I saw this headline today, “Nearly 150,000 mail ballots rejected in California’s primary despite efforts to count every vote.”

That doesn’t tell us much. Were they ballots that should have been counted and somehow were missed? And if so, why? Or were they ballots that were not legal and uncounted for that reason? And why so many – or so few? In other words, was this just the tip of the iceberg of the number of ballots that shouldn’t have been counted in that state? Or should many of these have been counted and were they unfairly excluded?

The article doesn’t say.

I was also hoping it would deal with the situation in Los Angeles in which the vast majority of the late-arriving ballots were for the third-place candidate, Nithya Raman, which ended up eliminating Spencer Pratt from the running. But it doesn’t.

This is how the article begins:

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.

Let’s rewrite that a bit:

Nearly 150,000 California mail-in ballots were rejected for the state’s June primary, an increase from recent elections even as the state attempts to make voting easier with the goal of boosting Democrat votes and relaxing the rules so that every mail-in ballot is counted whether it’s valid or not.

Here were the figures:

Every voter receives a mail-in ballot that can arrive at an election office seven days late and still be counted, provided the envelope is postmarked by Election Day.

Yet even with that generous weeklong window, the primary driver of the higher rejection numbers is late-arriving ballots, according to data compiled by the secretary of state’s office. Voting experts 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.

Left out is the question of how “voter” is determined, who is on the rolls, whether there’s any attempt to verify citizenship or residency and what those attempts are, and what “voting experts” are being interviewed and what their politics and evidence might be. Are they just guessing about the post office changes being the supposed culprit? Or might it be that a lot of ballots actually are mailed late? And if the latter, why? Might it be because it’s not until rather late that the fraudsters can guess how many ballots they need to make up the difference?

More:

According to state data, 148,241 mail ballots were rejected in the June election, or a rate of 1.73% of all mail ballots.

In raw numbers, that’s up from the 2024 primary, when 108,982 mail ballots were rejected, or a 1.56% rate. In 2022, 105,818 mail ballots were voided during the primary, or a rate similar to 2024.

But guess what? If you go to this site, you’ll find a chart that tells you that, way back in ancient times – the 2010 and the 2014 primaries in the state, to be exact – the rejection rates were much higher, 2.53 and 2.86 in the respective primaries. Since then – also described at that site – there have been major court victories to institute policies that lessen that number.

There are some very simple fixes for the late-postmark problem. One is to reduce the number of mail-in ballots as a whole by making the system more like the old absentee-ballot system. That won’t be happening while the Democrats are in charge. Another is for voters using such ballots to mail them in significantly ahead of time. That would not only reduce the number of late-postmarked ballots, but it would make it more difficult to engineer fraudulent late-ballot dumps to sway a close election.

In addition:

Nearly 44,000 ballots were set aside because the voter’s signature didn’t match the one on record with county officials. Over 8,300 ballots were rejected because there was no signature on the returned ballot envelope.

In 743 cases, the voter had already cast a ballot, so the mail ballot was voided. Other reasons for rejection included a ballot being missing from the return envelope, or multiple ballots were sent back in a single envelope.

Not reassuring.

More:

After the June primary, President Donald Trump seized on California’s reputation as the national slowpoke in vote counting to renew his long-standing criticism of the state’s elections …

There goes that Donald Trump again, seizing.

More:

There is no indication of any widespread problems with mail voting, which has gained in popularity among Democrats and Republicans alike. A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that the number of cases of mail voting fraud was minuscule — about four cases per 10 million mail ballots.

Three things about that paragraph are of interest. The first is that the common implication now from the left is that fraud must be widespread to be worth concern. And yet they don’t define “widespread.” The second is that they imply that all the fraud that’s been found and proven is all the fraud that occurs. This is preposterous. The third is that both parties support mail-in voting in some bipartisan fashion. But they don’t. It’s become more “popular” with Republicans because they know they must use it to counter the Democrats’ heavy use of it.

[NOTE: There’s also this news about voter eligibility in Pennsylvania.]