by Kevin Killough
Mail-in ballots for nearly 150,000 California voters were rejected for the state’s June primary, according to the secretary of state’s office.
The volume of rejected ballots is a spike over recent elections – 108,982 mail ballots were rejected in 2024 and 105,818 in 2025 – and the primary reason for the rejection numbers is the ballots missed the deadline.
California is trying to make it easy for anyone to vote. Among the changes toward that goal is sending ballots to every registered voter and allowing the ballot to arrive at the election office seven days late and still be counted, provided the envelope is postmarked by Election Day. However, the multiple changes over the years that were intended to increase turnout have done little to achieve that goal, according to the Associated Press.
The wire service report doesn’t include a definitive reason why the hundreds-of-thousands of votes were rejected, citing only “voting experts” who suspect the main problem is postmarks on ballots that came after Election Day, making them ineligible to be counted. The culprit could be U.S. Postal Service changes that might affect the timing of when postmarks are applied, also according to the wire service story.
Calls to the California election office on Friday to attempt to learn exactly why the ballots were rejected were unsuccessful.
The 150,000 rejected mailed ballots represent a rate of 1.73% of all mail-in ballots.
The fedearl government recently said California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada have an estimated 250,000 nonctiziens on its voter rolls.
This week, New Jersey said it identified 6,600 noncitizens on its voter rolls.
“Last week I learned that a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024, almost three years prior to my taking office. These individuals answered ‘no’ when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway,” Governor Mikie Sherrill said.
The governor said the mistake “happened under the previous administration.”
“Upon learning this information, I immediately ordered my chief counsel to launch an investigation to get to the bottom of what occurred. I also ordered the removal of any residents from our voter rolls who were erroneously added between June 2023 and June 2024. The new MVC Administrator that I appointed has begun the process of replacing the vendor responsible for administering the system,” Sherrill said.
“Our preliminary analysis shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted. They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state,” she added.
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Kevin Killough is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
