falls behind as more ballots are processed in subsequent days.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day matters,\u201d said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. \u201cElection security is about security in reality and also security in perception, and they’re both equally important.\u201d<\/p>\n

During a panel Thursday on election integrity, presented by CalMatters and the UC Student and Policy Center, Alexander argued that election administrators are boxing themselves into a \u201cfalse choice\u201d if they sacrifice timeliness in the name of accuracy. When winners aren\u2019t decided for days, sometimes weeks, the ensuing uncertainty leaves room for doubt to take root, speculation to grow and misinformation to spread.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It took eight days in 2024 for The Associated Press to be able to declare Republicans had won control of the U.S. House, partly because of outstanding votes in California races, Alexander said. Two years earlier, it took nine days. In 2020, it took the AP seven days to determine that Democrats would retain the House, she said. Each time, outcomes in California swing districts played a decisive role.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re creating a window of opportunity for people to make these claims,\u201d Alexander said, referring to largely unfounded claims of systemic voter fraud and election rigging. \u201cWe have to acknowledge that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fellow panelists defended California\u2019s meticulousness as crucial to its election integrity. Assemblymember Gail Pellerin<\/a>, Democratic chair of the Assembly elections committee and former Santa Cruz County registrar of voters, argued that county officials need time to verify voters\u2019 signatures on vote-by-mail envelopes \u201cso people don’t get disenfranchised for penmanship or for failure to sign.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s nothing in law that says, I need to meet your deadline,\u201d Pellerin said of media outlets and journalists who are eager to call races on election night. \u201cWhat the law says is that I need to count the votes accurately, securely. I need to check them, and double-check them, and audit them, and then I certify them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matt Barreto, director of the UCLA Voting Rights Center, noted that counties have 30 days post-election to certify their results and submit them to the secretary of state. That process, he said, should be completed as quickly as possible but \u201cnot at the expense of the county registrars doing their job effectively to make sure every vote is counted.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Catharine Baker, head of the UC Center, emphasized \u2014 pointedly to Pellerin \u2014 that counties need more money to make sure they\u2019re sufficiently staffed and have the equipment they need to count efficiently.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They all agreed that voters can do one thing to speed up the count: turn in their mail ballots early so counties can process them before election day.<\/p>\n

Large partisan divide over election integrity<\/p>\n

California voters are highly polarized in their views on the status of democracy in their state and country, largely along party lines.<\/p>\n

A new survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found a third of Democrats said they are \u201cextremely satisfied\u201d or \u201cvery satisfied\u201d with the way democracy works in California, while only 4% of Republicans said they felt that way. Conversely, more than two-thirds of Republicans are not satisfied at all, compared to 10% of Democrats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those results are practically unchanged from voters\u2019 responses in 2024, despite several major political events, including a presidential election that President Donald Trump won, a new presidential administration and a special election in California<\/a> in which voters adopted more partisan gerrymandered congressional districts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt speaks to the fact that in a lot of ways our democracy is stuck,\u201d said Eric Schickler, a UC Berkeley political science professor and co-director of the institute. \u201cRepublicans have one perspective on what’s wrong \u2014 they make claims of voter fraud and slow ballot counts,\u201d he said, \u201cand Democrats have another, which is concerns about voter suppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poll also highlighted the partisan divide over a proposed ballot initiative<\/a> from Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio<\/a> of San Diego that would require Californians to show photo identification to vote. When asked whether they would support the measure, but without any context about who was for and against it, 56% of survey respondents said they strongly or moderately supported it, while 39% were strongly or moderately opposed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But those shifted the more information voters were given. When told that DeMaio was the main proponent of preventing fraud and that Democrats argue the measure is part of Trump\u2019s agenda to keep people of color from voting, the support flipped, with only 39% supporting the measure and 52% opposed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Maya C. Miller, CalMatters Election workers sort ballots at the Fresno County Elections Warehouse in Fresno on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285567,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,1708,9,8,76068,1649,97876],"class_list":{"0":"post-285566","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-elections","10":"tag-california-headlines","11":"tag-california-news","12":"tag-governor-race-2026","13":"tag-u-s-congress","14":"tag-votingmatters"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}