Looking Past the 2026 CA Primary Election
Will Republicans attempt to void CA Congressional elections with voter fraud claims?
The final turnout numbers for both San Diego and California will both exceed 41%, which puts them near the top of historic totals for primary elections. The vast majority (93%) of ballots counted were cast by mail, with less than 7% cast in person. Keep that ratio in mind as I explore the schemes that Donald Trump and his acolytes have in mind for future contests further down in this post.
Of the primary contests I watch via the Ballot Book (San Diego), there are two where the outcome is in doubt: the City Council contests: District 4, where incumbent Henry Foster leads Martha Abraham by 22 votes, and District 8, where it’s theoretically possible for Gerardo Ramirez to make up the 732 votes out of the 11,000 uncounted votes to overtake Antonio Martinez.
Statewide, Republicans should be thankful that they snagged general election ballot positions for Governor and Lieutenant Governor. Now, they have Trumpy candidates who will try to excite the base in down-ballot elections, even if Becerra is the odds-on favorite to win in such a heavily Democratic state.
Any celebrations they might have will be in closets, since Dear Leader is burdening the nation with his election psychosis* about fraudulent voting. Just as MAGA followers paraded around with folded napkins atop their ears following the assination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, the faithful can be counted on to repeat those claims on a regular basis. Facts be damned, as evidence is irrelevant to a convenient dogma masquerading as civic concern.
* Psychosis is a symptom of a mental or physical condition, rather than a standalone illness. It involves a collection of symptoms that cause a loss of contact with reality, making it difficult for an individual to distinguish between what is real and what is not.
On the Democratic side, Xavier Becerra now has the blessing of Gov. Newsom. Candidate Tom Steyer, who will likely miss second place by 1-2% of the votes cast, has conceded and thrown his support to his party’s nominee:
For now, we must stay focused. Donald Trump is the embodiment of the corporations’ craven, soulless, profit-first model of politics, and it is absolutely essential that his handpicked candidate does not hold the keys to California. It would be a travesty for Steve Hilton to win the governorship, and Californians must unite behind Xavier Becerra to ensure he does not.
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Carl DeMaio and his merry band of grifters have qualified a “Voter ID” proposition for the November ballot, and this will feed into the noise Republicans intend to make as the general election nears.
The concept of Voter ID is popular across partisan lines, mostly because many people don’t understand what voter verification processes are already in place, and because those espousing the idea frequently go unchallenged when they make unprovable assertions about fraudulent voting.
Here’s a detailed explanation of how votes are counted and protected in California.
In the final analysis, DeMaio’s voter ID idea works out to be the equivalent of having to take a drug test before being allowed to make purchases at a state-licensed marijuana dispensary.
According to a 2026 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies, when voters were told the measure is meant to combat voter fraud and that it could suppress eligible votes, support dips to 37%.
Suppressing eligible voters of “othered” persuasions is, in fact, the true aim of the November ballot measure.
Asked for evidence of voter fraud in the California primary elections, House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise cited changes in the results after election night, inferring that the counting process in California undermined voter integrity.
El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells took to social media to claim that ballots mailed after election day were counted in California. He later backtracked (but left the original post up) to complain about the validity of ballots received after election day (which must be postmarked on or before election day).
House Speaker Mike Johnson articulated the real goal of the propaganda claiming voter fraud: to allow Republicans to arbitrarily cut off tabulation and declare any outstanding votes to be invalid.
Via Liz Dye at Public Notice:
“What a concept!” he bloviated, with practiced sanctimony. “Let’s have an election the day of the election. That’s what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”
The Speaker’s words might be more credible had he not been caught on hidden camera in 2021 stating plainly that the 2020 election was not stolen and that Trump had lost.
The Trump administration is pushing forward on other fronts, both to undermine public confidence in the voting process and directly intervene in elections. The president has declared a need to “federalize” elections, despite language in the constitution relegating that power to the states.
On Monday, First Assistant US Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli went on The Glenn Beck Program to beg listeners to help him find evidence of election fraud.
Via The New Republic:
“Number one, election fraud is not a theory. It is a real thing. Election fraud happens every year,” Essayli replied. “California is a fraudster’s paradise.… Almost anybody can register to vote in the state of California. You don’t have to have a Social Security number, and you don’t need a driver’s license number.… Then California has done universal vote-by-mail, which means if you’re on the voter rolls, you’re gonna get one mailed to you whether you want it or not.
“They put millions of ballots out into the mail, into the ether. The voter rolls are dirty.… Dead people, people who’ve moved, convicted felons, are also receiving ballots,” he continued, before criticizing “ballot harvesting,” a basic ballot collection method practiced by both Democrats and Republicans in California. “I expect people will be charged.… We have set up a tipline. I’ve set up a dedicated email.… We are looking for any sort of widescale conspiracy, if you will.” He then told Beck that election fraud charges would be coming in “one to two months.”
Riiiight. Maybe they’ll charge those Arizona MAGA types lured to California by the premise they could vote in the LA Mayoral contest. (Nope, they couldn’t vote) Or perhaps two or three months as in the amount of time it takes for an actual peace treaty with Iran to materialize.
