As the days tick down until the midterms, Americans should be confident in our elections — and also alert to real and alarming attacks on their integrity.
Unlike any presidential administration in U.S. history, the current one is engaged in near-daily efforts to undermine election processes and chill civic participation. In response, Protect Democracy and our peers have built a comprehensive strategy to ensure that we survive the assaults on our elections.
That’s the 30,000-foot view. But if the situation this fall gets especially dicey, there’s a high likelihood that it will play out in one specific place: California.
This makes it especially important to understand what is being done in California already — and what more can be done in the future — to build the strongest bulwark possible in defense of free and fair elections.
Why California specifically?
The Golden State is both important politically and unusually exposed to an election crisis. The state could feature five or more competitive House races this fall, more than enough to determine control of the chamber. And because close races in the state have historically taken longer to call than those almost anywhere else, the whole country could be focused on California for days after the election, if not longer, to find out which party has ultimately won.
President Trump has already shown his willingness to use that delay to inject unfounded accusations into an election with the aim of trying to disrupt the normal process. During the primary this summer, President Trump chimed in while ballots were still being tallied to accuse California Democrats of “trying to steal” the races for governor and Los Angeles mayor. His intervention amplified a growing national narrative questioning why it takes California so long to call its races — a narrative laced with distrust.
Meanwhile, Riverside County offered a preview of another tactic election defenders fear could be deployed in November: Sheriff Chad Bianco, a candidate running for governor, spent this spring seizing more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election over an unsubstantiated fraud complaint, even going so far as to defy the state attorney general's order to stand down.
There are understandable reasons why California takes as long as it does. California's pace is not due to “fraud” or “rigging;” it is the predictable result of policy choices that emphasize broad voter access and comprehensive ballot verification. The state automatically mails a ballot to all of its more than 23 million registered voters — more than any other state — and also offers robust in-person voting. Those policies benefit voters but strain the resources of county election offices asked to run both systems well. State law counts any mail ballot postmarked by Election Day that arrives within the following week, and before any ballot is opened, election workers must verify that the signature on the envelope matches the one on file, giving voters 22 days to fix a mismatch rather than simply discarding their ballot. Finally, a large portion of Californians return their mail ballots on Election Day or immediately before. The result, as the California Voter Foundation has described it, is a “pig-in-the-python” problem: a crush of ballots arriving at the last minute and moving through manual, one-by-one verification all at once.
Reasonable people can disagree about California’s policy choices, which prioritize voter access and accuracy over speed. The Secretary of State's office has defended that tradeoff directly, telling CalMatters that “accuracy is far more important” than speed. But these are legitimate policy choices resulting in a long counting period, not nefariousness or fraud.
That reality, however, does not change the potential for the nightmare scenario: a close election in which it becomes clear that California will decide control of the House while races in the state remain to be called, and this delay opens the floodgates to disinformation and election interference from rogue actors.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that a number of protections have been built already — with more in progress — to mitigate the damage.
What protections exist for this fall?
First, improvements are underway to speed up the vote counting
In recent years, California election officials have been investing in improving and innovating their processes. Their efforts are already yielding results: seven days after the June primary, 93% of ballots statewide had been counted, compared to 84% at the same point in the 2024 general election and 72% in the 2022 general election. The improvements are even more substantial in counties that have had funds to invest in improving spaces, equipment, and processes.
California isn’t stopping with that progress, however. Governor Newsom's 2026-27 budget, signed on June 29, includes roughly $40 million to “safeguard” and “speed up” ballot counting. Protect Democracy pushed for this investment for over a year alongside the California Voter Foundation, including through direct advocacy to the Governor's Office, Secretary of State's Office, and the Legislature. Counties are already putting the money to work, implementing new ballot-processing equipment like sorters, temporary staffing for tasks like signature verification, more and bigger ballot drop boxes, and vehicles to support early voting in remote areas. It's progress, but only a partial fix, since the total funding falls tens of millions short of what election officials and voting advocates requested.
Some of the new funding is earmarked for voter outreach, on the theory that getting people to return ballots earlier can decrease the last-minute crunch that slows the count. To that end, Protect Democracy partnered with UC San Diego's Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections and San Joaquin County Registrar Olivia Hale on a randomized experiment ahead of the June 2 primary, sending 34,346 voters two “Don't Delay, Vote Today!” postcards. The results were modest but statistically significant: recipients returned ballots 0.4 days earlier on average and were 2 points more likely to meet the recommended deadline for election-night counting to ensure their ballots could be verified. These results are impressive in the statewide context of more voters than usual returning mail ballots at the last minute. These postcards offer a low-cost, evidence-backed model any election official in the state can now adopt directly to speed up the process.
In addition, Governor Newsom recently signed SB 1420, a bill Protect Democracy and the California Voter Foundation supported to ease burdens on voters and election officials. Introduced by State Senator Laura Richardson, the law directs the Secretary of State to provide implementation guidance and voter education for “Sign, Scan, and Go” voting — bringing a completed mail ballot to a polling place, signing in as an in-person voter, and casting it on the spot. Jurisdictions that already offer this model report that it shaves three to four days off of processing, and voters get the reassurance of an in-person hand-off without giving up the convenience of filling out their ballot at home.
Then this week, Governor Newsom signed a second bill we supported — AB 2604 from Assemblymember Marc Berman. It will extend a similar efficiency to the back end of the process, giving every county access to a “mobile signature curing” tool that lets voters whose ballots face issues in the signature review process submit an updated signature from their smartphone rather than returning a slower mailed document. Roughly half of California's counties already use something like this; the bill would make the same capability available to the rest. (One caveat: AB 2604 will take some time to implement and so, by law, its rollout is designated for 2028, not this November.)
Second, California is advancing new legislative protections against election interference and abuses of constitutional rights
On September 19, Governor Newsom signed a package of 13 bills responding preemptively to federal efforts to interfere with the midterms. Several bills bar the seizure of ballots or election equipment before certification and prohibit arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day. Others go further, adding real consequences to those protections: one makes it a felony for anyone in a position of authority to direct workers to interfere with a mail ballot's delivery or return, imposing the kind of criminal liability meant to deter interference before it happens rather than just address it after the fact. “If you break the law we're going to hold you accountable,” Newsom said of the package, “and it doesn't matter who you are.”
Another bill imposes civil liability against officers — federal or state — who infringe on Californians’ constitutional rights, such as impeding their right to vote or to have their ballot counted. Under federal civil rights law, if a state or local officer violates your constitutional rights, you have recourse to sue them; but when a federal agent does the same thing, courts have closed off nearly every path to accountability.
Protect Democracy helped craft a model law to close that gap in states around the country. The New York Times described this legislation as “a law that might just save the midterms.” In California, it was the basis for SB 747, the No Kings Act, which was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and was signed by the Governor this week. Our team sponsored the bill and testified in support before both the Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees. Versions of this legislation have already passed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and with its enactment this week in California, more than 70 million Americans nationwide now enjoy these protections.
The legislation addresses two different threats we could see this fall. The first is physical intimidation aimed at keeping people from voting — for instance, a federal agent blocking a polling place or threatening a poll worker. Under the No Kings Act, affected voters can sue the individual agents responsible, and the legitimate consequences agents would face make them unlikely to violate rights in the first place. The second threat is interference with the vote count itself. Courts have long held that voters have a constitutional right to have their ballot counted as cast, so if a federal agent unlawfully seizes or destroys ballots, the No Kings Act gives affected voters a means of seeking a remedy.
