The NPR Politics Podcast - California counts votes slowly. Trump falsely cries fraud.

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

California counts votes very slowly, maybe slower than any other state. This is normal for California, but President Trump and some other Republican leaders are claiming, without evidence, that a delay in getting election results is evidence of fraud. We discuss why California is so slow to count votes and what Trump’s claims could mean for the November midterm elections. This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And we're recording this today at 1236 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, June 9th, 2026. Today on the show, we're talking about voting in California's primary, which ended a week ago, but we still don't have full results in several key races, including the race for governor. At the time we're recording this podcast, Democrat Javier Bacera is advancing to the. the November election, but it's not clear yet whether he will be facing Republican Steve Hilton or Democrat Tom Steyer in November. And President Trump is claiming that these delayed election results are evidence of fraud. We should say there's no evidence of fraud, of course, but Miles, remind us why California is so slow to post-election winners. Yeah, there's kind of a couple different parts of this, but one is just administratively. We should start with the fact that California males, all registered voters in the state, a mail ballot. And so most voters choose to vote by mail there. Mail ballots take a little bit longer to process than in-person votes. It's a case in many states, but what makes California

a particular unique is the scale in which people return those ballots on election day. And so when you think about what it takes to process a mail ballot, things like checking a signature to verify identity, scanning the envelope to make sure the person hasn't already voted before, even just taking the ballot out of the envelope, a quarter of California's elector doesn't turn their mail ballots in until on election day. So all that work can't even start until last Tuesday. So that's one big part of it. The other part of it is that a couple of these races are just very close. I should just note that that generally speaking, when elections are close, they take longer for networks to be able to project a winner. And so that is always the case in every single election cycle.

Yeah. And California's structure is also interesting. They have this like nonpartisan top two system. So this could end up being two Democrats on the ballot. That's also like this weird sort of situation that California is in. Totally. There's a lot of unique aspects of California's election system that also play in this. I mean, the fact that they have, you know, if you mess up your mail ballot, you get weeks to be able to cure that ballot to make sure your vote counts, for instance, or they have this grace period where if your ballot is postmarked by election day, it can get to election officials up to a week after the fact and still be counted. So election officials are literally still receiving ballots that will count today. And so there's all these different aspects of California's election system that contribute to the slow. lower than usual count. It sounds like California wants to make sure that it's counted every single vote correctly. That's right. I mean, a lot of these things I talked about are security measures, right? Verifying signatures, verifying people haven't already voted. I mean, the fact that some of these things are security and then some of these are just that California has made policy decisions that basically say, we are going to be one of the easiest states in the country to vote in. And we are

not going to give that up just because people are really mad that it takes us a little while to count. And so then when you think kind of naturally, how can some of this get fixed? I was talking about this with Stephen Ritcher, who's a former election official in Arizona. And he said he'd be very surprised if a lot of these policies get changed ahead of November because this is a state that just has made a conscious effort to prioritize access. I suppose it's a matter of priorities and that they are just very reluctant to do anything that could be perceived as rolling back any measure of convenience. or access. That's a legitimate public policy position. It's not one I share, and I think it's one

that we are suffering the consequences of right now. Richard noted also that before the election, Governor Gavin Newsom there wrote a letter to the state's election officials that basically said, please count faster, guys, like it's really important and misinformation can thrive in times of uncertainty, but, you know, the state didn't really provide more resources to election officials or changed policies in any huge material way to make counting those ballots faster. And so he called those sort of requests to count faster a little bit preposterous. Yeah, I remember doing a story about this, like talking to lawmakers across the country. The whole goal was to make election results faster, like 100% in pursuit of avoiding this misinformation storm that comes from, like, just counting,

taking a long time, which is what we're facing right now in California. This is like ignited a conversation across mostly Republicans talking about baseless suspicions that this is fraud. Actually, President Trump had this exchange with NBC's Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on Sunday. Do you think it's appropriate that they have an election and five days later they're nowhere close to pick any one? State local officials acknowledge they are slow. They're urging. No, they're crooked.

They're urging the votes to be. Umar, I feel like I'm in a time machine. What do you make of this? Well, look, this is Donald Trump's modus operandi. He has been working very hard for 10 years or so to convince voters that elections, especially in blue states, run by Democrats, are somehow rigged against him and his party. And he's been pushing this idea. He doesn't really accept the results of an election unless he wins it. And here he's saying they're crooked with no evidence.

