Nearly 150,000 mail ballots rejected in California’ primary despite efforts to count every vote
LOS ANGELES (AP) — About 150,000 California voters mail-in ballots rejected for the state’s June primary, an increase since the last election even as the state tries to make voting easier to increase turnout and count every vote.
California got a bad reputation for it Vote counting is very slow This can take weeks and sometimes longer; This is largely aimed at increasing participation over the years but I did little to achieve this. Among the changes: Every voter receives a mail-in ballot that can arrive at the election office seven days late and still be counted, as long as the envelope is postmarked on Election Day.
But despite the generous one-week window, late-arriving ballots are the main reason for the higher rejection figures, according to data compiled by the secretary of state’s office. Voting experts think the real problem stems from postmarks on ballots arriving after Election Day that make them ineligible for counting. This may be blamed on U.S. Postal Service changes that may affect the timing of applying postmarks.
Late ballot papers caused rejections
According to government data, 148,241 mail ballots were rejected 1.73% of votes cast in the June election or by mail.
Looking at the raw numbers, this is higher than the 2024 primary, when 108,982 mail ballots were rejected, or a rate of 1.56%. 105,818 mail ballots were invalidated in the 2022 primary; this rate is similar to that in 2024.
The delay accounted for 93,479 ballots rejected in June; this was by far the largest category of ballot disqualifications. While that number was about 70,000 in the 2022 primaries and about 76,000 in the 2024 primaries, turnout in those elections was lower than last June.
Kim Alexander, president of the non-partisan California Voter Foundation, He said a major concern is that the increase in ballots rejected due to delays could be linked to postal procedures as well as a late surge in ballots in June. In a free-for-all and chaotic governor’s race, many voters waited until the final days to decide.
“Ballots rejected due to delay are not because they arrived too late to be counted, but because they were postmarked too late to be counted in the first place,” Alexander wrote in an email.
Rejection rates fluctuated over timeBut the growing number of people set aside for delay compared to recent elections “really begs the question of why this is happening,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a nonpartisan research group.
Lawmakers concerned about USPS postmark changes
In January, a group of mostly Democratic US senators sent a letter to US Postal Servicealarmed that mail processing changes may affect postmark dates mail-in ballots during the election year This will determine control of Congress.
Updated agency policy says postmarks may indicate the day the mail was processed at one of its processing centers, not the day the Postal Service first received the mail. Due to recent mergers within the Postal Service, these centers are likely to be increasingly distant from certain communities, which may cause postmarks to be further delayed.
On Thursday, two Democrats from Wisconsin, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers, called on the Postal Service to address delays that caused hundreds of ballots to arrive after Election Day in April. In June, a federal judge stopped President Donald Trump executive order It sought to create a federal voter roll and limit who could receive a mail-in ballot.
Earlier this year, California election officials urged voters to send their ballots in the mail early, warning that changes at the Postal Service could cause postal service to slow down.
In California, the highest vote-by-mail rejection rate in June (3.52%) was in Tulare County in the agricultural Central Valley. This was followed by Alpine County, south of Lake Tahoe, and Merced County, also in the Central Valley, both recording a 3.36% denial rate.
Mismatched signatures and multiple ballots in one envelope
Nearly 44,000 ballots were canceled because the voter’s signature did not match the signature on county officials’ records. Over 8,300 votes were rejected due to lack of signatures on the returned ballot envelopes.
In 743 cases, the voter had already voted, so mail-in voting was invalid. Other reasons for rejection included a ballot missing from the return envelope or multiple ballots being returned in a single envelope.
The data did not break down votes that were not counted by party registration.
While Florida, Texas and other densely populated states are completing vote counting quickly, California is lagging behind nationally.
Following the June primaries, President Donald Trump took advantage of California’s reputation as a slow-moving state in vote counting to renew his long-standing criticism Republican Justice Department during state elections launched an investigation to the Los Angeles County elections.
There is no indication of widespread problems with mail-in voting. gained popularity Among both Democrats and Republicans. A report published by the Brookings Institution in 2025 found that the number of mail-in voting fraud cases was very small; about four cases per 10 million mail-in votes.
