In an unprecedented development with a potential to erode an element of the overwhelming political advantage Democrats enjoy over Republicans in California, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber rejected approaching 150,000 of the mail-in ballots cast by California voters in the June 2 Primary.
Weber’s action was based on sound legal and procedural principles and well-supported factual considerations pertaining to the ballots themselves and their submission. Nevertheless, the application of the criteria, including the cut-off thresholds, used in ascertaining whether the mailed ballots initially deemed questionable that were received by election offices in all 58 of the state’s counties were ultimately to be counted or not counted involved a degree of judgment and interpretation on Weber’s part that she alone exercised. The 148,241 ballots that were not counted this year represented a 35.02 percent increase over the 108,982 mail ballot rejections in 2024 and a 40.09 percent increase over the 105,818 rejections in 2025.
Pregnant in the situation were a number of uncomfortable considerations. Quietly within its own limited circle, the Democratic political establishment in Sacramento, of which Weber is a part, expressed, if not disapproval, bewilderment at why she felt it necessary at this time to intensify the validity standard on mail-in ballots. While the Secretary of State’s Office did not identify how many of those 148,241 ballots that were not counted were sent in by voters registered with the Democrat Party, the Republican Party, the American Independent Party, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Peace & Freedom Party, other more obscure parties or voters who declined to state any political affiliation, the widespread assumption is that a plurality of those rejections or, as likely, a majority of them, represented the votes of Democrats.
The 148,241 rejected mailed ballots represent a rate of 1.73 percent of all mail-in ballots cast throughout the state. When California first adopted mail ballot voting, the number of voters who made use of sending their votes in through the U.S. Postal Service was relatively low. In 1962, the first time mail-in ballots were used, by what were then called “absentee” voters, 156,167 voters, or 2.63 percent of the 5,929,602 of those who voted in that year’s election, took advantage of not having to physically show up at a polling station to cast their votes. That mode of voting remained relatively low, but gradually increased, such that in 1988, for the first time, the number of those voting by mail eclipsed ten percent for the first time, when 14.07 percent of the state’s voters sent in mail ballots. Over the years, in-person voting occurred with greater frequency in most elections overall and in particular in general elections, although as early as 2008, during the primary election, the number of mail-in ballots surpassed the number of traditional ballot box votes. Voting by mail consistently remained less popular during general elections than showing up at a voting precinct on election day until the 2009 California Special Statewide election on May 19 of that year, authorized by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state legislature to secure voter ratification of five budget-balancing measures aimed at locking in temporary tax extensions, authorizing borrowings, and redirecting dedicated funds to general revenues, amid a fiscal crisis projected to exceed $21 billion in deficits for the 2009-2010 fiscal year. In that election, 62.19 percent of those throughout the state participating voted by mail. In the 2010 general election, voters again showed a preference for voting in person. In the 2012 general election, however, 51.16 percent of the electorate chose to do so by mail. Thereafter, in California’s primary and general elections, the majority of voters in overwhelming numbers vote by mail, with, respectively in the 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024 general and in the 2021 and 2025 special elections, 60.62 percent, 57.79 percent, 65.31 percent, 86.72 percent, 88.64 percent, 80.76 percent, 90.01 percent and 88.89 percent voting by mail.
It is anticipated that in foreseeable future elections in California, 80 percent to 87 percent of those participating will do so by mail.
In this way, both the leadership of California’s Democratic Party and the leadership of California’s Republican Party understand that Weber’s willingness to reject mail-in ballots at the rate of 1.73 percent that she did in the just concluded California 2026 Primary has the potential of resetting the political playing field in the Golden State.
In December 2020, when Alex Padilla resigned as California secretary of state to become a U.S. Senator, Governor Newsom appointed Weber to the post, making her, upon being sworn in in January 2021, the first African American to hold the post. She was elected in her own right in 2022 and is vying for reelection in the November general election against Don Wagner, a Republican who is an Orange County supervisor and former state assemblyman.
For close to a generation, California politics have been dominated by the Democratic Party. The Republicans have not won a statewide constitutional election since 2006, when Schwarzenegger was elected governor. At present, the governor, lieutenant governor, California attorney general, California secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction, treasurer, controller and insurance commissioner are all Democrats. In the forty-seat California Senate, a supermajority, 30 members, are Democrats. In the 80-member California Assembly, which at present has a single vacancy, the Democrats comprise a supermajority, as 60 assembly members are Democrats and 19 are Republicans. California’s congressional delegation includes 42 Democrats and 8 Republicans, alongside one independent and one vacancy in the U.S. House of Representatives, plus two Democratic U.S. Senators.