But this is something that he's done for a long time and he's going to continue to do because it makes it easier for him. him to convince people that he has been somehow wronged in elections. He still claims that he won the 2020 election, which he did not. One of the things that Trump has been flagging as evidence of this purported fraud is that Republicans in several races initially looked like they were winning when the first, especially election night results started coming in. But then those leads started to disappear as more mail-in ballots come in. Maas, can you explain this? Yeah. I mean, this is something we saw in. in 2020 as well, when Trump looked like he was ahead in some battleground states. And then

specifically, going back to what we talked about a second ago, mail ballots, vote by mail ballots, take a little bit longer to count than in-person votes do. And so lately in the last few years, due to Republican misinformation about voting by mail, Republicans tend to vote in person a little bit more and Democrats tend to use vote by mail a little bit more. What that means is that you have these scenarios where the Republican looks like they're ahead because all of these in-person votes have been counted. And then as the vote by mail ballots continue to be counted, the Democrats kind of creep up. We saw this specifically in the L.A. mayor's race this time around with a candidate named Spencer Pratt, who is President Trump's preferred candidate. He looked like he was going to make it into the

general election in this top two primary. And then as the days went by, a second Democrat overtook him. And so that definitely has been fueling these conspiracy theories. Yeah. And Mara, I also feel like the fact that California has that nonpartisan primary where everyone's on the ballot and then the top two vote getters move on to the next thing also played a role in this because there were just like a lot more Democrats who were fighting for votes, whereas it seemed like Republicans coalesced around one person, right? Yeah, that's right. And also Democrats, there was a lot of turmoil on the Democratic side of the top two primaries. People were waiting to see who would be actually left in the race. And a lot of Democrats decided to make their decision and cast their vote at the very last minute. Yeah. Mara, you had also mentioned that this is like a very Trumpy thing, which is to, you know, raise concerns of fraud whenever. Republicans stop doing well as votes come in. Trump isn't the only Republican making these claims. This is what House Speaker Mike Johnson said on CNN yesterday.

Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. So it's impossible to prove them, but something is wrong. That's very, very Trumpian. And I think when you're Mike Johnson and you have a tiny little majority and you are in real danger of losing it, you want to cast doubt on the results as early as possible. But it's possible that Trump and Johnson are getting ready to say that the 2026 midterms was stolen from them and either the votes were counted incorrectly or there were all sorts of non-citizens who voted. Now, in the past, we didn't see a huge chorus of Republicans saying that the elections were going to be rigged. It was pretty much Trump himself.

You had some people like Carrie Lake who contested their loss and said that there was some kind of fraud in the election. But for the most part, it was Trump. Now it seems like it's going to be the whole chorus of Republicans. Well, specifically with this one, I think we're seeing every Republican jumping. And we saw Elon Musk jump in. We saw Rhonda Santas. We even saw Megan McCain tweeting about this. And I do think this is an interesting political moment, too, because it kind of, similar to the non-citizen voting thing, which kind of marries the election integrity stuff with immigration policy.

see, this marries election integrity stuff with Republicans love bashing on California. Yeah. And so I think everyone is, there's a little bit of that, too, where everyone kind of feels, even people who haven't gone along with Trump's full stolen election narratives can look at this and say, hey, I can score some political points here without going fully down the rabbit hole. And not just because California is blue, but because California has so many races, very closely contested house races that could determine the majority. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break. more in a moment. Welcome back. And I want to get, uh, from both of you a sense of like how we think all of this, this back and forth about California, how this might affect midterm results come November. Oh, man. I mean, it's impossible not to look at what's happened this week and immediately forecasts to November, right? I mean, every election expert I've been talking to looks at this and

says basically if there is a close election where the house is only decided by a couple seats, California has four very competitive house districts there. It could take a week to know who wins in those districts. And so we are potentially looking at a fraught, even potentially dangerous time. If you think back to 2020, that's what Stephen Richer, the election official we heard from earlier, told me. Here's how he put it. I think we're going to be in for a real slog with California come November. And I think that the volume will be at least.

10 times what it is right now. I think we got a little spoiled by 2024. Trump won. And after the post-election period, there was pretty quiet. Election officials, by and large, said it was a much easier election to administer than 2020 because there weren't the same kind of fraud narratives taking hold. And I don't know, we might be in for a rude awakening in 2006. I mean, does that sort of give up the game here, Mara, is the situation is that Republicans are facing losses possibly, which is why we're seeing accusations of fraud. Yes, absolutely. I mean, Republicans have done everything they can to erect structural barriers to protect themselves against these organic trends. The organic trends is that the incumbent party is doing poorly in polls. The economy is not great. Gas prices too high. So they had this round of very extreme partisan gerrymandering that certainly helped them shore up their defenses. I think if they felt that they were going to sweep the house, they wouldn't be doing this.

