A Bill to Keep Predators Off the Ballot Passed 60–0.
One Senator Buried It.
A registered child-sex-offender tried to run for Fresno City Council. In response, a Democratic assemblywoman wrote a bill to keep any registered sex offender off California’s ballots. It passed the state Assembly without a single “no” vote.
Then it reached a Senate committee chaired by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) — the author of the 2020 registry law critics still call the “pedophile-protection bill,” and now a candidate for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. On June 30, 2026, the bill died. A second bill survived only after language shielding certain sex crimes against minors was quietly written back in.
- 60–0Assemblythe unanimous floor vote AB 2753 won before the Senate killed it — KMPH FOX26
- 2–1–2Committeethe June 30 Senate Elections vote that buried it — ABC30 Fresno
- 1deciding nocast by the committee chair, Sen. Scott Wiener (D) — Daily Caller
AB 2753, written by Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria (D-Fresno), was about as simple as legislation gets. It amended the California Elections Code to prohibit a person from being a candidate for, or elected to, any state or local office “if the person has ever been required to register as a sex offender” under Penal Code Section 290. No tiers, no exceptions, no carve-outs. If you are on California’s sex-offender registry, you cannot run for city council, school board, or the Legislature.
The bill was not controversial in the lower house. It cleared the Assembly Elections Committee 7–0 in April and then passed the full Assembly floor 60–0 on May 7, 2026, per KMPH FOX26. Not one member of the California Assembly — Democrat or Republican — voted against keeping registered sex offenders off the ballot.
Then it reached the Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee, chaired by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). On June 30, 2026, the committee let it die on a 2–1–2 vote — two ayes, one no, two members declining to vote at all. Wiener cast the “no.” Sens. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) and Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) abstained, per the Daily Caller and RedState. Two abstentions on a bill this straightforward are their own kind of answer.
“When we looked at the sex offender list in totality, we strongly believe that all of those people that are on the registry currently should not be allowed to run for office.”
Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria (D-Fresno), author of AB 2753
Wiener would only let the bill move, he said, if it were narrowed to apply solely to Tier 3 — the lifetime registrants. Soria refused. “I was not willing to make additional amendments to this bill,” she said in a statement after the vote. “Accepting additional amendments would have jeopardized” a promise she had made to her Fresno constituents. The chair held firm; so did the author; the bill died.
The bill existed because of a specific man. In early 2026, Rene Campos, a registered sex offender, announced a run for Fresno City Council District 7. Campos was charged in 2018 with possession of child sexual abuse material; according to the public record he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor and served two years of formal probation, which placed him on California’s registry. He is a Tier 1 registrant.
The candidacy stunned Fresno officials, who discovered that California law does nothing to stop it. The Fresno County Clerk confirmed that once a registrant leaves prison and completes probation, voter registration is restored and — provided residency and signature rules are met — he may run for local office. Campos then held a news conference on a public sidewalk beside St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Fresno, directly across the street from Big Picture Elementary, per CBS47/KSEE24 and ABC30.
Campos ultimately failed to gather the 20 valid signatures needed to qualify, so he never appeared on the District 7 ballot, ABC30 reported. That is the crucial point the debate kept obscuring: the system did not stop him. Arithmetic did. Had he collected twenty signatures, nothing in California law would have kept a man on the child-pornography registry off the ballot — which is exactly the gap AB 2753 was written to close.
Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is not a random committee vote. He chairs the panel that killed AB 2753, and this is the second sex-offender fight of his career. In 2020 he authored SB 145, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), which gave judges discretion over whether to place a young adult on the registry for anal or oral sex with a minor aged 14 to 17 — matching the discretion judges already had in cases of vaginal intercourse. Wiener framed it as ending a rule that singled out gay men.
To be precise about what SB 145 did and did not do: it did not legalize sex with children, and it did not touch cases involving victims under 14 or offenders more than ten years older. Snopes rated the viral claim that the law “legalized pedophilia” false. But the equalized discretion it created still meant some adults convicted of statutory sex offenses against teenagers could now avoid mandatory registration — and that record is why Wiener’s critics read his AB 2753 “no” vote as of a piece with the rest of his career.
California keeps protecting child predators. A bill to bar registered sex offenders from the ballot passed the Assembly 60-0, then died in Scott Wiener's committee — while a second bill was amended to carve out sex crimes against minors.