The law is also carefully crafted to survive legal scrutiny. It doesn't create any new constitutional right, and it only reaches individual officers, not federal agencies themselves. As Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law noted, the Constitution's supremacy clause doesn't automatically shield federal officers from being sued under state law.
And that ballot seizure by Sheriff Bianco earlier this year? In late September, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the seizure was unlawful and ordered the ballots returned, with Attorney General Rob Bonta stating about similar efforts that “come November, we’re ready for whatever comes our way.” With the new legislation signed by Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta will have even more tools at his disposal to protect the elections.
What else is still needed?
Speeding up this fall's count and giving people a way to hold federal actors accountable is meaningful progress, but more work is needed in California before 2028.
One is the timelines themselves. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can arrive and count up to seven days later, and voters have up to 22 days to fix a signature problem before their ballot is rejected. Alongside partners in the state, we are studying whether either window could be shortened without hurting voters, since it's an open question how much of that time is actually being used versus just adding to the count.
We're also exploring what comes after the No Kings Act. The Constitution gave us a federalist system for a reason, so that states could check federal overreach, not just act as administrative arms of federal demands. Areas worth exploring include extending that same accountability logic into state criminal law, since federal officials who break federal law can simply be pardoned while state crimes for the same conduct can't; and rethinking how voter data gets protected, so it can't be weaponized the way we're already seeing attempted with national voter-file efforts, without losing the transparency that keeps elections trustworthy. These are early ideas but worth additional research and investment.
Election administration also needs to be an ongoing budget priority for the state, so that counties can depend on the state to support ongoing and recurring costs in addition to one-offs. This year's $40 million was real progress, but fixing that funding gap for good is arguably the single highest-leverage action California could take before 2028.
***
California may end up being the sharpest test of this fall's elections. If control of the House comes down to a close count, and California has uncalled races longer than others, that gap is exactly where bad-faith actors will attack the results. The reassuring part is that our ecosystem will not be caught unprepared; the funding for election administration, the support for voters and election officials, the legal remedies for federal intrusion, and the plans for what comes next are all already in motion.
As we urged at the outset, we should be alert to the risk of a crisis this fall. Don’t be surprised if the ground starts to tremble and shake. But the California mountains and canyons have withstood plenty of that before. Because of the steps that have been taken, we’re confident they will again.
As the days tick down until the midterms, Americans should be confident in our elections — and also alert to real and alarming attacks on their integrity.
Unlike any presidential administration in U.S. history, the current one is engaged in near-daily efforts to undermine election processes and chill civic participation. In response, Protect Democracy and our peers have built a comprehensive strategy to ensure that we survive the assaults on our elections.
That’s the 30,000-foot view. But if the situation this fall gets especially dicey, there’s a high likelihood that it will play out in one specific place: California.
This makes it especially important to understand what is being done in California already — and what more can be done in the future — to build the strongest bulwark possible in defense of free and fair elections.
Why California specifically?
The Golden State is both important politically and unusually exposed to an election crisis. The state could feature five or more competitive House races this fall, more than enough to determine control of the chamber. And because close races in the state have historically taken longer to call than those almost anywhere else, the whole country could be focused on California for days after the election, if not longer, to find out which party has ultimately won.
President Trump has already shown his willingness to use that delay to inject unfounded accusations into an election with the aim of trying to disrupt the normal process. During the primary this summer, President Trump chimed in while ballots were still being tallied to accuse California Democrats of “trying to steal” the races for governor and Los Angeles mayor. His intervention amplified a growing national narrative questioning why it takes California so long to call its races — a narrative laced with distrust.
Meanwhile, Riverside County offered a preview of another tactic election defenders fear could be deployed in November: Sheriff Chad Bianco, a candidate running for governor, spent this spring seizing more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election over an unsubstantiated fraud complaint, even going so far as to defy the state attorney general's order to stand down.
There are understandable reasons why California takes as long as it does. California's pace is not due to “fraud” or “rigging;” it is the predictable result of policy choices that emphasize broad voter access and comprehensive ballot verification. The state automatically mails a ballot to all of its more than 23 million registered voters — more than any other state — and also offers robust in-person voting. Those policies benefit voters but strain the resources of county election offices asked to run both systems well. State law counts any mail ballot postmarked by Election Day that arrives within the following week, and before any ballot is opened, election workers must verify that the signature on the envelope matches the one on file, giving voters 22 days to fix a mismatch rather than simply discarding their ballot. Finally, a large portion of Californians return their mail ballots on Election Day or immediately before. The result, as the California Voter Foundation has described it, is a “pig-in-the-python” problem: a crush of ballots arriving at the last minute and moving through manual, one-by-one verification all at once.
Reasonable people can disagree about California’s policy choices, which prioritize voter access and accuracy over speed. The Secretary of State's office has defended that tradeoff directly, telling CalMatters that “accuracy is far more important” than speed. But these are legitimate policy choices resulting in a long counting period, not nefariousness or fraud.
That reality, however, does not change the potential for the nightmare scenario: a close election in which it becomes clear that California will decide control of the House while races in the state remain to be called, and this delay opens the floodgates to disinformation and election interference from rogue actors.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that a number of protections have been built already — with more in progress — to mitigate the damage.
What protections exist for this fall?
First, improvements are underway to speed up the vote counting
In recent years, California election officials have been investing in improving and innovating their processes. Their efforts are already yielding results: seven days after the June primary, 93% of ballots statewide had been counted, compared to 84% at the same point in the 2024 general election and 72% in the 2022 general election. The improvements are even more substantial in counties that have had funds to invest in improving spaces, equipment, and processes.
California isn’t stopping with that progress, however. Governor Newsom's 2026-27 budget, signed on June 29, includes roughly $40 million to “safeguard” and “speed up” ballot counting. Protect Democracy pushed for this investment for over a year alongside the California Voter Foundation, including through direct advocacy to the Governor's Office, Secretary of State's Office, and the Legislature. Counties are already putting the money to work, implementing new ballot-processing equipment like sorters, temporary staffing for tasks like signature verification, more and bigger ballot drop boxes, and vehicles to support early voting in remote areas. It's progress, but only a partial fix, since the total funding falls tens of millions short of what election officials and voting advocates requested.
Some of the new funding is earmarked for voter outreach, on the theory that getting people to return ballots earlier can decrease the last-minute crunch that slows the count. To that end, Protect Democracy partnered with UC San Diego's Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections and San Joaquin County Registrar Olivia Hale on a randomized experiment ahead of the June 2 primary, sending 34,346 voters two “Don't Delay, Vote Today!” postcards. The results were modest but statistically significant: recipients returned ballots 0.4 days earlier on average and were 2 points more likely to meet the recommended deadline for election-night counting to ensure their ballots could be verified. These results are impressive in the statewide context of more voters than usual returning mail ballots at the last minute. These postcards offer a low-cost, evidence-backed model any election official in the state can now adopt directly to speed up the process.
In addition, Governor Newsom recently signed SB 1420, a bill Protect Democracy and the California Voter Foundation supported to ease burdens on voters and election officials. Introduced by State Senator Laura Richardson, the law directs the Secretary of State to provide implementation guidance and voter education for “Sign, Scan, and Go” voting — bringing a completed mail ballot to a polling place, signing in as an in-person voter, and casting it on the spot. Jurisdictions that already offer this model report that it shaves three to four days off of processing, and voters get the reassurance of an in-person hand-off without giving up the convenience of filling out their ballot at home.