Essayli has been on Fox News and other right wing media, claiming California is refusing to comply with a federal request for voter registration records that the Department of Justice says are needed to audit the state’s voter rolls and assess compliance with federal election laws.
Since May 2025, the Justice Department has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls — which would include driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers — from 48 states and the District of Columbia. Most have refused to provide these records and have instead provided publicly available versions of their voter files. Since September, the DOJ has sued 30 of those jurisdictions for refusing to hand over their voters’ sensitive information.
The feds have already lost in district court over this request of California, which is now pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Via the court order dismissing the case:
The DOJ’s request for the sensitive information of Californians stands to have a chilling effect on American citizens like political minority groups and working-class immigrants who may consider not registering to vote or skip casting a ballot because they are worried about how their information will be used. There cannot be unbridled consolidation of all elections power in the Executive without action from Congress and public debate. This is antithetical to the promise of fair and free elections our country promises and the franchise that civil rights leaders fought and died for.
The obvious reason the DOJ is seeking to audit voter rolls is connected to a scheme to empower the federal government to build a national voter database, wherein registrants who don’t crosscheck with other (often unreliable) lists would be prohibited from receiving ballots.
The schemes don’t stop there. Simultaneously, the Department of Homeland Security is exploring coordinating with the US Postal Service to monitor mail-in ballot flows, identify anomalies, and generate “authorized investigative leads.” The postal service - created by Congress as an independent entity - is being evaluated as a surveillance and investigation tool for federal law enforcement, applied specifically to Americans who vote by mail.
The NAACP has filed suit, arguing the new rule violates a 2021 court-enforced settlement in which USPS agreed to protect mail-in voting and prioritize timely ballot delivery through 2028 - a binding legal commitment the agency is now moving to undermine.
The administration’s legal strategies will likely run afoul of growing skepticism in the courts over the reliability of DOJ claims before them. Put simply, many judges are no longer willing to take the DOJ’s word for it — no matter what it is.
Elected Republicans in DC have been briefed on just how strongly voter sentiment is shifting.
The disposition of various legal actions will be unlikely to stop the Trump regime’s plans to interfere in the fall elections. The length of time it takes for ballots to be counted may well be used as an excuse not to seat newly-elected Democrats.
Via Mother Jones:
A glimpse of what could happen after November’s midterm elections emerged from a conversation between Trump cheerleader Benny Johnson and Will Chamberlain, editor in chief of the far-right publication Human Events. Chamberlain is also a senior counsel at an outfit called the Article III Project, a conservative legal advocacy group that says it fights “lawfare” against President Trump and promotes “constitutionalist” judges. In their conversation, Johnson and Chamberlain suggested that in the future, the Republican controlled-House could simply decline to seat members from California who the majority decides were fraudulently elected.
“The way these elections matter the most federally is in the House,” Chamberlain told Johnson. For “contested House races” that are “close-ish,” he added, “Mike Johnson and the Republican House Caucus in November should look at the results and say, ‘If you’re a California representative and you weren’t ahead on Election Day, we’re not going to seat you until we do a full investigation of your specific election and you prove you won.’ I think that’s the simple way.” That would, Chamberlain added, “wake up California.”
“We have the right to say to Democrats, we don’t trust your elections,” Chamberlain added. “And so we’re not going to trust the results of your elections… Deal with it.”
In the sure-to-be-close contest for the House of Representatives in CD48, imagine winning candidate Marni Wilpert showing in DC after the election, only to find out her margin didn’t pass the GOP sniff test.
How does one defeat such an evil plan? Three words: turnout, turnout, turnout.
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If you think California is taking a long time to count votes... wait until you hear how long the Trump Administration is taking to release the Epstein Files
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I’m pissed about…
The administration’s ongoing efforts to throttle release of the Epstein files. Todd Blanche, the former Trump defense attorney now running the Justice Department, is making it clear that further disclosures won’t be happening. A bunch of Congress members are making it clear that there are more disclosures in the offing, and, with nothing left to lose, Rep. Thomas Massie has the potential to take to the floor and really start naming names.
The New York Times today has an article detailing the meetings held by Trump’s inner circle, as developments in the Epstein scandal unfolded over the past year.
Trump had declared Epstein a dead issue during the summer, but as he began the second year of his presidency, his own team could see that voter concerns about Epstein were still breaking through to an alarming extent.
In an internal memo circulated to roughly a dozen Trump advisers in late March 2026, the president’s pollster, Fabrizio, summarized findings from two nights of focus groups conducted that month. Fabrizio’s memo listed the “Epstein files” as the sixth most important issue raised in the focus groups, behind inflation, the economy, foreign policy, immigration and health care — but ahead of data centers, military issues, crime and safety, and being “pro-working class.” In the section on “key takeaways” of the focus groups, Fabrizio’s memo stated: “There is also a consistent mention of the Epstein files, which came up in every group and is a real negative with some of these voters.”
The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump’s closest advisers spent months refusing to see. The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world’s richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear.
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