President Donald Trump took aim at California's slow-moving vote count Wednesday, accusing Democrats of "trying to steal" the state's gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral primaries from Republican candidates while millions of mail-in ballots remained untallied.
The charges landed as the Associated Press reported that only an estimated 56% of ballots had been counted by Thursday morning, a familiar pattern in a state where every registered voter receives a mail-in ballot and elections offices accept them up to a week after Election Day.
Whether the accusations amount to a legitimate warning or premature alarm depends on what you make of California's counting rules. But the underlying question Trump keeps raising, why the nation's most populous state takes weeks to finish counting, is one that millions of voters across the country share.
Californians voted Tuesday. By Thursday morning, Trump-backed Republican Steve Hilton led the gubernatorial primary with 27.6% of the vote. Democrat Xavier Becerra sat second at 25.6%, Time reported. Under California's "top-two" primary system, sometimes called a jungle primary, the two leading vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party.
A two-point margin with 44% of ballots still uncounted is thin enough to flip. Trump knows it.
He posted on Truth Social that Democrats were "trying to steal the Governor of California primary and the Mayor of Los Angeles primary away from two great Republican candidates." In a follow-up post, he wrote: "Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail-in ballots."
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, incumbent Karen Bass advanced to the November runoff but failed to clear the 50% threshold needed to avoid one, making her the first sitting L.A. mayor since 2005 forced into a runoff. Whether former reality TV star Spencer Pratt or city council member Nithya Raman will face her remained unclear as ballots continued to arrive.
Trump went further than general complaints. In another post, he wrote: "Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting delay?"
That claim raised immediate questions. It remains unclear whether any such investigation has actually been sanctioned. Trump offered no evidence, and no public statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles confirmed or denied the assertion. As we previously reported, Trump has made similar claims about federal scrutiny of California's ballot-counting practices before.
The lack of confirmation does not mean the claim is false. But it does mean voters are left waiting for clarity from the Justice Department while the president's words carry the weight of the office.
California's vote-counting pace is not new. The state mails ballots to every registered voter. Any ballot postmarked by Election Day and received by a county elections office within a week will be counted. The result: final tallies that drag out for weeks.
In 2024, control of the U.S. House of Representatives was not determined until roughly a week after the election, partly because California was still counting. The state did not complete its final count until nearly a month after Election Day.
For voters in states that report results the same night, this looks like dysfunction at best and manipulation at worst. Trump has channeled that frustration since returning to office, making restrictions on mail-in voting a top priority. On May 16, he wrote: "We cannot, as a country, put up with this any longer. Voter I.D. and proof of citizenship must be approved, now. Crooked mail-in voting must be stopped."
He renewed his call for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a federal proposal that would impose stricter voter identification requirements and curb the use of mail-in ballots. But the legislation has faced resistance from some Senate Republicans and has not secured enough support to advance in the chamber.
Governor Gavin Newsom's press office wasted no time responding. Shortly after Trump's posts, the office issued a statement: "Trump is lying about California again, time to take the phone away from grandpa and put him to sleep."
The personal jab aside, Newsom has been positioning himself as a defender of California's election system. He signed a bill last week to strengthen the state's voting safeguards ahead of the primary, characterizing concerns about election integrity as "legitimate anxiety" over potential interference by the Trump administration in the democratic process. The back-and-forth between Trump and Newsom over California elections has become a recurring feature of the political landscape.
Newsom is term-limited, which means this fight is partly about legacy and partly about the broader Democratic brand. His record on fiscal stewardship has drawn its own scrutiny, from a $20 million taxpayer-funded diaper program that raised questions about nonprofit ties to policy disagreements with his own party.
Trump's California complaints did not exist in a vacuum. In a podcast interview released Wednesday, he returned to his claims about the 2020 presidential election.
"The election was rigged 100%... He [former President Joe Biden] lost the election in a landslide. We have a very corrupt election process."
Those claims remain disputed. Biden won the 2020 election. Trump's supporters have long argued the mail-in ballot expansion during COVID created conditions ripe for fraud, while critics say the claims were never substantiated in court.
What is not disputed is the political effect. Trump's focus on election integrity has reshaped the Republican Party's posture toward mail-in voting and early counting. States run by Republican legislatures have tightened voter ID laws and restricted ballot drop boxes. California, run entirely by Democrats, has moved in the opposite direction, expanding mail voting and extending counting windows.
The result is a country where election administration looks radically different depending on which party controls the statehouse. And California, with its weeks-long counting process, sits at the far end of that spectrum.
Several questions hang over this story. Has the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles actually opened an investigation into California's vote-counting, or was Trump's post aspirational? What specific evidence, if any, supports the claim of "big cheating"? And will the remaining 44% of uncounted ballots shift the gubernatorial race enough to knock Hilton out of the top two?
The answers matter. If Hilton holds his lead, Trump's warnings will look like early vigilance. If the count flips the result, the accusations will intensify, and the debate over California's mail-in system will grow louder.
Even Newsom's own governance record invites skepticism about how California manages public resources. A state program paying triple the retail price for diapers does not inspire confidence that the same government is running airtight elections.
Meanwhile, the SAVE America Act remains stalled in the Senate, blocked not by Democrats alone but by Republicans who have not yet rallied behind it. Trump can post about voter ID all he wants. Until his own party delivers the votes, the complaints stay on Truth Social, and California keeps counting at its own pace.
A state that takes a month to count ballots and then mocks anyone who asks why is not building public trust. It is spending it down.