Then this week, Governor Newsom signed a second bill we supported — AB 2604 from Assemblymember Marc Berman. It will extend a similar efficiency to the back end of the process, giving every county access to a “mobile signature curing” tool that lets voters whose ballots face issues in the signature review process submit an updated signature from their smartphone rather than returning a slower mailed document. Roughly half of California's counties already use something like this; the bill would make the same capability available to the rest. (One caveat: AB 2604 will take some time to implement and so, by law, its rollout is designated for 2028, not this November.)
Second, California is advancing new legislative protections against election interference and abuses of constitutional rights
On September 19, Governor Newsom signed a package of 13 bills responding preemptively to federal efforts to interfere with the midterms. Several bills bar the seizure of ballots or election equipment before certification and prohibit arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day. Others go further, adding real consequences to those protections: one makes it a felony for anyone in a position of authority to direct workers to interfere with a mail ballot's delivery or return, imposing the kind of criminal liability meant to deter interference before it happens rather than just address it after the fact. “If you break the law we're going to hold you accountable,” Newsom said of the package, “and it doesn't matter who you are.”
Another bill imposes civil liability against officers — federal or state — who infringe on Californians’ constitutional rights, such as impeding their right to vote or to have their ballot counted. Under federal civil rights law, if a state or local officer violates your constitutional rights, you have recourse to sue them; but when a federal agent does the same thing, courts have closed off nearly every path to accountability.
Protect Democracy helped craft a model law to close that gap in states around the country. The New York Times described this legislation as “a law that might just save the midterms.” In California, it was the basis for SB 747, the No Kings Act, which was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and was signed by the Governor this week. Our team sponsored the bill and testified in support before both the Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees. Versions of this legislation have already passed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and with its enactment this week in California, more than 70 million Americans nationwide now enjoy these protections.
The legislation addresses two different threats we could see this fall. The first is physical intimidation aimed at keeping people from voting — for instance, a federal agent blocking a polling place or threatening a poll worker. Under the No Kings Act, affected voters can sue the individual agents responsible, and the legitimate consequences agents would face make them unlikely to violate rights in the first place. The second threat is interference with the vote count itself. Courts have long held that voters have a constitutional right to have their ballot counted as cast, so if a federal agent unlawfully seizes or destroys ballots, the No Kings Act gives affected voters a means of seeking a remedy.
The law is also carefully crafted to survive legal scrutiny. It doesn't create any new constitutional right, and it only reaches individual officers, not federal agencies themselves. As Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law noted, the Constitution's supremacy clause doesn't automatically shield federal officers from being sued under state law.
And that ballot seizure by Sheriff Bianco earlier this year? In late September, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the seizure was unlawful and ordered the ballots returned, with Attorney General Rob Bonta stating about similar efforts that “come November, we’re ready for whatever comes our way.” With the new legislation signed by Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta will have even more tools at his disposal to protect the elections.
What else is still needed?
Speeding up this fall's count and giving people a way to hold federal actors accountable is meaningful progress, but more work is needed in California before 2028.
One is the timelines themselves. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can arrive and count up to seven days later, and voters have up to 22 days to fix a signature problem before their ballot is rejected. Alongside partners in the state, we are studying whether either window could be shortened without hurting voters, since it's an open question how much of that time is actually being used versus just adding to the count.
We're also exploring what comes after the No Kings Act. The Constitution gave us a federalist system for a reason, so that states could check federal overreach, not just act as administrative arms of federal demands. Areas worth exploring include extending that same accountability logic into state criminal law, since federal officials who break federal law can simply be pardoned while state crimes for the same conduct can't; and rethinking how voter data gets protected, so it can't be weaponized the way we're already seeing attempted with national voter-file efforts, without losing the transparency that keeps elections trustworthy. These are early ideas but worth additional research and investment.
Election administration also needs to be an ongoing budget priority for the state, so that counties can depend on the state to support ongoing and recurring costs in addition to one-offs. This year's $40 million was real progress, but fixing that funding gap for good is arguably the single highest-leverage action California could take before 2028.
***
California may end up being the sharpest test of this fall's elections. If control of the House comes down to a close count, and California has uncalled races longer than others, that gap is exactly where bad-faith actors will attack the results. The reassuring part is that our ecosystem will not be caught unprepared; the funding for election administration, the support for voters and election officials, the legal remedies for federal intrusion, and the plans for what comes next are all already in motion.
As we urged at the outset, we should be alert to the risk of a crisis this fall. Don’t be surprised if the ground starts to tremble and shake. But the California mountains and canyons have withstood plenty of that before. Because of the steps that have been taken, we’re confident they will again.
As the days tick down until the midterms, Americans should be confident in our elections — and also alert to real and alarming attacks on their integrity.
Unlike any presidential administration in U.S. history, the current one is engaged in near-daily efforts to undermine election processes and chill civic participation. In response, Protect Democracy and our peers have built a comprehensive strategy to ensure that we survive the assaults on our elections.
That’s the 30,000-foot view. But if the situation this fall gets especially dicey, there’s a high likelihood that it will play out in one specific place: California.
This makes it especially important to understand what is being done in California already — and what more can be done in the future — to build the strongest bulwark possible in defense of free and fair elections.
Why California specifically?
The Golden State is both important politically and unusually exposed to an election crisis. The state could feature five or more competitive House races this fall, more than enough to determine control of the chamber. And because close races in the state have historically taken longer to call than those almost anywhere else, the whole country could be focused on California for days after the election, if not longer, to find out which party has ultimately won.
President Trump has already shown his willingness to use that delay to inject unfounded accusations into an election with the aim of trying to disrupt the normal process. During the primary this summer, President Trump chimed in while ballots were still being tallied to accuse California Democrats of “trying to steal” the races for governor and Los Angeles mayor. His intervention amplified a growing national narrative questioning why it takes California so long to call its races — a narrative laced with distrust.
Meanwhile, Riverside County offered a preview of another tactic election defenders fear could be deployed in November: Sheriff Chad Bianco, a candidate running for governor, spent this spring seizing more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election over an unsubstantiated fraud complaint, even going so far as to defy the state attorney general's order to stand down.
There are understandable reasons why California takes as long as it does. California's pace is not due to “fraud” or “rigging;” it is the predictable result of policy choices that emphasize broad voter access and comprehensive ballot verification. The state automatically mails a ballot to all of its more than 23 million registered voters — more than any other state — and also offers robust in-person voting. Those policies benefit voters but strain the resources of county election offices asked to run both systems well. State law counts any mail ballot postmarked by Election Day that arrives within the following week, and before any ballot is opened, election workers must verify that the signature on the envelope matches the one on file, giving voters 22 days to fix a mismatch rather than simply discarding their ballot. Finally, a large portion of Californians return their mail ballots on Election Day or immediately before. The result, as the California Voter Foundation has described it, is a “pig-in-the-python” problem: a crush of ballots arriving at the last minute and moving through manual, one-by-one verification all at once.
Reasonable people can disagree about California’s policy choices, which prioritize voter access and accuracy over speed. The Secretary of State's office has defended that tradeoff directly, telling CalMatters that “accuracy is far more important” than speed. But these are legitimate policy choices resulting in a long counting period, not nefariousness or fraud.
