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MY VIEW -
"I’m for mathematical and statistical literacy. And what happened here is mathematically and statistically impossible… I can tell you the statistical odds that this would have happened — and it’s one in a trillion!" – Chamath Palihapitiya on LA Elections
The greatest trick California’s bosses have foisted upon its citizens is that every attack on election fairness is framed as an expansion of voting rights and democracy. Every weakening of verification is sold as access. Every delay in counting is sold as making every vote count. Every restriction on observers is sold as protection (for whom?). Every challenge to the process is dismissed as MAGA extremism and election denialism. And when voters look at the system and conclude that the whole thing looks engineered to make fraud legal and almost impossible to prove, under the law, the same people who built the system call them conspiracy theorists.
Los Angeles now asks residents to believe the statistically impossible. A city drowning in encampments, deficits, police shortages, infrastructure decay, union giveaways, NGO patronage, fire-management failures (has the reservoir been filled yet?), and open-air drug dens somehow keeps rewarding the very politicians responsible for the wreckage.
When election-night results fail to produce the establishment’s preferred outcome, voters are told to wait patiently while late-arriving ballots, cured ballots, provisional ballots, and signature-reviewed ballots are processed behind layers of bureaucratic obscurity. While the public is locked out of the process.
Perhaps every ballot is lawful. Perhaps every signature is legitimate. Perhaps every late-counted batch is innocent. But when a broken city produces statistically impossible and politically implausible outcomes through an opaque system that citizens cannot meaningfully inspect, the burden should not be on the public to prove fraud after the fact. The burden should be on the government to prove the election was honest before demanding public acceptance.
Let’s start our journey into the legalization of election fraud in 2014, under Governor Jerry Brown, with Senate Bill 29. California changed the long-standing expectation that ballots had to be received by Election Day. Mailed ballots could now arrive after Election Day and still be counted if postmarked on time. That may sound reasonable in isolation, but it introduced one of the core features of California’s current legitimacy crisis: elections no longer end on Election Day. The public sees one count, then another, then another, while asking the public to trust the process.
In 2015, AB 1461, the California New Motor Voter Act, was enacted. The state linked voter registration to DMV transactions, automatically placing “eligible citizens” in the registration pipeline. Again, the slogan was access. But the risk was obvious from the start: if the DMV process is flawed, the voter rolls become flawed. If eligibility screenings are weak, administrative errors become election errors. If noncitizens are “accidentally” registered, the voting rolls become corrupted.
California’s defenders respond that noncitizens are not allowed to register. That is true as a legal proposition. But the integrity question is not whether the law says only citizens may vote. The question is whether the system verifies eligibility with sufficient rigor.
Then came AB 1921 in 2016, the bill that expanded third-party ballot collection, commonly called ballot harvesting. Before that, California limited who could return another voter’s mail ballot. AB 1921 allowed any person designated by the voter to return it. Who verifies that the designated person has authority? Supporters called it convenience. Critics saw something else: the industrialization of ballot collection by campaigns, unions, activists, nonprofits, and political machines. What happened to secret ballots?
That same year, SB 450 created the California Voter’s Choice Act model, expanding vote centers, drop boxes, mailed ballots, and countywide voting options. In theory, this made voting easier. In practice, it moved elections further away from the old precinct-based civic ritual and deeper into a mass-logistics operation run by county bureaucracies, software systems, tech companies, signature screens, mail flows, drop boxes, and centralized tabulation. What had once been a communal act of citizenship, neighbors showing up in person, in a real place, on a real day, and signing the voter rolls, in person, was reduced to another impersonal piece of government paperwork.
By 2018, SB 759 expanded the ability to cure mismatched signatures. Voters whose mail-ballot signatures did not match could be notified and given the opportunity to correct the issue before certification. But for which candidate?
In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 72, expanding same-day conditional voter registration to polling places and vote centers. People could be dragooned into registering and voting during the final election period, subject to later verification. What rigor has gone into the verification, if any?
Then COVID arrived, and Sacramento used the crisis to permanently remake elections.
