Column: A president who won’t tell the truth about California may unfairly punish the state
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- Trump is threatening to withhold wildfire relief from California to salve his tender ego
- He’s raised false claims of election chicanery to explain his failure to carry the state in three tries
California has a problem with its elections.
Not the way they’re conducted or administered, though there’s certainly room for improvement.
The problem is with a certain pouty president who can’t get over the fact California voters just aren’t that into him.
Donald Trump lost the state by a whopping 4.2 million votes in 2016. He nursed his bruised ego by suggesting the result was tainted by “millions and millions” of fraudulent ballots — even though there’s zero evidence supporting that claim.
In November, Trump won back the White House, but still lost California by nearly 3.2 million votes. Not exactly a nail-biter, but definitely better than his showings in 2016 and 2020. Apparently, though, a gold star for progress wasn’t enough to boost our needy president’s self-esteem.
“I think we would’ve won the state of California,” Trump told supporters at a post-inauguration celebration, “if the state had stronger voter identification laws.” Another assertion that’s not remotely grounded in reality, but Trump’s gonna Trump.
Yes, it’s grown tiresome. But all that whining could be written off as just more gaseous venting had the president not threatened to withhold desperately needed aid to fire-ravaged Southern California.
“I have a condition,” he told reporters before touring the charred remains of Pacific Palisades: Voter ID legislation to remedy what Trump falsely described as “a very corrupt” state election system.
In their haste to politicize one of the worst natural disasters in California history, Donald Trump and many allies don’t bother offering hopes and prayers. Their callous response is unprecedented.
(He also reiterated his demand that California change its water policies, but maybe that’s been solved by the troops Trump supposedly sent to turn on the water flow from the Pacific Northwest. There were no troops and there is no such flow, but whatever.)
Predictably, House Speaker Mike Johnson chimed in with his own false election claims, asserting that Republicans lost three California House seats in November because of vote-counting chicanery. “Inexcusable,” he huffed, echoing Trump’s suggestion there may be political terms for wildfire relief.
There is so much wrong with those kinds of threats, including the fact they’re morally reprehensible and utterly without precedent in the American annals of natural disaster — that is, until Trump came along. But we’ll save those lamentations for another day.
There’s also a great deal that Trump, Johnson and their California-bashing allies get wrong about the integrity of the state’s election system.
For starters, repeated nationwide studies have shown that voter fraud “is vanishingly rare and voter impersonation is nearly nonexistent,” as the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy think tank at New York University, has noted.
That leaves us — let’s quickly do the math — millions and millions shy of the supposedly fraudulent votes that tipped California away from Trump.
As for the state’s notoriously prolonged vote-counting process, it may be a source of vexation. (Including to many within the state.) But there’s nothing nefarious going on there, either.
Over the years, California lawmakers have enacted policies aimed at encouraging the greatest voter turnout possible, which is a commendable goal in a representative democracy. Once votes are cast, the state makes every effort to ensure they’re properly tabulated. And there are a great many to be counted. The number of presidential ballots cast in California last November — nearly 16 million — exceeds the population of all but four states.
It takes time to ensure that each of those ballots is legitimate. (That’s how you prevent fraud.)
That may require verifying an individual’s address or checking his or her signature against the one on file. Or shipping a mail ballot that was dropped off at the wrong location to the county where it should have been cast.
A considerable number of provisional ballots also need to be processed. For instance, if someone shows up at the wrong polling place they are allowed to cast a ballot, which then must be scrutinized.
All those steps hold up the final count, which, unfortunately, has invited disingenuous claims about vote-switching and stolen House seats. There is a straightforward, perfectly innocent reason why Democratic candidates sometimes pull ahead after trailing in early returns: Election day balloting has skewed Republican in recent years while mail ballots, which are counted later, have tended to favor Democrats.
If you want quicker results, the state should shell out more money to pay for it. Counties are responsible for tabulating ballots, but get nothing from Sacramento for that responsibility. Let the state pay to hire more staffers. Also, lawmakers could do more to help election offices in rural California, which are cash-starved compared with those in big urban areas.
Another change worth considering: Would shifting from county-managed voter registration databases to a state-managed system boost efficiency?
Those are all relatively small modifications, however, in a system that needs no major overhaul.
“For eight years, Trump has cried wolf, pushing claims attacking the integrity of California’s elections,” Sen. Alex Padilla, the state’s former elections chief, said in an email. “There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud and Trump’s actions are an attempt to sow distrust in California’s elections because he doesn’t like the results.”
Republicans have long styled themselves as the party of law and order and ‘backing the blue,’ but Trump freed people who attacked police. How does that make the country safer?
It’s said, quite rightly, that elections have consequences. So does lying about elections.
Bogus claims only serve to undercut faith in our democratic process and insult the many people working diligently to ensure the honesty and efficiency of our election system. They do so under increasingly stressful and sometimes dangerous conditions.
There’s no harm considering whether things can be done better.
But not by holding hostage tens of thousands of people whose lives have been devastated by wildfire. “They deserve support from their president,” Padilla rightly stated, rather than “political gamesmanship.”
And not by seeking needless fixes for a nonexistent problem conjured up by a president who’s not just a sore loser but a sore winner, as well.
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