That reality, however, does not change the potential for the nightmare scenario: a close election in which it becomes clear that California will decide control of the House while races in the state remain to be called, and this delay opens the floodgates to disinformation and election interference from rogue actors.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that a number of protections have been built already — with more in progress — to mitigate the damage.
What protections exist for this fall?
First, improvements are underway to speed up the vote counting
In recent years, California election officials have been investing in improving and innovating their processes. Their efforts are already yielding results: seven days after the June primary, 93% of ballots statewide had been counted, compared to 84% at the same point in the 2024 general election and 72% in the 2022 general election. The improvements are even more substantial in counties that have had funds to invest in improving spaces, equipment, and processes.
California isn’t stopping with that progress, however. Governor Newsom's 2026-27 budget, signed on June 29, includes roughly $40 million to “safeguard” and “speed up” ballot counting. Protect Democracy pushed for this investment for over a year alongside the California Voter Foundation, including through direct advocacy to the Governor's Office, Secretary of State's Office, and the Legislature. Counties are already putting the money to work, implementing new ballot-processing equipment like sorters, temporary staffing for tasks like signature verification, more and bigger ballot drop boxes, and vehicles to support early voting in remote areas. It's progress, but only a partial fix, since the total funding falls tens of millions short of what election officials and voting advocates requested.
Some of the new funding is earmarked for voter outreach, on the theory that getting people to return ballots earlier can decrease the last-minute crunch that slows the count. To that end, Protect Democracy partnered with UC San Diego's Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections and San Joaquin County Registrar Olivia Hale on a randomized experiment ahead of the June 2 primary, sending 34,346 voters two “Don't Delay, Vote Today!” postcards. The results were modest but statistically significant: recipients returned ballots 0.4 days earlier on average and were 2 points more likely to meet the recommended deadline for election-night counting to ensure their ballots could be verified. These results are impressive in the statewide context of more voters than usual returning mail ballots at the last minute. These postcards offer a low-cost, evidence-backed model any election official in the state can now adopt directly to speed up the process.
In addition, Governor Newsom recently signed SB 1420, a bill Protect Democracy and the California Voter Foundation supported to ease burdens on voters and election officials. Introduced by State Senator Laura Richardson, the law directs the Secretary of State to provide implementation guidance and voter education for “Sign, Scan, and Go” voting — bringing a completed mail ballot to a polling place, signing in as an in-person voter, and casting it on the spot. Jurisdictions that already offer this model report that it shaves three to four days off of processing, and voters get the reassurance of an in-person hand-off without giving up the convenience of filling out their ballot at home.
Then this week, Governor Newsom signed a second bill we supported — AB 2604 from Assemblymember Marc Berman. It will extend a similar efficiency to the back end of the process, giving every county access to a “mobile signature curing” tool that lets voters whose ballots face issues in the signature review process submit an updated signature from their smartphone rather than returning a slower mailed document. Roughly half of California's counties already use something like this; the bill would make the same capability available to the rest. (One caveat: AB 2604 will take some time to implement and so, by law, its rollout is designated for 2028, not this November.)
Second, California is advancing new legislative protections against election interference and abuses of constitutional rights
On September 19, Governor Newsom signed a package of 13 bills responding preemptively to federal efforts to interfere with the midterms. Several bills bar the seizure of ballots or election equipment before certification and prohibit arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day. Others go further, adding real consequences to those protections: one makes it a felony for anyone in a position of authority to direct workers to interfere with a mail ballot's delivery or return, imposing the kind of criminal liability meant to deter interference before it happens rather than just address it after the fact. “If you break the law we're going to hold you accountable,” Newsom said of the package, “and it doesn't matter who you are.”
Another bill imposes civil liability against officers — federal or state — who infringe on Californians’ constitutional rights, such as impeding their right to vote or to have their ballot counted. Under federal civil rights law, if a state or local officer violates your constitutional rights, you have recourse to sue them; but when a federal agent does the same thing, courts have closed off nearly every path to accountability.
Protect Democracy helped craft a model law to close that gap in states around the country. The New York Times described this legislation as “a law that might just save the midterms.” In California, it was the basis for SB 747, the No Kings Act, which was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and was signed by the Governor this week. Our team sponsored the bill and testified in support before both the Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees. Versions of this legislation have already passed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and with its enactment this week in California, more than 70 million Americans nationwide now enjoy these protections.
The legislation addresses two different threats we could see this fall. The first is physical intimidation aimed at keeping people from voting — for instance, a federal agent blocking a polling place or threatening a poll worker. Under the No Kings Act, affected voters can sue the individual agents responsible, and the legitimate consequences agents would face make them unlikely to violate rights in the first place. The second threat is interference with the vote count itself. Courts have long held that voters have a constitutional right to have their ballot counted as cast, so if a federal agent unlawfully seizes or destroys ballots, the No Kings Act gives affected voters a means of seeking a remedy.
The law is also carefully crafted to survive legal scrutiny. It doesn't create any new constitutional right, and it only reaches individual officers, not federal agencies themselves. As Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law noted, the Constitution's supremacy clause doesn't automatically shield federal officers from being sued under state law.
And that ballot seizure by Sheriff Bianco earlier this year? In late September, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the seizure was unlawful and ordered the ballots returned, with Attorney General Rob Bonta stating about similar efforts that “come November, we’re ready for whatever comes our way.” With the new legislation signed by Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta will have even more tools at his disposal to protect the elections.
What else is still needed?
Speeding up this fall's count and giving people a way to hold federal actors accountable is meaningful progress, but more work is needed in California before 2028.
One is the timelines themselves. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can arrive and count up to seven days later, and voters have up to 22 days to fix a signature problem before their ballot is rejected. Alongside partners in the state, we are studying whether either window could be shortened without hurting voters, since it's an open question how much of that time is actually being used versus just adding to the count.
We're also exploring what comes after the No Kings Act. The Constitution gave us a federalist system for a reason, so that states could check federal overreach, not just act as administrative arms of federal demands. Areas worth exploring include extending that same accountability logic into state criminal law, since federal officials who break federal law can simply be pardoned while state crimes for the same conduct can't; and rethinking how voter data gets protected, so it can't be weaponized the way we're already seeing attempted with national voter-file efforts, without losing the transparency that keeps elections trustworthy. These are early ideas but worth additional research and investment.
Election administration also needs to be an ongoing budget priority for the state, so that counties can depend on the state to support ongoing and recurring costs in addition to one-offs. This year's $40 million was real progress, but fixing that funding gap for good is arguably the single highest-leverage action California could take before 2028.
***
California may end up being the sharpest test of this fall's elections. If control of the House comes down to a close count, and California has uncalled races longer than others, that gap is exactly where bad-faith actors will attack the results. The reassuring part is that our ecosystem will not be caught unprepared; the funding for election administration, the support for voters and election officials, the legal remedies for federal intrusion, and the plans for what comes next are all already in motion.
As we urged at the outset, we should be alert to the risk of a crisis this fall. Don’t be surprised if the ground starts to tremble and shake. But the California mountains and canyons have withstood plenty of that before. Because of the steps that have been taken, we’re confident they will again.
As the days tick down until the midterms, Americans should be confident in our elections — and also alert to real and alarming attacks on their integrity.
Unlike any presidential administration in U.S. history, the current one is engaged in near-daily efforts to undermine election processes and chill civic participation. In response, Protect Democracy and our peers have built a comprehensive strategy to ensure that we survive the assaults on our elections.
