California counts votes and Trump makes baseless voter fraud claims

0:00It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, President Trump uses California's slow vote count to revive baseless claims of election fraud. It has been almost a week since Californians went to the polls, and yet several races have yet to be called. During the wait, President Trump has brought back election fraud claims. Like here, speaking this past weekend with NBC's Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. It's four days in California. No, they're not. They're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you, it's four days and they aren't even close to coming up with it.

0:39You know why they're doing that? Because they're cheating on the election. Do you have evidence to support that? All I have to do is look. Trump leader ended that interview abruptly after Welker pressed him for evidence. Your elections in this country, we're like a third world country. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and Mr. Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. Your one-sided crooked network. Sorry, let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. Consider this. With his claims about California, Trump is returning to a familiar playbook.

1:16Is this a preview of what the midterms could look like?

1:22From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

1:29This week on Sources and Methods, President Trump says he told Benjamin Netanyahu, you're effing crazy. Is the president running out of patience with Israel? I mean, I do think Trump and the White House need Netanyahu. They need Israel to have a lasting deal with Iran. We unpacked the week's biggest national security news on sources and methods. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:57It's Consider This from NPR. We are still waiting for some results from last Tuesday's primary in California. That election will determine who is on the ballot this fall in the races for governor, also Los Angeles mayor, and key congressional districts. But the state is one of the slowest in the country to count votes. And in the meantime, President Trump is pushing familiar and false claims of election fraud. Joining me now to talk through Trump's claims, a slow count in California, and what all this could mean for the upcoming midterms is NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks. Hey, Miles. Hi, Mary Louise.

2:34Hey, so to ask the basic question, is there any evidence of fraud with the California vote counting process? No, just like there was no evidence that there was fraud in 2020. Widespread fraud, I should say, even though, as you heard Trump say, he still to this day claims that there was. But both that election and this one in California present situations that do lend themselves pretty easily to these sort of fraud claims. Just like Trump looked like he was ahead when votes started coming in in 2020 or started to be counted, a candidate in the Los Angeles mayor's race named Spencer Pratt looked like he was going to make it to the general in that state's top two primary.

3:09But then, as more ballots have been counted, Pratt dropped to third, which is fueling a lot of this conspiracy theorizing because Pratt had really caught on with National Conservatives. But this is all pretty easily explained. In recent years, Democrats tend to vote by mail more than Republicans do, and mail ballots take longer to count than in-person votes do. So we'll sometimes see something known as the red mirage, where a Republican candidate looks like they're ahead and then they fade as mail ballots are counted. Okay, that makes sense. It does seem unusual, though, that California does take so long to count.

3:42Do we know why? It's really a policy discussion. California is one of the easiest states to vote in, but some of those convenience measures come at the cost of super quick counting. The biggest one is related to how mail ballots are counted and processed. Officials need to scan these mail ballots. They need to check the signatures to make sure of identities. They have to get rid of the envelopes to make sure the ballot is ready to be counted, right? So all of that is fine if the ballot is returned early, but roughly a quarter of people turn in their mail ballots on election day. Stephen Richard told me he's a former voting official from Arizona who's now a fellow at the Cato Institute and Harvard University.

4:17That process isn't even getting started until the evening of Election Day or until a day or two after. And that's especially the case when we're talking about millions, legitimately millions of mail ballots that are dropped off on Election Day. There are a couple other policies that contribute to California also accepts mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day, but don't arrive until up until a week after. So election officials are still receiving ballots that will count even today. Today, like right now. Exactly. So all of this contributes to longer vote counting. And how much of an outlier is California?

4:54We've already had a lot of primaries this year, including in a lot of places where people also vote by mail. And this is the first time it's popping up. It's really interesting, right? Because California is slow, but they're not actually that slow compared to some other states. You take 2024, for instance. I was emailing with MIT political science professor Charles Stewart. He assembled a data set that looked at how quickly each state counted their votes in the 2024 election. And he shared it with me. It took roughly 10 days for California to get to 95 % of their votes counted. Sounds like a lot, but it took Alaska roughly the same amount.

5:29And it took states like Mississippi and Utah something like eight days. So not that far off. So let me ask about what we may be learning in terms of a playbook for November and those midterms which are coming up. California, as we noted, it has multiple competitive races, could determine who controls the House of Representatives here in Washington. Might we see this dynamic play out again? I think almost certainly. I mean, the handful of races that we're talking about in California right now are close. And when that is the case, the vote counting process gets spotlighted because it takes longer to call the races.

6:02That could be the case again in November. Stephen Richer, the former voting official we heard from earlier, said absence of big policy changes, the only difference that we're going to see is an even tenser political environment. I think we're going to be in for a real slog with California come November. And I think that the volume will be at least 10 times what it is right now. Richard, who is a Republican, noted that Trump has been falsely claiming fraud about elections that he doesn't like for 10 years since the Iowa caucuses in 2016. So there's no reason to think he'll stop now. That is NPR's Miles Parks covering voting and elections for us.

6:43Thank you, Miles. Thank you. This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez-Hance with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. It was edited by Courtney Dorning, Christopher Integliata, and Megan Pratz. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. On NPR's Wildcard Podcast, Maya Hawke says childhood with her mom, Uma Thurman, was witch-adjacent. It's not, you know, toil and trouble, but it's a witchiness, like a kind of witchy love of nature and a love of herbal remedies and something that could potentially get you burned at the stake. Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation on the NPR app or on YouTube at NPR Wildcard.