By Mark Gutglueck
San Bernardino County and at least some of its residents are at ground zero in the nuclear confrontation over what constitutes election fraud between Republican U.S. President Donald Trump and some of his legal functionaries, including those with prosecutorial authority, and Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
This week, Newsom suggested that he, Bonta and the California Highway Patrol will arrest Trump and have him thrown in jail on a charge of interfering in California’s electoral process if he has the audacity to show up in the Golden State.
Simultaneously, Trump’s appointee as U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles has let it be known that he is taking seriously the Commander-in-Chief’s assertion that California is a hotbed of ballot stuffing carried out with the intent of thwarting Republicans from being elected to office, and that he has investigators looking for the perpetrators, who are to be brought to the bar of justice. It is no secret that Republicans of high standing believe the kingpin of election rigging in California is none other than the highest ranking Democrat in the state – the governor himself.
Meanwhile, at least a handful and maybe as many as four or five dozen residents in San Bernardino County have taken stock of some tangible indications that government employees with the elections office as well as the elections office in neighboring Los Angeles County have been less than diligent in following rules and laws in place to ensure faith in the electoral process by preventing things like ballot box stuffing or single individuals voting multiple times or those not actually residing where they are registered to vote being registered elsewhere and thereby voting multiple times in multiple locations in a single election cycle. Those would-be citizen reformers have begun the process of challenging election officials in San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County with regard to, for one, the election officials’ processes of cross referencing the voters who claim to live in their jurisdictions with others with the same names and personal details who live, or claim to live elsewhere and are voting in those other places as well. The reformers are focused on other issues suggesting something might be amiss, such as duplicate or duplicate-like records for voters within rather than outside one jurisdiction, including apparent same-name/same-address or same-name/same-date-of-birth patterns; very old voters, especially age over 90; registered voters with birthdate or age fields missing; voters with missing or incomplete registration address fields; address or district-assignment inconsistencies for some voters, including records in which voters are voting in one district while appearing to live outside their districts; other data anomalies of different descriptions.
While those animated about the potential voter fraud issue have emphasized that discrepancies are not evidence in and of themselves of improper registration or voter fraud, they do stand as cue for further inquiry, they say. The surveys that have been done are not comprehensive for Los Angeles County’s more than 5.65 million registered voters or San Bernardino County’s 1,166,450 voters, but they have included the entirety of specific districts with those counties. Extrapolating on those available numbers, it appears that a cloud of suspicion hangs over something on the order of 8.53 percent of voters in both counties, based on the above-specified criteria.
So, while there appears to be concurrence between the the Republican leader at the top of the national political heap and the Democratic head of state in California about the existence and persistence of voter fraud, the interpretations of who is engaging in the compromising of the political process are in stark contradiction. According to Donald Trump, the Democrats are the ones loading the electoral dice. Gavin Newsom says it is the Republicans who are tilting the playing field.
Exactly who is benefiting by the loosely monitored voting rolls in San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County is tough to figure. There are calculations and anecdotes that favor either side.
In 2020, President Trump, running for reelection, famously or infamously, claimed that the only way he would not be retained in office that year would be if the Democrats stole the election from him. When he lost, he doubled down on that assertion, leading to a major contretemps at the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 when then-Vice President Pence arrived there to officially count the votes of the Electoral College. That led to the prosecution and in many case the convictions, while Joseph Biden was president, of large numbers of those who showed up that day to protest and deny Biden’s victory over Trump in the November 2020 election. After Trump emerged victorious for the second time in what was his third run for president in 2024 and was sworn into office in 2024, he pardoned all of those who had been convicted of rioting at the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. He maintains now, as he consistently did during the four years he was out of office, that he actually won the 2020 race which the Electoral College said he had lost.
The Gospel the president continues to preach is that the Republicans are the dominant party throughout the country and that in those places where the Democrats are in ascendancy, they are ahead only because they have cheated and stole elections they in actuality lost.