That’s the 30,000-foot view. But if the situation this fall gets especially dicey, there’s a high likelihood that it will play out in one specific place: California.
This makes it especially important to understand what is being done in California already — and what more can be done in the future — to build the strongest bulwark possible in defense of free and fair elections.
Why California specifically?
The Golden State is both important politically and unusually exposed to an election crisis. The state could feature five or more competitive House races this fall, more than enough to determine control of the chamber. And because close races in the state have historically taken longer to call than those almost anywhere else, the whole country could be focused on California for days after the election, if not longer, to find out which party has ultimately won.
President Trump has already shown his willingness to use that delay to inject unfounded accusations into an election with the aim of trying to disrupt the normal process. During the primary this summer, President Trump chimed in while ballots were still being tallied to accuse California Democrats of “trying to steal” the races for governor and Los Angeles mayor. His intervention amplified a growing national narrative questioning why it takes California so long to call its races — a narrative laced with distrust.
Meanwhile, Riverside County offered a preview of another tactic election defenders fear could be deployed in November: Sheriff Chad Bianco, a candidate running for governor, spent this spring seizing more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election over an unsubstantiated fraud complaint, even going so far as to defy the state attorney general's order to stand down.
There are understandable reasons why California takes as long as it does. California's pace is not due to “fraud” or “rigging;” it is the predictable result of policy choices that emphasize broad voter access and comprehensive ballot verification. The state automatically mails a ballot to all of its more than 23 million registered voters — more than any other state — and also offers robust in-person voting. Those policies benefit voters but strain the resources of county election offices asked to run both systems well. State law counts any mail ballot postmarked by Election Day that arrives within the following week, and before any ballot is opened, election workers must verify that the signature on the envelope matches the one on file, giving voters 22 days to fix a mismatch rather than simply discarding their ballot. Finally, a large portion of Californians return their mail ballots on Election Day or immediately before. The result, as the California Voter Foundation has described it, is a “pig-in-the-python” problem: a crush of ballots arriving at the last minute and moving through manual, one-by-one verification all at once.
Reasonable people can disagree about California’s policy choices, which prioritize voter access and accuracy over speed. The Secretary of State's office has defended that tradeoff directly, telling CalMatters that “accuracy is far more important” than speed. But these are legitimate policy choices resulting in a long counting period, not nefariousness or fraud.
That reality, however, does not change the potential for the nightmare scenario: a close election in which it becomes clear that California will decide control of the House while races in the state remain to be called, and this delay opens the floodgates to disinformation and election interference from rogue actors.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that a number of protections have been built already — with more in progress — to mitigate the damage.
What protections exist for this fall?
First, improvements are underway to speed up the vote counting
In recent years, California election officials have been investing in improving and innovating their processes. Their efforts are already yielding results: seven days after the June primary, 93% of ballots statewide had been counted, compared to 84% at the same point in the 2024 general election and 72% in the 2022 general election. The improvements are even more substantial in counties that have had funds to invest in improving spaces, equipment, and processes.
California isn’t stopping with that progress, however. Governor Newsom's 2026-27 budget, signed on June 29, includes roughly $40 million to “safeguard” and “speed up” ballot counting. Protect Democracy pushed for this investment for over a year alongside the California Voter Foundation, including through direct advocacy to the Governor's Office, Secretary of State's Office, and the Legislature. Counties are already putting the money to work, implementing new ballot-processing equipment like sorters, temporary staffing for tasks like signature verification, more and bigger ballot drop boxes, and vehicles to support early voting in remote areas. It's progress, but only a partial fix, since the total funding falls tens of millions short of what election officials and voting advocates requested.
Some of the new funding is earmarked for voter outreach, on the theory that getting people to return ballots earlier can decrease the last-minute crunch that slows the count. To that end, Protect Democracy partnered with UC San Diego's Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections and San Joaquin County Registrar Olivia Hale on a randomized experiment ahead of the June 2 primary, sending 34,346 voters two “Don't Delay, Vote Today!” postcards. The results were modest but statistically significant: recipients returned ballots 0.4 days earlier on average and were 2 points more likely to meet the recommended deadline for election-night counting to ensure their ballots could be verified. These results are impressive in the statewide context of more voters than usual returning mail ballots at the last minute. These postcards offer a low-cost, evidence-backed model any election official in the state can now adopt directly to speed up the process.
In addition, Governor Newsom recently signed SB 1420, a bill Protect Democracy and the California Voter Foundation supported to ease burdens on voters and election officials. Introduced by State Senator Laura Richardson, the law directs the Secretary of State to provide implementation guidance and voter education for “Sign, Scan, and Go” voting — bringing a completed mail ballot to a polling place, signing in as an in-person voter, and casting it on the spot. Jurisdictions that already offer this model report that it shaves three to four days off of processing, and voters get the reassurance of an in-person hand-off without giving up the convenience of filling out their ballot at home.
Then this week, Governor Newsom signed a second bill we supported — AB 2604 from Assemblymember Marc Berman. It will extend a similar efficiency to the back end of the process, giving every county access to a “mobile signature curing” tool that lets voters whose ballots face issues in the signature review process submit an updated signature from their smartphone rather than returning a slower mailed document. Roughly half of California's counties already use something like this; the bill would make the same capability available to the rest. (One caveat: AB 2604 will take some time to implement and so, by law, its rollout is designated for 2028, not this November.)
Second, California is advancing new legislative protections against election interference and abuses of constitutional rights
On September 19, Governor Newsom signed a package of 13 bills responding preemptively to federal efforts to interfere with the midterms. Several bills bar the seizure of ballots or election equipment before certification and prohibit arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day. Others go further, adding real consequences to those protections: one makes it a felony for anyone in a position of authority to direct workers to interfere with a mail ballot's delivery or return, imposing the kind of criminal liability meant to deter interference before it happens rather than just address it after the fact. “If you break the law we're going to hold you accountable,” Newsom said of the package, “and it doesn't matter who you are.”
Another bill imposes civil liability against officers — federal or state — who infringe on Californians’ constitutional rights, such as impeding their right to vote or to have their ballot counted. Under federal civil rights law, if a state or local officer violates your constitutional rights, you have recourse to sue them; but when a federal agent does the same thing, courts have closed off nearly every path to accountability.
Protect Democracy helped craft a model law to close that gap in states around the country. The New York Times described this legislation as “a law that might just save the midterms.” In California, it was the basis for SB 747, the No Kings Act, which was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and was signed by the Governor this week. Our team sponsored the bill and testified in support before both the Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees. Versions of this legislation have already passed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and with its enactment this week in California, more than 70 million Americans nationwide now enjoy these protections.
The legislation addresses two different threats we could see this fall. The first is physical intimidation aimed at keeping people from voting — for instance, a federal agent blocking a polling place or threatening a poll worker. Under the No Kings Act, affected voters can sue the individual agents responsible, and the legitimate consequences agents would face make them unlikely to violate rights in the first place. The second threat is interference with the vote count itself. Courts have long held that voters have a constitutional right to have their ballot counted as cast, so if a federal agent unlawfully seizes or destroys ballots, the No Kings Act gives affected voters a means of seeking a remedy.
The law is also carefully crafted to survive legal scrutiny. It doesn't create any new constitutional right, and it only reaches individual officers, not federal agencies themselves. As Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law noted, the Constitution's supremacy clause doesn't automatically shield federal officers from being sued under state law.
