LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 The U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Los Angeles said Friday it had opened \u201cmultiple election fraud investigations\u201d related to California\u2019s elections and sent a prosecutor to the county\u2019s vote-counting center.<\/p>\n
The developments came a day after President Donald Trump made baseless claims<\/a> of mass fraud in California\u2019s drawn-out vote count from Tuesday\u2019s primary<\/a>. Late-tallied Democratic-leaning mail ballots were continuing to eat into the vote totals for the president\u2019s preferred candidates for governor and Los Angeles mayor.<\/p>\n The announcement by U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, Trump\u2019s appointee as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, and the visit to Los Angeles County\u2019s ballot tabulation center marked an escalation in the president\u2019s campaign against the Democratic-dominated state, whose notoriously prolonged vote<\/a> count has been a magnet for election conspiracy theories. Trump weighed in again Friday while participating in a roundtable discussion in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, claiming without evidence that Democrats were rigging the election.<\/p>\n \u201cYou look at what\u2019s happening \u2014 it\u2019s getting tighter and tighter and tighter,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the people who were supposed to win, bad things are happening. It\u2019s a crooked state.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump has often said that changes to vote totals as late ballots are counted are a sign of fraud<\/a>, when they\u2019re merely a reflection of more ballots being counted.<\/p>\n On Thursday, Trump said his Department of Justice was investigating the California count. By Friday morning, Essayli posted on X about ongoing investigations without providing details, saying only that California\u2019s elections have \u201cserious structural vulnerabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n An assistant U.S. attorney came to the main ballot processing center Friday morning, according to a statement from Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for Los Angeles County\u2019s Registrar-Recorder. The prosecutor \u201cwas provided an overview of the public observation program, and participated in a walkthrough of the ballot processing operations,\u201d Sanchez said.<\/p>\n He added that \u201celection officials routinely host observers representing a wide range of interests.\u201d<\/p>\n It was not the first time Trump\u2019s Justice Department has taken an interest in California\u2019s elections. Last fall, it sent observers<\/a> to monitor polling sites in five counties, including Los Angeles, during the special election asking voters to change California\u2019s congressional map.<\/p>\n GOP candidate calls for change in mail ballot law<\/p>\n Also on Friday, Republican Steve Hilton<\/a>, who is Trump\u2019s favored candidate for governor, called for a sweeping overhaul in California\u2019s election laws to limit mail ballots to only those who request them, rather than being sent to all registered voters. He also called for an Election Day deadline to accept them rather than the seven-day grace period<\/a> the state currently allows as long as they are postmarked by the final day of voting.<\/p>\n Hilton said in an interview that the U.S. attorney\u2019s office might know more than his campaign does, but noted his team has been monitoring the count and has seen nothing that seems illegal.<\/p>\n \u201cWe certainly haven\u2019t seen anything of that nature that would warrant legal action,\u201d Hilton said.<\/p>\n Still, Hilton said the sluggish count has made California \u201ca national and international laughingstock.\u201d He proposed the state government send an emergency detachment of state workers to California\u2019s 58 counties to speed up the vote count.<\/p>\n Jesse Salinas, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officers, said he welcomed Hilton\u2019s eagerness to help but the proposal would do no good.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019d be more disruptive than helpful at this point,\u201d said Salinas, who\u2019s also the clerk and registrar for Yolo County.<\/p>\n Anyone who handles a ballot or machine used in the vote-counting process would have to be trained by the very people working feverishly to tally mail ballots that poured in Tuesday. And, added Salinas, his own vote-counting facility is already full, with no more room for any additional staff. <\/p>\n Hilton, who has been endorsed by Trump, is battling two Democrats for one of the two slots<\/a> on the November ballot. Reality television star Spencer Pratt<\/a>, another candidate backed by Trump, is likewise competing with City Councilwoman Nithya Raman for the chance to face Mayor Karen Bass<\/a> in the November election.<\/p>\n Because Democrats usually vote by mail, and held onto their ballots unusually late in the crowded primary, their votes are often tallied after those of more Republican-leaning voters who might have cast ballots early. The net effect is that Republican candidates appear at their high water marks in the first batch of returns on election night, only to see their leads whittled away in the days or weeks that follow, when election workers complete the lengthy process of tallying late-arriving mail ballots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 The U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Los Angeles said Friday it had opened \u201cmultiple election…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[164749,23,10584,2356,3137,12,1070,793,3138,298510,10580,3031,298509,3,111,190894,122508,10585,795,21,19,22,20,25,24,8647,800],"class_list":["post-687134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-2026-elections","tag-america","tag-bill-essayli","tag-california","tag-california-state-government","tag-donald-trump","tag-elections","tag-general-news","tag-government-and-politics","tag-jesse-salinas","tag-karen-bass","tag-los-angeles","tag-mike-sanchez","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-spencer-pratt","tag-steve-hilton","tag-u-s-department-of-justice","tag-u-s-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-voting","tag-washington-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}