A most recent case in point is that of Spencer Pratt, a television personality who identifies as a Republican and ran for Los Angeles mayor this year against the embattled incumbent, Democrat Karen Bass. Pratt was inspired to run because of the 2025 loss of his home during the Pacific Palisades fire, which redounded to the discredit of Bass, who was outside of the country when the conflagration destroyed many of the neighborhoods in the wealthy west side Los Angeles community. Pratt capitalized on the widespread anger toward Bass to spark what was heavy grassroots support for his upstart candidacy, which was given a boost by other elements of the media, in particular those associated with the so-called right-wing and elements of the mainstream who were disillusioned with Bass. The race boiled down to a three-way affair between Bass, Pratt and Democratic Councilwoman Nithya Raman and in the initial going and then toward the home stretch in the June Primary, Pratt’s candidacy was boosted by its novelty as well as hefty donations from high-profile personalities such as Jeanie Buss, Jeff Jenkins, Manny Pacquiao, Rick Saloman and Katherine McPhee, which allowed his campaign team to demonize Bass in hard hitting attacks. The intense and impromptu promotion of his campaign had some believing that in the open primary he might finish in first in the primary and spring off that into a winning campaign in November, to be fueled by further hit pieces against Bass. While polling for a time showed Pratt in second place, he never pulled even with the incumbent.
Ultimately, political reality in the form of a better than 3-to-1 registration advantage in Los Angeles favoring the Democratic Party over the Republican Party redounded to his disadvantage. While he held second place on election night that lead remained intact for nearly 24 hours after polling ended at 8 p.m. on June 2, there a flood of mail-in ballots that arrived June 3, 4 and 5, followed by some straggling late ballots after that, which boosted Raman by some 40,000 votes compared to Pratt. Bass finished well ahead with 292,115 or 34.27 percent to Raman’s 247,242 or 29.01 percent, followed by Pratt’s 217,638 or 25.53 percent.
Keying on the intense media promotion prior to the polling and Pratt’s slight margin over Raman on election night, President Trump in his social media posts claimed the election was rigged and that Pratt was in 2026, like he had been in 2020, the victim of election fraud.
Thereafter, Bill Essayli, who was nominated by Trump last year to be U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles/Central California but whose confirmation was held up by the Democrats, made public that his office in Los Angles, which he is leading as First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California until his appointment is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, has been carrying ot an investigation into allegations of voter fraud in the state since last year. The investigation was intensifying in the aftermath of last week’s election results, Essayli said, and the filing of criminal charges was anticipated.
Essayli said the FBI was heavily involved in the probe and a multitude of elections were being looked into.
According to Essayli, officials with the State of California and local election officials were not cooperating in the federal efforts to look into the election fraud. That lack of cooperation included denying the FBI and federal prosecutors access to voter registration records.
Essayli disclosed that several prosecutors in his office as well as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon had been thwarted for nearly a year in seeking to complete an audit of how elections were conducted in California. That survey had been carried out under the auspices of the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act, he said.
President Trump, remarking on how the tallying of late-arriving mail-in ballots in certain races in California changed the initial results from what was indicated in the counting of ballots on the evening of election day and into the morning of the next day, used the social media outlet X to repeat his charge that top-ranking Democrats were holding California’s electoral system hostage.
During an interview conducted in in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin on June 5 for the June 7 broadcast of NBC’s Meet The Press, President Trump stormed off the set when host, Kristen Welker, did not acknowledge that delays in the counting of ballots following the June 2 Primary constituted proof that California was plagued by what he characterized a “rigged” election. Welker’s suggestion that officials’ struggles with tabulating and verifying ballots did not prove a fraudulent voting process existed, the president starkly differed, asserting “all I have to do is look, and I listen” to be convinced the voting process had been corrupted. Welker’s failure to accept his conclusion, like similar failures by other members of the media, he said as he was taking his leave, demonstrated that NBC and other major networks are “crooked.”
This provoked Governor Newsom, who took to his X social media account to text, “Trump says voter fraud should land people in prison. Agreed. And let’s start with the politicians spreading election lies with the goal of illegally interfering with counting ballots.”
Newsom referenced his signing of Senate Bill 73 earlier this year, which he implied gave state officials the authority to arrest those who engage in efforts to illegally influence the outcome of an election or interfere with the accurate counting of ballots.
That legislation, which was authored by San Bernardino County/Riverside County-based State Senator Sabrina Cervantes after Riverside County Sheriff and gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco in February seized roughly 650,000 ballots cast in the specially-held November 2025 election relating to Proposition 50, prohibited election officials or anyone from providing law enforcement personnel including federal agents with access to voter rolls, voter lists, or certified voting technology absent a court order or investigation into specific violations of California election law, and defined any such unauthorized access as “disruption, modification, or illegal seizure” of election materials. SB 73 restricts peace officers from interfering with election administration or disrupting election workers carrying out their duties, except in urgent public safety emergencies, and stipulates that the California Department of Justice – essentially the Office of the California Attorney General – is to issue guidance to county election officials on how to deny requests from law enforcement seeking access to areas where ballots are cast, processed, or handled. The law further imposes barriers against illegal removal or seizure of voted ballots and establishes criminal penalties for knowingly taking ballots from election officials, making it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine, imprisonment for up to three years, or by both for a person to knowingly take a package containing voted ballots from the custody of elections officials.