Wiener is also, at this moment, a candidate for higher office. In the June 2026 primary he advanced to the general election in the race to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) in California’s 11th Congressional District, per ABC7 San Francisco. The votes he is casting as a committee chair this summer are, in effect, part of a congressional campaign resume — which is why national outlets from the Daily Wire to the Federalist put his name in the headline.
Wiener defended himself by attacking the motives of his critics, calling the outcry over the amendments “pure politics and pure political cynicism” and describing California’s registry as an overly broad system that sweeps in far more than dangerous predators. That is a real policy argument — the registry does include a wide range of offenses. It is also the argument that, applied here, kept a bill blocking child-pornography registrants from the ballot from ever reaching the Senate floor.
The committee did advance a different bill the same week — and how it did so is the part that drew the loudest alarm. AB 2691, by Assemblywoman Dawn Addis (D-San Luis Obispo), would bar people convicted of “sexual assault” and human trafficking from elected office. On June 24, 2026, the bill was amended — at the committee chair’s request, according to the California Family Council — to exclude sodomy, oral copulation, and sexual penetration against a minor from the definition of “sexual assault.” In plain terms, several felony sex crimes against children were written out of the ban.
Addis explained the carve-out as an attempt to avoid sweeping in young couples: “We didn’t want to unintentionally wrap in what’s known as Romeo and Juliet kinds of situations into this elections bill.” Critics answered that the amendment’s language reached well past teenage relationships and into serious felonies against children. Greg Burt, vice president of the California Family Council, testified that his organization could not believe what it was reading.
“Our honest reaction was that it could not be real. We assumed we had misread it. We sat in our office and tried to imagine how anyone could stand up and defend it.”
Greg Burt, VP, California Family Council · testimony on the AB 2691 amendments · June 30, 2026
AB 2691 was supposed to keep sexual-assault convicts out of elected office. Then the committee amended it to exempt sodomy, oral copulation, and penetration against minors. We asked how anyone could defend it. No one did.
California Democrats killed a bill to keep registered sex offenders off the ballot — and amended a second one to carve out crimes against kids. Remember this every time they lecture you about protecting children.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · paraphrased commentary
Read together, the two votes tell one story. The committee would not pass the clean, universal ban, and it would only pass the narrower ban after removing several categories of child sex crime from it. Whatever the intent, the practical result is a California Elections Code that still does not clearly bar a person convicted of a felony sex offense against a child from seeking public office.
The Federalist called this “at least the third time in recent years” California Democrats have moved to narrow or block a measure that would have cut against the interests of adults who commit sex offenses involving minors: SB 145 in 2020, the AB 2753 killing, and the AB 2691 carve-out. Whether one accepts that framing or not, the through-line is a legislature that keeps finding reasons the tough version cannot pass.
Only in California could a bill to keep child predators off the ballot pass 60-0 and still get buried by the same senator running to replace Nancy Pelosi. Voters should ask him about it every single day until November.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · paraphrased commentary
The honest counterweight belongs in the record too. In 2025 a different Democrat did the opposite. Sen. Susan Rubio (D), joined by Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, wrote SB 680 to close a genuine loophole: adult men who committed “unlawful sexual intercourse” with underage girls could, in many cases, avoid mandatory registration entirely. SB 680 required registration when the offender is more than ten years older than the victim, or a repeat offender. Newsom signed it on October 13, 2025. It proves the point rather than rebutting it — a California Democrat can tighten the child-protection statutes when she chooses to. The Senate committee simply chose not to, twice, in the same week.
The clean ban is dead. AB 2753, which would have barred every Penal Code § 290 registrant from state or local office, failed 2–1–2 in the Senate Elections Committee on June 30, 2026, after passing the Assembly 60–0.
The narrow ban was narrowed further. AB 2691 advanced only after June 24 amendments removed sodomy, oral copulation, and sexual penetration against minors from its definition of “sexual assault.”
The practical effect: a registered sex offender — including one on the registry for offenses involving children — can still, as a general matter, run for and hold local office in California, exactly as before Rene Campos filed his papers in Fresno.
None of this is hidden. The votes are recorded, the amendments are published, and the officials are named: Soria (D) who wrote the ban, Wiener (D) who chaired the committee that killed it, Addis (D) who accepted the carve-out, Umberg (D) and Allen (D) who declined to vote. A bill that could not find a single opponent among 80 Assembly members could not survive one Senate committee. In California, the accountability question is not whether the facts exist. It is whether voters in the 11th District will ask about them.
