Voting experts point to postal changes as possible factor

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nearly 150,000 California voters had their mail-in ballots rejected for the state’s June primary, a spike from recent elections even as the state attempts to make voting easier with the goal of boosting participation and counting every ballot, according to data from the secretary of state’s office.

California is known for its ponderously slow vote counts, which can drag on for weeks and sometimes longer. That pace is largely the result of multiple changes over the years intended to increase turnout but that have done little to achieve that goal, according to the Associated Press. Among the changes: Every voter receives a mail-in ballot that can arrive at an election office up to seven days after Election Day and still be counted, as long as the envelope is postmarked by Election Day.

Even with that generous window, the primary driver of the higher rejection numbers is late-arriving ballots, according to the secretary of state’s data. Voting experts suspect the main problem is postmarks on ballots that came after Election Day, making them ineligible. The culprit could be U.S. Postal Service changes that might affect the timing of when postmarks are applied, according to the data.1

Footnotes

  1. Turnout in the June primary reached 40.8%, an increase over the prior two primaries but below participation levels from earlier decades, as counting concluded on July 2. (MSI, 2026-07-02) ↩