GOP lies over California vote counting set stage to subvert midterms

President Donald Trump and the GOP are falsely claiming fraud over mail ballots in California’s primary. The lies are aimed at setting the stage to undermine this fall’s crucial midterms, when control of the House could hinge on the Golden State.

The false claims have gone into overdrive as California mail ballots counted in recent days have allowed a progressive Democrat to overtake Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt to make the November runoff race for Los Angeles mayor.

“The Dumocrats, right before our very eyes, are stealing the Vote,” Trump posted last week on social media. Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), and numerous other GOP leaders have likewise raised suspicion about the count.

In reality, the claim that California’s slow vote count provides a basis for questioning Golden State results is hogwash, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. 

“This is not about how fast California counts ballots,” Becker said. “All that [Trump] cares about is whether he wins or loses. And if he loses, he’ll create a fiction in his head to tell him otherwise.”

But the MAGA meltdown, over a race in a Democratic-dominated city that the GOP never had a realistic chance to win, offers a grim preview of the kinds of election lies Trump and the GOP are likely to level come November, when control of the U.S. House of Representatives could hinge on several tight races in California.

Election forecasters at the Cook Political Report currently list four California congressional races as either “Lean Democrat” or “Toss Up,” more than any other state besides New York, which also has four. Meanwhile, the state’s widespread use of mail-in voting and generous receipt grace period mean tallies can take days — even weeks in particularly close races — to wrap up.

That could lead to a flood of post-election litigation, as GOP lawyers, alleging fraud or the potential for it, pull out the stops to get votes thrown out and to contest results.

A Trump-appointed prosecutor in southern California added fuel to the fire Tuesday when he said he’s planning to bring “election fraud” charges over the primary in the next two months. 

A Supreme Court ruling for the GOP in RNC v. Watson — the party’s challenge to state laws that allow the counting of mail ballots postmarked by election day but received after — could add to the chaos. It would make it much harder for voters to get their ballots in on time and offer even more opportunities for anti-voting lawsuits.

It all could add up to a perfect storm for election denialism and subversion this fall. 

Republicans already crying wolf

The GOP has led a long-term effort to set the stage for this lie — not only in the public square, but in the courts, too.

“If you have an election and the election is going to turn on late arriving ballots in a way that means what everybody kind of thought was the result on Election Day ends up being the opposite a week later, 21 days later, the losers are not going to accept that result,” the attorney Paul Clement, representing Republicans in the Watson case, told the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. “Full stop. They won’t. And that is bad for our system.”

A ruling in the case is expected imminently. 

But here’s what Clement didn’t say: The problem of losers not accepting results is limited to just one party. It’s the product of a years-long campaign, led by Trump, to lie about voting, and mail voting in particular. 

During an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that aired Sunday, Trump repeated his “rigged election” rant and said it was “happening again right now in California.” 

“It’s four days, and they aren’t even close, because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump said. 

When Welker confronted Trump’s lack of evidence, he erupted at her, abruptly ending the interview and shuffling off in a huff. 

Some supposed election fraud efforts “are so diabolical and so far upstream that it’s impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here, and that’s a concern,” Speaker Johnson said of the California primaries.

And House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said that “whether you can prove fraud or not, it does undermine voter integrity in the vote.”

Notably, Pratt was still in second place in L.A. at the time. But then, as more mail-in ballots were verified and counted, his lead slowly eroded until he slipped into third and out of the mayoral runoff. 

These kinds of lead shifts, reported as votes are counted in the days following the election, are what some Republicans say undermines trust in elections. 

But these aren’t natural doubts — rather, they come from party leaders. And they’re designed to undermine confidence.

There’s also little reason to believe Trump will accept a loss — or that the GOP will break with him in the name of democracy.

Claims that the 2020 presidential race — which Trump lost — was stolen have essentially become dogma in the GOP. Even the president’s judicial nominees carefully toe the line to avoid admitting in congressional hearings to believing the fact that Biden won.

Trump cited these falsehoods when he signed executive orders aimed at the mythical problem of widespread noncitizen voting and mail-in ballot fraud, when he floated the idea of ordering troops and federal agents to the polls, when he nominated his unqualified Federal Housing Finance Agency chief for Director of National Intelligence, and when claimed the power to “take over” elections. 

Those actions and threats have unnerved many Democratic voters, who have told pollsters that they now doubt Trump — who publicly said last year that he regrets not seizing ballots in 2020 — will allow November’s elections to go unmolested. 

A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll in March found that only 66% of voter were confident in the upcoming elections. That was a 10-point decline compared to a survey conducted shortly before the 2024 election, driven “largely by Democrats and independents, whose confidence has dropped 16 and 11 percentage points respectively.” 

Even though voters across the ideological spectrum share electoral anxieties, their sources vary widely. While Republican voters largely buy Trump’s baseless contentions about widespread postal ballot fraud and immigrant voting, Democrats and independents are way more worried about what he might do to undermine elections in November.  

But it’s not just Democrats and independent voters who think Trump might reject a Democratic win in November. A February Yahoo/YouGov survey found that 60 percent of Americans said Trump was “not likely to accept” those results, with 34 percent of Republicans agreeing he wasn’t unlikely to accept and another 24 percent saying they weren’t sure. 

Trump’s accusations this past week of something shady happening in sunny southern California are nothing new, Becker noted. 

“This isn’t a dry run for 2026; they’ve been doing this for months and months,” Becker said. “This is just part of an ongoing effort to delegitimize a future election”

For years now, Trump and his backers have repeatedly claimed that proof, and prosecutions, are coming just around the bend. In January, Trump detoured from his written remarks at the World Economic Forum to claim arrests for the “rigged election” were coming “soon”. His attorney general nominee, Todd Blanche, echoed Trump last month, claiming there was a “ton of evidence” of misdeeds in 2020 but refusing to say whether releasing it — if or when the agency does — would provide “definitive answer” to the president’s allegations. 

But more than a year into his second term, neither Trump nor his DOJ has made their case publicly yet. 

“It’s always, ‘oh, we’re going to prove something tomorrow. Arrests are coming tomorrow. The evidence will come tomorrow,’’” Becker said. “Tomorrow never comes.”

“President Trump and his allies have has secured unprecedented control over the Department of Justice, control that no administration had ever tried to assert, including the Nixon administration, including the first Trump administration, and in over 17 months they have directed an untold amount of the taxpayers’ resources at proving fraud in past and future elections in the United States and undermining our country as a democracy, and after all that time and all of that wasted effort, they found nothing.”

Some commenters believe that repeated failure to deliver on the promised proof may ultimately undermine Trump’s ability to foment his supporters to his side come November. UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen compared Trump to the boy who cried wolf, and political scientist Jonathan Bernstein agreed the constant lying may ultimately backfire if Trump tries to repeat them this fall.