Time to Clean Up Election Laws -- Cali's and Others

In Los Angeles, former reality TV star Spencer Pratt has upended the mayor's race with blisteringly creative ads and relentless attacks on the competency of Mayor Karen Bass, who slashed $17 million from the LA Fire Department's budget and left the city's main water reservoirs empty. When arson caused wildfires in January 2025, they blazed out of control, killing a dozen people and destroying thousands of homes in the Pacific Palisades — including Pratt's.

Pratt has generated nationwide buzz and widespread public support in the City of Angels, especially among women, working class and minority residents, by promising to clean up the homelessness problem, stop the distribution of needles and open drug use in the city, strengthen law enforcement to reduce crime, and provide firefighters and other first responders with the resources they need.

California has a "jungle primary" system, where the top two candidates advance to the November general election. But in typical blue-state fashion, what looked to be the final results on Election Night may well be thwarted in the days and weeks to come.

The polls closed at 8 p.m. PST Tuesday. By midnight Wednesday morning, Hilton was in the lead in the gubernatorial race, with Democrat Xavier Becerra just behind and billionaire Tom Steyer, also a Democrat, a distant third. Karen Bass led in the mayor's race with just over 35%, Spencer Pratt followed with 30%, and Nithya Raman, a Democrat city councilwoman, sat at approximately 22%.

At this writing, we're two days past the date of the primary elections in California and being told that the results won't be known "for weeks."

With just 56% of the votes for governor counted, Hilton is only 100,000 votes ahead of Becerra. In populous Los Angeles County, Becerra leads by 86,000 votes, and Hilton is only ahead of Steyer by 2,000 votes.

Pratt is still holding his second place position in the Los Angeles mayoral race, but the numbers haven't been updated since Wednesday afternoon. (What are they doing?) Betting markets are increasingly predicting that Raman will make the runoffs rather than Pratt, but that's probably more attributable to cynicism than to actual knowledge about voter preferences.

Still, the cynicism is warranted; California has one of the worst electoral systems in the country.

The state is home to somewhere between 2 million and 3 million illegal immigrants. (Some estimates put the number much higher.) It is one of 12 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that does not require ID to vote, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law in 2024 that expressly forbids cities and counties from imposing their own voter identification requirements. But even if ID were required, it wouldn't do much good without requiring proof of U.S. citizenship, since California is one of the 19 states that issue drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants.

California is also among only eight states that has "universal mail-in voting." In theory, only registered voters receive ballots in the mail. But there are few if any checks in the system. The voter registration website allows anyone with a California address to register to vote, even if they claim to have neither a Social Security number nor a driver's license — which means that a ballot will simply be sent to the requested address. Social media is rife with accounts of people receiving multiple ballots at the same locations, ballots arriving at places where previous residents are deceased or no longer live, and ballots being sent to former California residents who now live in other states, as well as voters registered to nonexistent residences (like public toilets).

California also allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to a week after Election Day. If they're actually mailed, they're supposed to be postmarked by Election Day. But many aren't mailed, since ballots can be deposited, instead, in "drop boxes" across the state. Those ballots aren't postmarked, and the only guarantee that they were completed before Election Day is if every single drop box is closed and picked up by 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Right.

Or those ballots can be collected by someone else.

Which brings us to "ballot harvesting," one of the most egregious abuses. Thirty-five states allow third parties to collect other people's ballots, but most have restrictions about who can do it (such as a family member) or how many ballots any one person may collect from others.

Not California. Its law permits individuals to collect an unlimited number of ballots from anyone else — and even to be paid to do it. (They just can't be paid by the ballot — a limitation easily avoided.) Harvesters can collect ballots from people who don't speak English, from the disabled, from the elderly in assisted living facilities. There is no supervision, no protection from pressure or undue influence, and no chain-of-custody assurances.

This is a dog's breakfast and a recipe for fraud and abuse, as all but the most gullible can see, and all but the most deceitful admit. It needs to be cleaned up, and not just in California. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Watson v. Republican National Committee (expected by the end of this month) may limit mail-in voting. But Congress needs to get its act together and pass legislation that makes Election Day a national holiday, limits voting to in-person with few exceptions, and requires both proof of identity and of U.S. citizenship in order to vote in our elections.

It shouldn't be too much to ask that the same people who pontificate about "our democracy" actually do their jobs and protect the integrity of the democratic process.

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Laura Hollis is an attorney and academic. She resides in Indiana with her husband and their two children.