AB 860 in 2020 required counties to mail ballots to every active registered voter for the November election. It was sold as an emergency pandemic measure. But in California, emergency measures always become permanent expansions of state power. In 2021, AB 37 made universal vote-by-mail permanent. Every active registered voter would receive a ballot.
That was the decisive shift. California moved to mass ballot distribution as the default. It flooded the system with paper ballots and asked citizens to trust that voter rolls were clean, addresses were accurate, signatures were meaningful, the chain of custody was secure, drop boxes were monitored, and ballot collection was free from coercion or payment for a vote.
This is a huge ask from a state that cannot competently manage homelessness, infrastructure, wildfire response, public safety, or its own budget.
In 2021, SB 503 took effect, one of the most important yet least understood election-integrity laws. It changed signature verification standards by applying a presumption that the signature on a vote-by-mail envelope is the voter’s. It stated that an exact match is not required and that similar characteristics may be sufficient. In LA County, a signature only needs a 40% match. You don’t even need to be a decent forger anymore.
In 2023, AB 626 allowed a voter, in specified circumstances, to vote a vote-by-mail ballot in person without the identification envelope. That envelope is not decorative. It is the paper trail connecting the ballot to signature verification, voter identity, and chain of custody. Without the envelope, risks are ballot substitution, duplicate voting, loss of signature verification, and chain-of-custody issues.
Then came SB 1174 in 2024. After Huntington Beach voters approved a local voter-ID measure, Sacramento moved to prohibit local governments from imposing their own voter-identification requirements. That was a revealing moment. California politicians constantly claim they support election integrity. But when a city tried to add a basic ID safeguard, the state stopped it. A clear signal that the State wanted access over verification, allowing industrial-strength ballot harvesting. Like 40,000 votes materializing for Councilwoman Raman.
Finally, on May 27, 2026, Newsom signed SB 73, an emergency election bill, just before the primary. Defenders said it protected elections from intimidation and improper law-enforcement interference (like seizing counterfeit ballots?). Critics saw it as something far darker: a law that centralized control, restricted outside scrutiny, and prohibited vote-by-mail observers from challenging whether signatures compare once the government’s internal process accepts them.
That is the whole architecture of twelve bills legalizing opportunities to cheat in every conceivable way, made perfectly legal and overseen by the party in power. Authorizing late-arriving ballots. Automatic registration. Ballot harvesting. Vote centers. Drop boxes. Same-day registration. Universal mailed ballots. Signature curing. Presumptions favoring acceptance. Restrictions on voter ID. Restrictions on observer challenges. Restrictions on local law enforcement. What could they be trying to hide?
Today, citizens are asking why allegedly rejected ballots seem to fall only on one side. They are asking why signatures are accepted in some cases and rejected in others. Why do voter registrations appear at homeless shelters and service centers? They are asking why late ballot drops keep changing outcomes. Most of all, they are asking why the people running a city on the brink of collapse keep winning. We also want to know why a Measure ER passed. Who is voting for giving illegals free healthcare when insurance premiums, taxes, and energy prices are so high? Have we suddenly become a society of altruists?
California has not built an election system that inspires confidence. It has built a system that demands trust while removing the mechanisms that create trust. It has replaced Election Day with election month, voter identification with trust me, precinct accountability with centralized processing, signature matching with presumptive acceptance, and citizen oversight with bureaucratic gatekeeping.
Then it wonders why people suspect fraud. The corporate media has exacerbated the legitimacy crisis. With limited exceptions, most notably Fox News and a handful of independent reporters, the mainstream press will not even seriously broach the subject. It will discuss “misinformation.” It will discuss “election denial” without any investigation by its own staff, making sure the election was impartial and non-partisan. It will discuss the supposed danger of public skepticism.
This is not a democracy. A free society requires more than the mechanical counting of ballots, from wherever, from whoever. It requires confidence that the rules are neutral, the rolls are clean, the ballots are lawful, the count is observable, and the losers can trust the result. California’s ruling class has spent years destroying each of those conditions.
Legalized cheating is still cheating, and no matter what happens next, the damage is done. Millions of Californians believe the elections are rigged.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