There have been suggestions emanating from Republicans in specific and in general and from the Republican Party that Weber, as California’s secretary of state and the state government’s senior official overseeing the electoral process in the state, has been tolerant of election fraud and favoritism toward the Democratic Party and Democrats in general.
Prior to Weber being in office, when Becerra was the California secretary of state, as well as during Weber’s time in that role, the California Office of Secretary of State had been heavily criticized for the glacial pace of its ballot counting. In some cases, those tallies have been delayed such that members of the Assembly and State Senate have been installed into office before the secretary of state certified the results of the election. Under the California Elections Code, county election officials have up to 30 days but on more to count ballots and conduct audits. Wagner has said that Weber tolerating county officials stretch that timeframe out to more than a month and well into the December after November elections has undercut the trust that citizens of the state should have in California’s electoral process. In September 2025, the Donald Trump Administration, through the U.S. Justice Department, filed a lawsuit alleging widespread voter fraud in the state in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, 52 U.S. Code § 20501 et seq.; the Help America Vote Act, 52 U.S. Code § 20901 et seq.; and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
An accusation recurrent in the legal action taken by the U.S. Justice Department as well in accusations made by President Donald Trump, Republicans in general and Orange County Supervisor Wagner, who is Weber’s current opponent in this year’s election, is that the extended time period over which the tallying of votes in the aftermath of California’s elections are inexcusable, particularly given the modern means of tabulation and ballot evaluation available to the elections offices throughout the state and the secretary of state’s office, which they maintain, is a demining indication that election fraud is ongoing in which votes are added to the totals credited to Democratic candidates and votes are subtracted from the totals actually achieved by Republican candidates. This fraud, the Republicans maintain, has been perpetrated by the Democrats in power – namely Weber and her Democratic predecessors as secretary of state going back two decades.
Those accusations appear to have had an effect. In the June 2 primary, Weber bested the Republican Wagner by polling 2,175,355 or 55.7 percent of the 3,906,870 votes cast in the secretary of state race, in which Wagner received 1,575,245 or 40.3 percent, with two other candidates accounting for the remaining 4 percent. While this would appear to have left Weber with a comfortable 15.4 percent lead over her opponent going into the upcoming November general election, Weber is underperforming in terms of the commanding voter registration lead Democrats have over Republicans in California.
As of the beginning of 2026 on January 1, 10,381,340 of the state’s 23,092,098 registered voters, or 44.96 percent, were registered as Democrats. Far fewer voters in California were affiliated with the Republican Party – 5,804,699 or 25.14 percent. Indeed, almost as many voters throughout the state, 5,231,189 or 22.65 percent expressed no party preference and 1,674,870 or 7.25 percent were members of the American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom or other parties. Given that the vast majority of Republicans most likely supported Wagner and the overwhelming number of Democrats supported Weber, it thus appears that on June 2 it was Wagner who was able to make the most effective appeal to those voters unaligned with any party or affiliates of the parties that are out of the political mainstream. For that reason, Weber is now engaged, it seems, in trying to redress the perception that she has, out of sheer party loyalty, tolerated questionable, shifty, shady and outright crooked electioneering practices that have compromised the integrity of California’s voting system. This perception, or allying it, is of tremendous relevance in a race where the post at stake – secretary of state – is supposed to be the guarantor of free, open, accurate and honest elections.
In the governor’s race in June, the two major Republicans, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, received a combined 34.8 percent. The eight top-polling Democrats, Xavier Becerra, Tom Steyer, Katie Porter, Matt Mahan, Antonio Villaraigosa, Tony Thurmond, Betty Yee and Eric Swalwell collectively brought in 61.2 percent of the vote. In the races for lieutenant governor, California attorney general, insurance commissioner, controller, superintendent of schools, the Democrats performed better percentage-wise than did Weber. The June 2 outcome, despite the extensive advantage that falls to Democrats overall in the state and which should redound to Weber’s favor, she remains, at least potentially, vulnerable to an electoral strategy by Wagner which concentrates on the unreliability of the electoral process in California during her watch.
