California Still Can’t Count Its Votes. Now the DOJ Is Probing Fraud.

Four days after California’s June 2, 2026 primary, the state’s two marquee races — governor and Los Angeles mayor — were still uncalled. The Los Angeles mayoral count sat near 66% of ballots tallied; the gubernatorial count near 57%. In Los Angeles County alone, more than 713,000 ballots remained uncounted.

That grinding pace is not, by itself, evidence of anything illegal. It is the predictable output of California election law — near-universal mail voting, a seven-day ballot-arrival window, and a 22-day signature-cure period. But the limbo created the political vacuum into which, on June 5, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (R) in Los Angeles announced “multiple election fraud investigations” — without naming a single target, case, or piece of evidence.

This is a story with two distinct facts that deserve to be kept apart: the delays are real and documented, and the fraud is, so far, asserted but unproven. Conflating the two is exactly the trap a careful reader should refuse.

• 713,000+ — ballots still uncounted in Los Angeles County alone four days after the June 2 primary · Source: The Hill / county registrar data
• 30 days — the legal window county registrars have to count; final results are due to the Secretary of State by July 3, 2026 · Source: CalMatters / CA Secretary of State
• Multiple — federal election-fraud investigations opened by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (R) with FBI Los Angeles — no targets, cases, or evidence disclosed · Source: ABC7 / The Hill

By the morning of June 5, the picture was a stalemate. In the governor’s race, Steve Hilton (R) led with roughly 27% against former Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) at about 26% and billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer (D) near 20% — with only 57% of ballots counted. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D) held about 35%, reality-TV figure Spencer Pratt (R) about 29%, and City Councilmember Nithya Raman (D) about 23%, with 66% of the vote tallied.

California uses a top-two primary, so the only question those numbers actually answer is which two candidates advance to November — not who wins. But with margins this tight and hundreds of thousands of ballots outstanding, even the runoff matchups stayed unsettled for days, a delay critics seized on as proof that something was wrong.

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Election-law expert Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Federal Election Commission member, told Fox News Digital that California’s slow count is driven by four specific features of state law. None of them is an accident; all of them were policy choices.

One:near-universal vote-by-mail. Every registered Californian is mailed a ballot, and the overwhelming majority vote that way — in the 2024 presidential election, von Spakovsky noted, roughly 13 million of about 16 million votes were cast by mail. Each of those envelopes must be received, signature-verified, opened, and processed before the ballot inside can be counted.

Two: a seven-day arrival window. Ballots postmarked by Election Day still count if they reach the registrar up to seven days later. Three: a 22-day cure period, during which voters whose signatures don’t match the file can fix the problem so their ballot counts. Four: high volumes of provisional ballots, each of which must be individually investigated for eligibility before it is added to the total. Of the four, von Spakovsky singled out mass mail voting as the biggest brake on speed.

“Out of 16 million votes that were cast in the [2024 presidential election], 13 million were by mail.”

Hans von Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation · Fox News Digital, June 5, 2026

Every one of those four pressure points is written into California law. County election officials have up to 30 days after Election Day to finish counting, and final results from the June 2 primary must be reported to the Secretary of State by July 3, 2026. A 2024 reform — Assembly Bill 5 — pushed counties to report most results within 13 days, but officials are quick to note it does not apply to the slowest categories of ballots.

Jesse Salinas, the Yolo County elections official, pushed back on the assumption that counting should be finished sooner: he said hearing people insist the count “should be done by the 13th day” ignores that, for the late-arriving and cure-eligible ballots, “that’s legally not possible by state law.” The delay, in other words, is the system working as designed — trading speed for the chance to count every lawful ballot.

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On June 5, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — the top federal prosecutor for the Central District of California, a Trump appointee and former Republican state assemblyman — announced on X that “multiple election fraud investigations” were underway in coordination with FBI Los Angeles. He wrote that “California’s election system has serious structural vulnerabilities,” singling out “universal vote-by-mail with no voter ID requirements” as conditions where “fraud can go undetected.”

Essayli also said his office is working with Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, on “a comprehensive audit of California’s voter rolls,” accusing the state of stonewalling efforts to verify that only eligible U.S. citizens are registered. His office reportedly sent a prosecutor to a Los Angeles vote center. The announcements landed a day after President Trump, from the Oval Office, accused Democrats of trying to “steal” the governor and L.A. mayor races.

What Essayli did not provide is the part that matters most: he identified no target, described no specific alleged misconduct tied to the June 2 primary, and offered no evidence that California’s slow count is connected to fraud. As ABC7 reported plainly, the DOJ “has not provided evidence of fraud.”

This is where precision earns its keep. A slow count and a stolen election are not the same thing, and the public record currently supports only the first. Even outlets sympathetic to the integrity concerns acknowledge it: the slow count, PBS NewsHour noted, makes California “a target for critics” but “doesn’t mean elections are rigged.” The mechanics that produce the delay — signature verification, the arrival window, provisional review — are themselves safeguards, not loopholes.

Even the Republican frontrunner declined to follow Trump over the cliff. Steve Hilton (R) called the delay “a complete disgrace” and “yet another Democrat fiasco,” and proposed an “Emergency Election Support Corps” to speed counties up — but he stopped short of alleging the vote was being rigged. The substantive complaint is about administrative speed and transparency. The fraud charge is a separate, heavier claim that requires separate, heavier proof.

Three things will unfold over the coming weeks. First, the count finishes: counties keep tallying mail, cure, and provisional ballots until the runoff fields for governor and L.A. mayor are settled and results are certified to Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D) by July 3. Second, the DOJ’s investigations either produce a named case — a specific defendant, a specific charge — or they remain what they are now: an announcement. Third, the voter-roll audit Essayli and Dhillon described will test, in court if necessary, whether California must open its registration data to federal review.

The accountability question that survives all the noise is narrower and more answerable than “was it stolen.” It is this: a state that takes a month to count its votes invites exactly this kind of suspicion, whether or not the suspicion is warranted. California’s leaders chose a system that maximizes ballot access at the direct cost of speed and public confidence. That tradeoff is a policy decision — theirs to defend, and voters’ to judge.

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