And that ballot seizure by Sheriff Bianco earlier this year? In late September, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the seizure was unlawful and ordered the ballots returned, with Attorney General Rob Bonta stating about similar efforts that “come November, we’re ready for whatever comes our way.” With the new legislation signed by Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta will have even more tools at his disposal to protect the elections.
What else is still needed?
Speeding up this fall's count and giving people a way to hold federal actors accountable is meaningful progress, but more work is needed in California before 2028.
One is the timelines themselves. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can arrive and count up to seven days later, and voters have up to 22 days to fix a signature problem before their ballot is rejected. Alongside partners in the state, we are studying whether either window could be shortened without hurting voters, since it's an open question how much of that time is actually being used versus just adding to the count.
We're also exploring what comes after the No Kings Act. The Constitution gave us a federalist system for a reason, so that states could check federal overreach, not just act as administrative arms of federal demands. Areas worth exploring include extending that same accountability logic into state criminal law, since federal officials who break federal law can simply be pardoned while state crimes for the same conduct can't; and rethinking how voter data gets protected, so it can't be weaponized the way we're already seeing attempted with national voter-file efforts, without losing the transparency that keeps elections trustworthy. These are early ideas but worth additional research and investment.
Election administration also needs to be an ongoing budget priority for the state, so that counties can depend on the state to support ongoing and recurring costs in addition to one-offs. This year's $40 million was real progress, but fixing that funding gap for good is arguably the single highest-leverage action California could take before 2028.
***
California may end up being the sharpest test of this fall's elections. If control of the House comes down to a close count, and California has uncalled races longer than others, that gap is exactly where bad-faith actors will attack the results. The reassuring part is that our ecosystem will not be caught unprepared; the funding for election administration, the support for voters and election officials, the legal remedies for federal intrusion, and the plans for what comes next are all already in motion.
As we urged at the outset, we should be alert to the risk of a crisis this fall. Don’t be surprised if the ground starts to tremble and shake. But the California mountains and canyons have withstood plenty of that before. Because of the steps that have been taken, we’re confident they will again.
As the days tick down until the midterms, Americans should be confident in our elections — and also alert to real and alarming attacks on their integrity.
Unlike any presidential administration in U.S. history, the current one is engaged in near-daily efforts to undermine election processes and chill civic participation. In response, Protect Democracy and our peers have built a comprehensive strategy to ensure that we survive the assaults on our elections.
That’s the 30,000-foot view. But if the situation this fall gets especially dicey, there’s a high likelihood that it will play out in one specific place: California.
This makes it especially important to understand what is being done in California already — and what more can be done in the future — to build the strongest bulwark possible in defense of free and fair elections.
Why California specifically?
The Golden State is both important politically and unusually exposed to an election crisis. The state could feature five or more competitive House races this fall, more than enough to determine control of the chamber. And because close races in the state have historically taken longer to call than those almost anywhere else, the whole country could be focused on California for days after the election, if not longer, to find out which party has ultimately won.
President Trump has already shown his willingness to use that delay to inject unfounded accusations into an election with the aim of trying to disrupt the normal process. During the primary this summer, President Trump chimed in while ballots were still being tallied to accuse California Democrats of “trying to steal” the races for governor and Los Angeles mayor. His intervention amplified a growing national narrative questioning why it takes California so long to call its races — a narrative laced with distrust.
Meanwhile, Riverside County offered a preview of another tactic election defenders fear could be deployed in November: Sheriff Chad Bianco, a candidate running for governor, spent this spring seizing more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election over an unsubstantiated fraud complaint, even going so far as to defy the state attorney general's order to stand down.
There are understandable reasons why California takes as long as it does. California's pace is not due to “fraud” or “rigging;” it is the predictable result of policy choices that emphasize broad voter access and comprehensive ballot verification. The state automatically mails a ballot to all of its more than 23 million registered voters — more than any other state — and also offers robust in-person voting. Those policies benefit voters but strain the resources of county election offices asked to run both systems well. State law counts any mail ballot postmarked by Election Day that arrives within the following week, and before any ballot is opened, election workers must verify that the signature on the envelope matches the one on file, giving voters 22 days to fix a mismatch rather than simply discarding their ballot. Finally, a large portion of Californians return their mail ballots on Election Day or immediately before. The result, as the California Voter Foundation has described it, is a “pig-in-the-python” problem: a crush of ballots arriving at the last minute and moving through manual, one-by-one verification all at once.
Reasonable people can disagree about California’s policy choices, which prioritize voter access and accuracy over speed. The Secretary of State's office has defended that tradeoff directly, telling CalMatters that “accuracy is far more important” than speed. But these are legitimate policy choices resulting in a long counting period, not nefariousness or fraud.
That reality, however, does not change the potential for the nightmare scenario: a close election in which it becomes clear that California will decide control of the House while races in the state remain to be called, and this delay opens the floodgates to disinformation and election interference from rogue actors.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that a number of protections have been built already — with more in progress — to mitigate the damage.
What protections exist for this fall?
First, improvements are underway to speed up the vote counting
In recent years, California election officials have been investing in improving and innovating their processes. Their efforts are already yielding results: seven days after the June primary, 93% of ballots statewide had been counted, compared to 84% at the same point in the 2024 general election and 72% in the 2022 general election. The improvements are even more substantial in counties that have had funds to invest in improving spaces, equipment, and processes.
California isn’t stopping with that progress, however. Governor Newsom's 2026-27 budget, signed on June 29, includes roughly $40 million to “safeguard” and “speed up” ballot counting. Protect Democracy pushed for this investment for over a year alongside the California Voter Foundation, including through direct advocacy to the Governor's Office, Secretary of State's Office, and the Legislature. Counties are already putting the money to work, implementing new ballot-processing equipment like sorters, temporary staffing for tasks like signature verification, more and bigger ballot drop boxes, and vehicles to support early voting in remote areas. It's progress, but only a partial fix, since the total funding falls tens of millions short of what election officials and voting advocates requested.
Some of the new funding is earmarked for voter outreach, on the theory that getting people to return ballots earlier can decrease the last-minute crunch that slows the count. To that end, Protect Democracy partnered with UC San Diego's Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections and San Joaquin County Registrar Olivia Hale on a randomized experiment ahead of the June 2 primary, sending 34,346 voters two “Don't Delay, Vote Today!” postcards. The results were modest but statistically significant: recipients returned ballots 0.4 days earlier on average and were 2 points more likely to meet the recommended deadline for election-night counting to ensure their ballots could be verified. These results are impressive in the statewide context of more voters than usual returning mail ballots at the last minute. These postcards offer a low-cost, evidence-backed model any election official in the state can now adopt directly to speed up the process.
In addition, Governor Newsom recently signed SB 1420, a bill Protect Democracy and the California Voter Foundation supported to ease burdens on voters and election officials. Introduced by State Senator Laura Richardson, the law directs the Secretary of State to provide implementation guidance and voter education for “Sign, Scan, and Go” voting — bringing a completed mail ballot to a polling place, signing in as an in-person voter, and casting it on the spot. Jurisdictions that already offer this model report that it shaves three to four days off of processing, and voters get the reassurance of an in-person hand-off without giving up the convenience of filling out their ballot at home.
Then this week, Governor Newsom signed a second bill we supported — AB 2604 from Assemblymember Marc Berman. It will extend a similar efficiency to the back end of the process, giving every county access to a “mobile signature curing” tool that lets voters whose ballots face issues in the signature review process submit an updated signature from their smartphone rather than returning a slower mailed document. Roughly half of California's counties already use something like this; the bill would make the same capability available to the rest. (One caveat: AB 2604 will take some time to implement and so, by law, its rollout is designated for 2028, not this November.)