Using Senate Bill 73 as the basis of his authority, the governor issued what was essentially a threat of arrest to President Donald Trump if he continued to suggest California is engaged in election fraud or had his minions such as Essayli undertake action to establish through an investigative or prosecutorial process that to be the case.
“In California, I just signed a law making that punishable with up to 3 years behind bars,” Newsom posted on X. “More to come. Fuck around and find out, Donald.”
What members of the public are being treated to is a fantastical scenario in which federal and state authorities would engage in competing arrests of one another over the shared but differently nuanced perception that cheating is at the basis of governance, at least in California. That such a scenario would play out is doubtful and fraught with complications that are extremely difficult to contemplate. How would a situation in which, for example, members of the state police – the California Highway Patrol – ordered Secret Service agents to stand down so that President Trump could be handcuffed and taken into custody end? Similarly, is it realistic to believe that the FBI would follow through with the arrests of the governor for signing and the California legislature for passing Senate Bill 73 if the U.S. Attorney’s Office and federal investigators reach the conclusion that the law interferes with the effort to enforce the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act?
Rather than resulting in arrests and incarceration of government officials – and high ranking government officials at that – this internecine governmental spat is much more likely to end up with common citizens who take it upon themselves to examine whether election fraud is taking place falling under the microscope of investigators and then being targeted for prosecution. One such group is a band of citizens/residents within California Assembly District 53, which straddles both San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County. Members of that somewhat loosely knit coalition have made a request that the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters/County Clerk’s Office and the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Office look into the issues relating to such as duplicate or duplicate-like records for voters both within and outside those jurisdictions, same-name/same-address and same-name/same-date-of-birth patterns; the presence of very old or dead people on the voter rolls, registered voters with birthdate or age fields missing; voters with missing or incomplete registration address fields; voters with address or district-assignment inconsistencies, and records pertaining to specific voters voting in one district while appearing to live outside their districts.
As chance or fate would have it, that activism carries with it the potential of putting those carrying it out on the wrong side of both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Los Angeles County, in which there are roughly three registered Democrats for every one voter registered as a Republican, is in lockstep with the Democrats controlling Sacramento where all of the state’s constitutional elected officials – governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, state attorney general, state treasurer, insurance commissioner, superintendent of public education and state controller are all Democrats and the Democrats hold supermajorities in the California Assembly and California Senate. Seeking information about how Los Angeles County’s election office is maintaining voter rolls that conceptually, at least, support the Democrats’ continuing dominance in the Golden State, might be interpreted as a violation of Senate Bill 73.
San Bernardino County is one of the last bastions of Republicanism in California. While the number of registered Democrats eclipsed the number of registered Republicans in San Bernardino County in 2009, for 17 years, greater Republican voter turnout than Democratic voter turnout has consistently favored the Republicans over Democrats in the 20,560-square mile jurisdiction. Local municipal races by law in California are supposed to be nonpartisan. Nevertheless, party affiliation in San Bernardino County is extremely important in terms of who holds elected office at every level in the county. Some federal and state elected offices in San Bernardino County are held by Democrats, but that is generally true only because the districts involved extend into heavily Democratic areas outside the county. San Bernardino County has more than its share – in the neighborhood of five times its share – of Republicans representing it in Congress, in the California Senate and the California Assembly when compared to the rest of California. Of the five members of the county board of supervisors, four are Republicans. Of the county’s 22 city councils and two town councils, 17 of those 24 panels have as more Republicans than Democrats.
In July 2018, then-San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Michael Scarpello was forced to resign, reportedly because the majority Republican board of supervisors had grown nervous about his management of the county elections system in that election cycle upon discovering that before becoming a professional election system manager in Nebraska and Colorado prior to his hiring in San Bernardino County, he was affiliated with the Democratic Party. For his part, Scarpello maintained his party affiliation had no impact whatsoever on his professional comportment. San Bernardino County officials, citing confidentiality rules pertaining to personnel decisions, would not confirm at that time what the rationale for pressuring him to leave rather than face termination was. The San Bernardino County Democratic Party lodge a protest with regard to his force departure, to no avail.
It is unclear whether, statistically, the presence of aging or dead voters as well as voters with questionable or duplicative residential information or district-assignment inconsistencies in San Bernardino County benefits the GOP or the Democrats and it is equally unclear how Essayli or the U.S. Attorney’s Office will react to efforts to force the issue to the fore.