While Governor Newsom and the rest of the California Democratic political establishment – consisting of elected officials, extending to those heading key offices in Sacramento, Assembly members, State Senators, Congress members, two U.S. Senators and their staffs and consultants – recognize that Weber, as a politician, was merely doing what she needs to do to ensure her own electability by critically assessing the irregularities of late incoming ballots, they are nevertheless concerned that in tossing out a substantial, indeed record, number of ballots coming in after the election, she is setting a precedent that the Republicans will try to bring to bear to assist Republicans in tight future races for various important offices, such as in the Assembly, the State Senate or for Congress.
Across the state, the Democrats have the overwhelming upper hand in terms of registered voters and districts that have been gerrymandered to ensure close to 75 percent of the elected legislators in the state – serving at the federal and state level – are Democrats and virtually all other major elected state and federal officials are members of that party, as well. With that reality, it hardly seems likely that the Democrats will lose their vice-lock on government in the state in the November 2026 election or at any point soon thereafter.
Weber, at the same time is being pressed to explain how it is that it takes weeks and sometimes as much as a month to make a determination of who wins elections in California or what the precise, or at least reliable, vote tally in those contests are.
This week, in specifying that 148,241 ballots that had been mailed in by state residents in June would not be counted, Weber offered, or attempted to offer, an explanation as to why it takes, in the cyber-age dominated by scanning technology that can evaluate hundreds of ballots per second and election office headquarters throughout the state equipped with literally hundreds of those machines, why it has taken in the past two weeks, three weeks, four weeks or in the case of the June 2, 2026 election more than six weeks to ascertain the outcome of elections.
One reason, according to the California Secretary of State, is that the U.S. Post Office cannot be counted upon to determine whether the ballots have been delivered to them on time prior to the voting deadline. Another reason, those in control of the electoral process say, is that the Post Office itself can be responsible for a delay of up to seven days or more for the delivery of the ballots to the appropriate elections offices.
Under the rules put in place for mail-in balloting, ballots can arrive at an election office seven days late and still be counted, as long as the envelope containing that ballot is postmarked by election day. Those ballots arriving in envelopes bearing a postmark after election day are, by definition, ineligible for inclusion in the count.
Nevertheless, it is noted, a ballot may be brought into a post office on election day or even a day or two before election day and still end up being postmarked after election day. In previous years, that was rarely the case. Generally speaking, envelopes deposited into mailboxes or at the post office itself on any given day prior to 5 p.m. on standard Monday through Saturday operational days were previously transported at once to large regional processing and distribution plants, where the mail was sorted for delivery and postmarked with that day’s date. In 2025, however, the United States Postal Services instituted a makeover in its “transportation operations,” such that its method of sorting and delivering was to be streamlined and efficientized to, federal officials claimed, save $36 billion over a decade by reducing redundant surface and air transport. The roll-out of the first phase of the Regional Transportation Optimization program came on April 1, 2025, followed by a second phase as of July 1, 2025 The U.S. Postal Service’s transportation operations changes consisted of a refinement of service standards, and the integration of regional processing hubs with sorting and delivery centers according to what was referred to as a hub-and-spoke alignment that involved synchronized transit schedules between local post offices and regional processing plants together with collection adjustments. This meant that mail entered at locations over 50 miles from a regional hub is collected for processing the next day rather than the same day. Thus, mail deposited at a post office or into a mail box on a given day, such as a Tuesday, might very well not be affixed with a postmark until the following day. That postmark would bear the day/date of processing rather than the date of reception by the post office/mail box/postal service.
As a consequence, ballots dropped in mailboxes on election day in a community far from one of those distribution hubs received a postmark the following day, making it ineligible to be counted.
In this way, many California voters – 93,497 of them, to be precise – who procrastinated until June 2 to drop off their mail-in ballots this year were excluded from the electoral process.
Not all of the ballots that were rejected were deemed unfit for counting because of a late postmark. Another 52,290 were consigned to oblivion because the voter who cast them in time otherwise did not sign their ballot envelope as instructed or affixed a signature that did not visually match or in some fashion was different from the signature of that voter on file with his or her county’s election office.
According to the California Secretary of State’s Office, at this point there is not any prospect that the 148,241 vote-by-mail ballots deemed invalid will ever be counted. The June 2, 2026 California Primary is now firmly in the past. Efforts to improve the system, according to Weber, will instead be made going forward.
The game plan is, according to Weber’s office, to instruct and encourage those who are going to be voting by mail that they should fill out and return their ballots prior to election day.