Second, California is advancing new legislative protections against election interference and abuses of constitutional rights
On September 19, Governor Newsom signed a package of 13 bills responding preemptively to federal efforts to interfere with the midterms. Several bills bar the seizure of ballots or election equipment before certification and prohibit arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day. Others go further, adding real consequences to those protections: one makes it a felony for anyone in a position of authority to direct workers to interfere with a mail ballot's delivery or return, imposing the kind of criminal liability meant to deter interference before it happens rather than just address it after the fact. “If you break the law we're going to hold you accountable,” Newsom said of the package, “and it doesn't matter who you are.”
Another bill imposes civil liability against officers — federal or state — who infringe on Californians’ constitutional rights, such as impeding their right to vote or to have their ballot counted. Under federal civil rights law, if a state or local officer violates your constitutional rights, you have recourse to sue them; but when a federal agent does the same thing, courts have closed off nearly every path to accountability.
Protect Democracy helped craft a model law to close that gap in states around the country. The New York Times described this legislation as “a law that might just save the midterms.” In California, it was the basis for SB 747, the No Kings Act, which was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and was signed by the Governor this week. Our team sponsored the bill and testified in support before both the Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees. Versions of this legislation have already passed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and with its enactment this week in California, more than 70 million Americans nationwide now enjoy these protections.
The legislation addresses two different threats we could see this fall. The first is physical intimidation aimed at keeping people from voting — for instance, a federal agent blocking a polling place or threatening a poll worker. Under the No Kings Act, affected voters can sue the individual agents responsible, and the legitimate consequences agents would face make them unlikely to violate rights in the first place. The second threat is interference with the vote count itself. Courts have long held that voters have a constitutional right to have their ballot counted as cast, so if a federal agent unlawfully seizes or destroys ballots, the No Kings Act gives affected voters a means of seeking a remedy.
The law is also carefully crafted to survive legal scrutiny. It doesn't create any new constitutional right, and it only reaches individual officers, not federal agencies themselves. As Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law noted, the Constitution's supremacy clause doesn't automatically shield federal officers from being sued under state law.
And that ballot seizure by Sheriff Bianco earlier this year? In late September, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the seizure was unlawful and ordered the ballots returned, with Attorney General Rob Bonta stating about similar efforts that “come November, we’re ready for whatever comes our way.” With the new legislation signed by Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta will have even more tools at his disposal to protect the elections.
What else is still needed?
Speeding up this fall's count and giving people a way to hold federal actors accountable is meaningful progress, but more work is needed in California before 2028.
One is the timelines themselves. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can arrive and count up to seven days later, and voters have up to 22 days to fix a signature problem before their ballot is rejected. Alongside partners in the state, we are studying whether either window could be shortened without hurting voters, since it's an open question how much of that time is actually being used versus just adding to the count.
We're also exploring what comes after the No Kings Act. The Constitution gave us a federalist system for a reason, so that states could check federal overreach, not just act as administrative arms of federal demands. Areas worth exploring include extending that same accountability logic into state criminal law, since federal officials who break federal law can simply be pardoned while state crimes for the same conduct can't; and rethinking how voter data gets protected, so it can't be weaponized the way we're already seeing attempted with national voter-file efforts, without losing the transparency that keeps elections trustworthy. These are early ideas but worth additional research and investment.
Election administration also needs to be an ongoing budget priority for the state, so that counties can depend on the state to support ongoing and recurring costs in addition to one-offs. This year's $40 million was real progress, but fixing that funding gap for good is arguably the single highest-leverage action California could take before 2028.
***
California may end up being the sharpest test of this fall's elections. If control of the House comes down to a close count, and California has uncalled races longer than others, that gap is exactly where bad-faith actors will attack the results. The reassuring part is that our ecosystem will not be caught unprepared; the funding for election administration, the support for voters and election officials, the legal remedies for federal intrusion, and the plans for what comes next are all already in motion.
As we urged at the outset, we should be alert to the risk of a crisis this fall. Don’t be surprised if the ground starts to tremble and shake. But the California mountains and canyons have withstood plenty of that before. Because of the steps that have been taken, we’re confident they will again.
As the days tick down until the midterms, Americans should be confident in our elections — and also alert to real and alarming attacks on their integrity.
Unlike any presidential administration in U.S. history, the current one is engaged in near-daily efforts to undermine election processes and chill civic participation. In response, Protect Democracy and our peers have built a comprehensive strategy to ensure that we survive the assaults on our elections.
That’s the 30,000-foot view. But if the situation this fall gets especially dicey, there’s a high likelihood that it will play out in one specific place: California.
This makes it especially important to understand what is being done in California already — and what more can be done in the future — to build the strongest bulwark possible in defense of free and fair elections.
Why California specifically?
The Golden State is both important politically and unusually exposed to an election crisis. The state could feature five or more competitive House races this fall, more than enough to determine control of the chamber. And because close races in the state have historically taken longer to call than those almost anywhere else, the whole country could be focused on California for days after the election, if not longer, to find out which party has ultimately won.
President Trump has already shown his willingness to use that delay to inject unfounded accusations into an election with the aim of trying to disrupt the normal process. During the primary this summer, President Trump chimed in while ballots were still being tallied to accuse California Democrats of “trying to steal” the races for governor and Los Angeles mayor. His intervention amplified a growing national narrative questioning why it takes California so long to call its races — a narrative laced with distrust.
Meanwhile, Riverside County offered a preview of another tactic election defenders fear could be deployed in November: Sheriff Chad Bianco, a candidate running for governor, spent this spring seizing more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election over an unsubstantiated fraud complaint, even going so far as to defy the state attorney general's order to stand down.
There are understandable reasons why California takes as long as it does. California's pace is not due to “fraud” or “rigging;” it is the predictable result of policy choices that emphasize broad voter access and comprehensive ballot verification. The state automatically mails a ballot to all of its more than 23 million registered voters — more than any other state — and also offers robust in-person voting. Those policies benefit voters but strain the resources of county election offices asked to run both systems well. State law counts any mail ballot postmarked by Election Day that arrives within the following week, and before any ballot is opened, election workers must verify that the signature on the envelope matches the one on file, giving voters 22 days to fix a mismatch rather than simply discarding their ballot. Finally, a large portion of Californians return their mail ballots on Election Day or immediately before. The result, as the California Voter Foundation has described it, is a “pig-in-the-python” problem: a crush of ballots arriving at the last minute and moving through manual, one-by-one verification all at once.
Reasonable people can disagree about California’s policy choices, which prioritize voter access and accuracy over speed. The Secretary of State's office has defended that tradeoff directly, telling CalMatters that “accuracy is far more important” than speed. But these are legitimate policy choices resulting in a long counting period, not nefariousness or fraud.
That reality, however, does not change the potential for the nightmare scenario: a close election in which it becomes clear that California will decide control of the House while races in the state remain to be called, and this delay opens the floodgates to disinformation and election interference from rogue actors.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that a number of protections have been built already — with more in progress — to mitigate the damage.
What protections exist for this fall?
First, improvements are underway to speed up the vote counting
In recent years, California election officials have been investing in improving and innovating their processes. Their efforts are already yielding results: seven days after the June primary, 93% of ballots statewide had been counted, compared to 84% at the same point in the 2024 general election and 72% in the 2022 general election. The improvements are even more substantial in counties that have had funds to invest in improving spaces, equipment, and processes.
