The justice department on Friday sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles, as Donald Trump continues to make baseless claims that California Democrats were “rigging” the results to win primary elections in the nation’s biggest blue state.
State officials have rejected the allegations, but the delay in results immediately fueled misinformation about the integrity of California’s elections, with the president, who has long fanned election-conspiracy theories, accusing the state of “cheating”.
In a statement to CNN on Friday, a spokesperson for the county registrar-recorder said “our office was notified late yesterday that the US Attorney’s Office would send an Assistant US Attorney to the Ballot Processing Center to observe ballot processing activities”.
“The individual arrived this morning, was provided an overview of the public observation program, and participated in a walkthrough of the ballot processing operations,” the spokesperson, Mike Sanchez, told the network. The county registrar-recorder’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier on Friday morning, Bill Essayli, the US attorney, announced that his office, along with the FBI’s Los Angeles office, had “multiple election fraud investigations underway”, and that the state’s election systems had “serious structural vulnerabilities”.
Three days after Californians headed to the polls, key races in the primary election remained too close to call and experts warned the counting could continue for days.
In the governor’s race, the British-born conservative pundit Steve Hilton and Xavier Becerra, a former US health and human services secretary under Joe Biden, were leading the early vote tally, with an estimated 60% of ballots counted by Friday morning. Billionaire Tom Steyer trailed behind the pair. The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election in November.
The Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, had already learned on Tuesday evening that she would be advancing to the runoff, but on Friday it was still unclear whether she will be facing the former reality TV star Spencer Pratt or progressive city councillor Nithya Raman. With an estimated 65% of votes counted, Pratt was leading Raman, but the rankings could still change significantly.
Voters eager to learn who will occupy key offices may have to wait weeks to learn who will face off in November. Per state law, California counties must finish counting ballots by 15 June, but certain ballots are exempt from that deadline. For example, mail-in ballots postmarked by election day and received by 9 June are valid and can be processed beyond the deadline.
Across the state, there are still an estimated 3,606,128 ballots that need to be processed and counted, according the the California secretary of state’s office.
“California’s county elections officials are hard at work counting the millions of ballots cast by California voters for the June 2 primary election, ensuring accuracy and preserving the integrity of every vote,” said Shirley Weber, the secretary of state, said in a statement.
Experts expect many of the untallied votes to lean Democrat. That’s because Republicans are more likely to return their ballots early or vote in person on election day. Those ballots get counted first. A larger than usual number of Democrats waited until the last minute this year to cast their vote as they weighed which candidate had the best chance of reaching one of the top two slots.
Still, the ongoing tabulation did not stop Trump from declaring victory for his favored candidate. The president congratulated Hilton, accused California of election rigging, telling reporters on Thursday that the Department of Justice would open an investigation.
“We don’t want cheating in our elections. You see it in California. Those numbers are coming down rapidly. They found a lot of mail-in ballots last night, shockingly. We don’t want that,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday.
The office of Gavin Newsom, the California governor, posted a clip of a CNN video explaining how the nation’s most populous state prioritizes accuracy and accessibility over speed.
“For the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too,” Newsom’s office posted.
Before the election, the governor said election misinformation could spread if results are delayed, and urged counties to speed up their counts.
“Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold,” Newsom said in a letter to county election offices last month. “We face an assault on our democratic values unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes, and it’s our job to safeguard those values.”
Last year, Newsom signed a bill requiring the vote count to be completed within 13 days, rather than the previous 30 days. To get an extension, counties must inform the secretary of state’s office of the reason for the delay.
Marc Berman, a Democratic state assemblymember who wrote the bill to accelerate ballot counting, said Trump’s comments about the counting process were disappointing and “a lie”.
“While Trump is laser-focused on lying about our elections and undermining voters’ faith in our democracy, so that Republicans can then try to pass policies like Voter ID laws that make it harder for people to vote, our priority is to make sure that every validly cast ballot is counted,” he said in a statement.
In a video posted on X, Hilton criticized the state’s counting as “just another shambles brought to you by California Democrats”. But he also said that so far his campaign has seen nothing to indicate it will need to go to court.
In addition to the gubernatorial and LA mayoral races, Several congressional contests are still too close to call. In California’s sixth congressional district, one that was remade to give Democrats an advantage, Kevin Kiley, a former Republican and now independent congressman, was in the lead. Republican Michael Stansfield was in second place, just ahead of Democrat Richard Pan, a former state lawmaker, with tens of thousands of votes left to tally.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