You know, I also think like it's notable the difference in how we're talking about elections coming into 2026 versus like a year like 2020, for example, when it comes to mail and ballots, 2020, because of the pandemic, there were a lot of more voters voting in big part for the first time by mail. And there was a national conversation about, hey, it's going to take longer to count the votes because a lot of people are going to be voting by mail. And a lot of states have expanded their programs for this. I wonder if we hear this conversation going into 2026 as well. Yeah, I mean, I think election officials are definitely going to be continuing to preach that message. And, you know, I think one of the tough parts about 2020 from a misinformation angle is that a lot of states change their rules very close to that election cycle, which did also lend to this idea that, you know, the system was kind of shifting all the way up until the election. And a lot of voters felt like that was for partisan gain. And so in this case, the rules generally speaking are pretty much.

which I think is to election officials advantage that they have all year to try to level set. That said, we're seeing it right now that in some states, vote counting still just takes a little while. And so if that underlying trend is still true, I think there's only so much election officials can do to counter the misinformation because Trump has made it very clear. I don't think we can say it enough. He's been doing this for 10 years now since the Iowa caucuses in 2016. That's half of some voters lives. And so I don't think there's any reason to believe he's going to stop now. What's so interesting is usually the guy who's trailing wants to keep counting.

But Donald Trump usually says we shouldn't count past election day because, you know, he does believe in this red mirage idea that the Republican lead disappears over time because more Democratic ballots come in late as we've just heard. But what if some Republican candidates are trailing and he wants to keep counting? I mean, that would confuse everyone. I think it's also worth noting just to level set again on California because California is the slowest state to count votes. That is true. But they aren't that much slower than a few other states, including a few red states that don't ever get talked about. I was looking at this data set that was put together by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, where he tracked how long it took every single state in the country to get to 95% of their votes counted in 2024. Took 10 days for California. A long time, right? Took Mississippi eight days. Took Utah, eight days. Took Alaska, roughly the same amount. of time as California, we're not talking about any of those other states. And so I do think there's some part of this, that's true that, you know, there are things policy-wise that California could do to make their vote counting faster. But then there are some parts of this that is just pure

partisanship. I mean, speaking of Mississippi, I feel like there's another wildcard and all this that we should talk about, which is Mississippi has a case before the Supreme Court. Part of the reason they take a long time is they have a grace period for voters. They count ballots that come in after election day as long as they're postmarked by election day. That case, force Mississippi to change that policy. So I can imagine that affecting all the states you just listed, because from what I understand, they all have, like, grace periods for voters for various reasons. Right. It definitely could slightly make things faster, though, again, you could also see a scenario where thousands potentially of voters are disenfranchised by a rule change like that, especially

if the closer it comes to the election if you're not able to educate the public that that rule change is happening. But California, I don't think, I don't think a rule change like that would materially change what we're seeing because the biggest reason is that 25% percent. of voters who drop off their mail ballots on election day. Yeah. We've heard Republicans talk about California so far, which strikes me as an opening of what we're going to hear coming into November. What are you expecting, Mara, to hear from Republican candidates?

Do we think, are we going to hear the drumbeat of my opponents are cheating over and over again? Well, I assume that you're going to hear a lot of people say what Mike Johnson does. Can't prove it, but I know they cheated. And especially if the House looks like it's slipping away. And yes, I do think you're going to hear in advance accusations of cheating. And I think the closer the election, the more contested it's going to be. And we're going to just have to buckle our seatbelts because there's one thing to say in advance that you think your opponent's going to cheat.

Then there's another thing after the election is over to say that he did cheat. And then you have to prove it. And then you want to recount. And then there's going to be challenges. I do think generally it's going to be more after the election, though, than books. beforehand. The way Trump does it all year round because he, I mean, he's already in office and he clearly has not been really concerned with the pushback to politically. But NPR did an analysis in 2022 of statewide races and found that candidates running especially for jobs that are directly related to elections like Secretary of States, but also governors have a role in certifying elections too. When Republicans run on election denial in competitive races, they seem to underperform other Republicans on the ticket. And so you're going to have a lot of these candidates who have gotten Trump's endorsement. trying to walk a really, really thin tightrope where they want to keep Trump happy with them and keep that MAGA base supporting them. And yet they don't want to turn off independents who are not into this sort of stuff.

Well, I do want to get a sense of hotspots for election fraud conspiracy theories. Where are you guys going to be watching? I mean, I think it's everywhere. Yeah, that's what I was exactly what I was going to say, Marr, is it's like, look at the cook political reports, a list of 30-something competitive districts. And that's going to be where election administration is probably under the most scrutiny because those are probably going to be the closest elections. Yeah, I mean, Mississippi allows people to send, as you said, send in their ballots so long as they're postmarked by Election Day. There's a grace period. But we don't really care much about Mississippi because it's not a swing state.

It's not a battleground. Yeah. So it's going to be those battlegrounds, I think, generally speaking. And then I hate to say it, but it's going to be like watch Trump's truth social because the election denial movement takes its cues from President Trump. And it's this sort of circle where President Trump is picking up local reports, grassroots reports of voter fraud and things like that and amplifying them. But, you know, by and large, everyone is taking their cues from him. And so if he decides he's focusing on Antrim County, Michigan today,

then that is where the election denial spotlight is going to be focused. And so it's going to be kind of just watching to see what pops up over the next six months. Oh, man. This feels so far away, but also so close 2026. I'm in terms. Oh, boy. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today.

I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.