California isn’t stopping with that progress, however. Governor Newsom's 2026-27 budget, signed on June 29, includes roughly $40 million to “safeguard” and “speed up” ballot counting. Protect Democracy pushed for this investment for over a year alongside the California Voter Foundation, including through direct advocacy to the Governor's Office, Secretary of State's Office, and the Legislature. Counties are already putting the money to work, implementing new ballot-processing equipment like sorters, temporary staffing for tasks like signature verification, more and bigger ballot drop boxes, and vehicles to support early voting in remote areas. It's progress, but only a partial fix, since the total funding falls tens of millions short of what election officials and voting advocates requested.
Some of the new funding is earmarked for voter outreach, on the theory that getting people to return ballots earlier can decrease the last-minute crunch that slows the count. To that end, Protect Democracy partnered with UC San Diego's Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections and San Joaquin County Registrar Olivia Hale on a randomized experiment ahead of the June 2 primary, sending 34,346 voters two “Don't Delay, Vote Today!” postcards. The results were modest but statistically significant: recipients returned ballots 0.4 days earlier on average and were 2 points more likely to meet the recommended deadline for election-night counting to ensure their ballots could be verified. These results are impressive in the statewide context of more voters than usual returning mail ballots at the last minute. These postcards offer a low-cost, evidence-backed model any election official in the state can now adopt directly to speed up the process.
In addition, Governor Newsom recently signed SB 1420, a bill Protect Democracy and the California Voter Foundation supported to ease burdens on voters and election officials. Introduced by State Senator Laura Richardson, the law directs the Secretary of State to provide implementation guidance and voter education for “Sign, Scan, and Go” voting — bringing a completed mail ballot to a polling place, signing in as an in-person voter, and casting it on the spot. Jurisdictions that already offer this model report that it shaves three to four days off of processing, and voters get the reassurance of an in-person hand-off without giving up the convenience of filling out their ballot at home.
Then this week, Governor Newsom signed a second bill we supported — AB 2604 from Assemblymember Marc Berman. It will extend a similar efficiency to the back end of the process, giving every county access to a “mobile signature curing” tool that lets voters whose ballots face issues in the signature review process submit an updated signature from their smartphone rather than returning a slower mailed document. Roughly half of California's counties already use something like this; the bill would make the same capability available to the rest. (One caveat: AB 2604 will take some time to implement and so, by law, its rollout is designated for 2028, not this November.)
Second, California is advancing new legislative protections against election interference and abuses of constitutional rights
On September 19, Governor Newsom signed a package of 13 bills responding preemptively to federal efforts to interfere with the midterms. Several bills bar the seizure of ballots or election equipment before certification and prohibit arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day. Others go further, adding real consequences to those protections: one makes it a felony for anyone in a position of authority to direct workers to interfere with a mail ballot's delivery or return, imposing the kind of criminal liability meant to deter interference before it happens rather than just address it after the fact. “If you break the law we're going to hold you accountable,” Newsom said of the package, “and it doesn't matter who you are.”
Another bill imposes civil liability against officers — federal or state — who infringe on Californians’ constitutional rights, such as impeding their right to vote or to have their ballot counted. Under federal civil rights law, if a state or local officer violates your constitutional rights, you have recourse to sue them; but when a federal agent does the same thing, courts have closed off nearly every path to accountability.
Protect Democracy helped craft a model law to close that gap in states around the country. The New York Times described this legislation as “a law that might just save the midterms.” In California, it was the basis for SB 747, the No Kings Act, which was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and was signed by the Governor this week. Our team sponsored the bill and testified in support before both the Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees. Versions of this legislation have already passed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and with its enactment this week in California, more than 70 million Americans nationwide now enjoy these protections.
The legislation addresses two different threats we could see this fall. The first is physical intimidation aimed at keeping people from voting — for instance, a federal agent blocking a polling place or threatening a poll worker. Under the No Kings Act, affected voters can sue the individual agents responsible, and the legitimate consequences agents would face make them unlikely to violate rights in the first place. The second threat is interference with the vote count itself. Courts have long held that voters have a constitutional right to have their ballot counted as cast, so if a federal agent unlawfully seizes or destroys ballots, the No Kings Act gives affected voters a means of seeking a remedy.
The law is also carefully crafted to survive legal scrutiny. It doesn't create any new constitutional right, and it only reaches individual officers, not federal agencies themselves. As Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law noted, the Constitution's supremacy clause doesn't automatically shield federal officers from being sued under state law.
And that ballot seizure by Sheriff Bianco earlier this year? In late September, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the seizure was unlawful and ordered the ballots returned, with Attorney General Rob Bonta stating about similar efforts that “come November, we’re ready for whatever comes our way.” With the new legislation signed by Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta will have even more tools at his disposal to protect the elections.
What else is still needed?
Speeding up this fall's count and giving people a way to hold federal actors accountable is meaningful progress, but more work is needed in California before 2028.
One is the timelines themselves. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can arrive and count up to seven days later, and voters have up to 22 days to fix a signature problem before their ballot is rejected. Alongside partners in the state, we are studying whether either window could be shortened without hurting voters, since it's an open question how much of that time is actually being used versus just adding to the count.
We're also exploring what comes after the No Kings Act. The Constitution gave us a federalist system for a reason, so that states could check federal overreach, not just act as administrative arms of federal demands. Areas worth exploring include extending that same accountability logic into state criminal law, since federal officials who break federal law can simply be pardoned while state crimes for the same conduct can't; and rethinking how voter data gets protected, so it can't be weaponized the way we're already seeing attempted with national voter-file efforts, without losing the transparency that keeps elections trustworthy. These are early ideas but worth additional research and investment.
Election administration also needs to be an ongoing budget priority for the state, so that counties can depend on the state to support ongoing and recurring costs in addition to one-offs. This year's $40 million was real progress, but fixing that funding gap for good is arguably the single highest-leverage action California could take before 2028.
***
California may end up being the sharpest test of this fall's elections. If control of the House comes down to a close count, and California has uncalled races longer than others, that gap is exactly where bad-faith actors will attack the results. The reassuring part is that our ecosystem will not be caught unprepared; the funding for election administration, the support for voters and election officials, the legal remedies for federal intrusion, and the plans for what comes next are all already in motion.
As we urged at the outset, we should be alert to the risk of a crisis this fall. Don’t be surprised if the ground starts to tremble and shake. But the California mountains and canyons have withstood plenty of that before. Because of the steps that have been taken, we’re confident they will again.
About the Author
Ian Bassin
Ian Bassin is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel.
About the Author
Ian Bassin
Ian Bassin is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel.
About the Author
Ian Bassin
Ian Bassin is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel.
About the Author
Ben Gips
Ben Gips is a Policy Advocate at Protect Democracy focused on elections and technology governance, working to protect free, fair, and secure elections. He currently leads the organization’s state policy work in California.
About the Author
Ben Gips
Ben Gips is a Policy Advocate at Protect Democracy focused on elections and technology governance, working to protect free, fair, and secure elections. He currently leads the organization’s state policy work in California.
About the Author
Ben Gips
Ben Gips is a Policy Advocate at Protect Democracy focused on elections and technology governance, working to protect free, fair, and secure elections. He currently leads the organization’s state policy work in California.
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