Days Before the Primary, Newsom Quietly Changed the Signature Rules. Critics Say It Opens a Door.

On May 27, 2026 — six days before California opened its consolidated statewide primary — Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed Senate Bill 73 and let it take effect immediately. The bill, by Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) and Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana), is mostly a response to a Republican sheriff who seized hundreds of thousands of ballots earlier this year. But buried inside it is a provision that changes who may challenge a mail-ballot signature — and that is the part conservative critics seized on.

The Daily Caller summed up the alarm in a headline: “Gavin Newsom’s Newest Election Law Could Open The Door To Major Voter Fraud.” The specific change: SB 73 bars partisan election observers from challenging a signature on a vote-by-mail return envelope “on the basis that they believe the signature does not compare with the signatures appearing in the voter’s registration record.” To critics, that removes a layer of citizen oversight from a mail-heavy system already under federal scrutiny.

Here is the line this story will not cross: the law does notstop election officials from verifying signatures — that legal duty is untouched. What changes is that an observer standing in the room can no longer formally contest a county worker’s signature call. Supporters say observers were never trained handwriting examiners and that the provision blocks intimidation. Critics say it strips the last independent eyes off the most fraud-vulnerable step in California voting. Both can be true. What is not yet true — on any public record — is that the change has produced a single fraudulent ballot.

• SB 73 — Cervantes-Umberg election bill signed by Gov. Newsom (D) on May 27, 2026, effective immediately — six days before the June 2 primary · Source: Office of the Governor; CA Legislature
• ~650,000 — ballots Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R) seized in early 2026 — the act that prompted SB 73's law-enforcement seizure ban · Source: CalMatters, NBC News
• 0 — documented fraudulent ballots tied to the signature-observer change — critics' concern is prospective, not proven · Source: Daily Caller; PolitiFact

SB 73 is, by its own text, two laws stitched together. The larger half is a ballot-custody statute: it makes it a crime — punishable by up to three years in prison, a $1,000 fine, or both — for anyone to knowingly take a package of voted ballots from the custody of an elections official, and it bars law enforcement from accessing, disrupting, or seizing ballots, voter rolls, or voting equipment without a court order. That is the provision Newsom and the bill’s authors led with when they announced the signing.

The smaller half — the one the Daily Caller built its headline around — touches signature verification. Under the new language, an election observer “shall not be permitted to challenge a signature on a vote by mail ballot return envelope…on the basis that they believe the signature does not compare with the signatures appearing in the voter’s registration record.” The bill also bars an elections official from letting a law-enforcement agent serve as a vote-by-mail observer. Critically, the statute leaves the official duty to compare signatures fully in place; it reassigns who may contest the call, not whether the call is made.

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California is one of the few states that mails a ballot to every active registered voter, accepts ballots that arrive up to seven days after Election Day if postmarked on time, and gives voters a 22-day window to “cure” a mismatched signature. Mail ballots make up roughly 80 percent of the state’s vote. In that system, the signature on the return envelope is the central anti-fraud check — the one thing standing between a real voter and someone returning a ballot that is not theirs. Critics argue that removing the observer’s power to challenge a signature thins that check at the exact point it matters most.

The concern is sharpened by timing and venue. SB 73 took effect six days before voting began, with no slow ramp for counties to adjust procedures. And it landed in the same state where U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (R, Trump-appointed, C.D. Cal.) says officials have “multiple election fraud investigations underway” and where the Justice Department is fighting in federal court for an electronic copy of the voter rolls. To election-integrity activists, a law that reduces observer scrutiny — passed quietly, just before a primary, in a one-party state — reads as the wrong move at the wrong moment, whatever its intent.

“Gavin Newsom signed a bill removing a layer of mail-in ballot signature verification days before the start of the state’s elections.”

The Daily Caller · June 8, 2026 · the critics' framing

Newsom and the bill’s Democratic authors frame SB 73 as a shield, not a loophole. “California will not allow our elections to be commandeered by political intimidation, abuse of power, or chaotic interference,” Newsom said on signing. Sen. Umberg (D) put the motive plainly: “When the President says he is going to disrupt an election, I believe him.” Supporters note that partisan observers are not trained forensic document examiners — that letting them contest individual signatures invites exactly the kind of mass challenge that can be weaponized to slow a count or cast doubt on legitimate ballots.

They also stress what the law preserves. Election officials must still compare each return-envelope signature against the voter’s registration records; voters whose signatures do not match still get the 22-day cure period. The Secretary of State, Shirley Weber (D), has defended the broader system as one that “by law ensures both voting rights and the integrity of elections.” In this telling, SB 73 does not remove signature verification — it removes a partisan veto over a professional’s judgment, while the verification itself continues exactly as before.

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To understand why SB 73 exists, follow the ballots back to Riverside County. In early 2026, Sheriff Chad Bianco (R) — a Republican candidate for governor — obtained a warrant and seized more than 650,000 ballots from the November 2025 special election on Proposition 50, the redistricting measure. Bianco said he was investigating possible fraud. But, as CalMatters reported after going to court to unseal the warrants, his investigators “had no insider tipsters, no witnesses and no independent analyses from forensic experts” — the underlying claims came from a private activist group an election expert likened to “flat earthers.”

Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) asked the courts to intervene, and in April 2026 the California Supreme Court ordered Bianco to pause the probe and preserve the seized ballots. Sen. Cervantes (D), whose district includes Riverside, cited that seizure as the catalyst for her bill. So the law’s core is a direct rebuke to a Republican officeholder — which is also why critics distrust the signature provision riding along with it: a measure sold as protecting ballots from one party’s sheriff also quietly reduced the other party’s observers’ reach. That is the tension a serious accounting has to hold.

The honest framing is the one most likely to survive scrutiny: SB 73’s signature provision is a documented reduction in observer authority, not a documented source of fraud. No public record — not from Essayli’s office, not from any court filing, not from the Daily Caller itself — shows a single fraudulent ballot that passed because an observer was barred from challenging it. PolitiFact rated President Trump’s broader claim that California’s slow count proves a “rigged election” as “Pants on Fire.” The signature change is a real policy shift; the fraud it might enable is, so far, hypothetical.

But hypothetical is not the same as baseless. A state that already counts the most mail ballots, accepts the latest-arriving ones, and is simultaneously refusing a federal voter-roll audit chose — days before an election, by single-party vote — to remove one of the few checks the opposing party could exercise in the room. Even if every signature is verified correctly by every county, the optics corrode trust. The fix critics would accept is not complicated: independent, bipartisan verification and transparency, so a legal outcome reads as a trusted one. SB 73 added a custody protection and subtracted an observer check in the same breath, and only one of those was advertised.

There is a defensible version of SB 73 and an indefensible way it was delivered. Banning a partisan sheriff from carting off 650,000 ballots is sound policy; nothing about Bianco’s seizure looks like legitimate law enforcement. But folding a reduction in election-observer authority into that same bill, passing it on a party-line vote, and switching it on six days before a primary is how a state that insists it has nothing to hide ends up looking like it does. Transparency is the only currency that makes a mail-ballot count believable, and California keeps spending it.

So the accountable conclusion is narrow and firm: critics are right that SB 73 removed a check, and wrong to imply it has already produced fraud. The burden now sits with California’s Democratic officials — Newsom, Weber, Bonta, Cervantes, Umberg — who control the rolls, the count, and the rules. If the signature verification they kept on the books is as rigorous as they say, the way to prove it is to open the process to independent eyes, not to legislate the opposing party’s eyes out of the room and ask the public to take their word for it.

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