California’s election system is facing renewed scrutiny after officials confirmed that nearly 150,000 mail-in ballots were rejected during the state’s June primary election, a sharp increase from recent election cycles and a number that critics say exposes serious vulnerabilities in a state that mails a ballot to every registered voter regardless of whether they requested one.
The figures, reported by the Associated Press, show that California’s rejection numbers spiked even as state officials continue to expand mail voting access with the stated goal of increasing turnout and ensuring every eligible ballot gets counted. Instead, the June primary delivered the opposite result for tens of thousands of voters whose ballots never made it into the final tally.
Election officials broke down the reasons behind the rejections, and the details are worth examining closely. More than 8,300 ballots were tossed out because the returned envelope contained no signature at all, a basic requirement that voters failed to meet despite the state’s mail-heavy voting system. Another 743 ballots were voided because the voter had already cast a ballot through another method, raising questions about how the state tracks and reconciles multiple submissions from the same registered voter.
Additional ballots were rejected for reasons including missing ballots inside returned envelopes, incorrect or missing addresses, late arrival beyond the state’s generous seven-day postmark deadline, and signatures that simply did not match what election officials had on file. California is unusual in that it allows mail ballots to arrive up to seven days after Election Day and still be counted, provided they were postmarked on time, a policy that has repeatedly drawn criticism for dragging out California’s vote counting process far longer than almost any other state in the country.
That slow count has become something of a national punchline in recent years, and it did not go unnoticed this time around either. President Trump seized on California’s reputation as the country’s undisputed slowpoke when it comes to tallying votes, renewing his long-standing criticism of how the state administers its elections. His comments came as the Justice Department, under his administration, opened an investigation into Los Angeles County’s handling of the election.
That federal scrutiny of Los Angeles County matters given the sheer size of the jurisdiction. Los Angeles County alone processes millions of mail ballots in any given election cycle, meaning even a small percentage of rejections there can translate into a very large raw number of disenfranchised voters, exactly the kind of scale problem that has fueled skepticism of California’s system for years among conservatives nationwide.
To put the scale of this rejection number in perspective, California Senate committee data previously showed that 117,586 ballots were rejected statewide during the 2024 general election. The nearly 150,000 rejected in this year’s June primary represents a meaningful increase over that figure, despite the state continuing to pour resources into voter education campaigns urging Californians to sign their ballot envelopes correctly and to sign up for ballot tracking services.
Those tracking tools, known as BallotTrax, allow voters to monitor their ballot status and receive notifications if there is a problem. Yet data presented to state lawmakers shows that only about five million of California’s 22 million registered voters are actually signed up for the service, leaving the vast majority of voters with no automatic warning if their ballot runs into trouble. Research presented to the legislature found that non-BallotTrax users saw rejection rates at least fifty percent higher than users who had signed up, a gap that suggests the state’s own outreach efforts are falling well short of where they need to be.
Signature mismatch issues in particular have a long and controversial history in California elections. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the state years ago, arguing that election officials were discarding tens of thousands of ballots over signature discrepancies without ever notifying the affected voters, effectively disenfranchising them without any chance to fix the problem. That lawsuit eventually forced changes requiring officials to notify voters and give them an opportunity to cure a mismatched or missing signature before final certification.
Despite those reforms, state data reviewed by lawmakers shows more than 100,000 California voters were disenfranchised between 2020 and 2024 due to signature discrepancies that were never successfully cured, even with the notification process now in place. That is a striking figure for a state that has spent nearly a decade implementing reforms specifically designed to prevent exactly this outcome.
The consequences of these rejections are not merely theoretical. State officials have acknowledged that rejected ballots have altered the outcomes of real elections in California, particularly in smaller municipal races where margins can be razor thin. An Anaheim City Council race, for example, was decided by a margin of just 78 votes, a gap easily smaller than the number of ballots rejected in Orange County alone during that same election cycle, where more than 8,500 signatures were flagged as mismatched.
Even at the congressional level, California has seen races decided by margins narrow enough that ballot rejection rates become directly relevant to who actually wins. A 2024 congressional race in the Central Valley was decided by just 187 votes, a margin so thin that any meaningful number of improperly handled ballots could plausibly have changed the outcome.
State officials and outside experts have pointed to a Brookings Institution report from 2025 finding that actual documented cases of mail voting fraud remain exceedingly rare, describing roughly four cases per 10 million mail ballots cast. Democrats and election administrators point to that data as evidence that California’s system, while imperfect on the rejection side, is not being meaningfully exploited through outright fraud.
That distinction matters, but it does not fully answer the concerns conservatives are raising. The issue is not necessarily that ballots are being fraudulently cast. It is that a system sending unsolicited ballots to every registered voter, combined with a slow, error-prone verification process, results in tens of thousands of legitimate voters having their voices excluded from the final count each election cycle, a very different but equally serious problem for the integrity and fairness of the process.
Critics have also pointed to the underlying architecture of California’s system as the root cause. Rather than requiring voters to affirmatively request a mail ballot, the state automatically mails one to every registered voter, a policy defenders say boosts turnout but that skeptics argue increases the raw volume of ballots vulnerable to signature errors, address problems, late arrivals, and administrative mistakes simply because so many more ballots are in circulation to begin with.
The state legislature has taken up this issue repeatedly in recent years, holding hearings specifically focused on signature curing processes and ballot rejection rates. Testimony before a Senate elections committee earlier this year highlighted persistent problems, including findings that racial disparities exist in signature rejection rates, with Black, Latino, and Asian American voters facing higher rejection rates than the general population, according to research presented to lawmakers.
For a state that positions itself as a national model on voting access, these numbers complicate that narrative considerably. Nearly 150,000 rejected ballots in a single primary election is not a rounding error. It represents a population larger than many American cities, all of whom went to the trouble of filling out and returning a ballot only to have it excluded from the final certified results.
With the Justice Department now actively investigating Los Angeles County’s election administration, California officials are likely to face continued pressure to explain both the scale of these rejections and what concrete steps, beyond the reforms already attempted over the past decade, they intend to take to prevent the number from climbing even higher in future elections, particularly with a high-turnout midterm election now on the horizon this November.
