Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Saturday that is meant to prevent interference in California’s midterm elections in response to efforts by President Trump and other Republicans to restrict voting participation.
Mr. Newsom and fellow Democrats in the State Legislature crafted the bills to broadly combat involvement by the Trump administration, without knowing specifically whether or how the federal government might engage in California’s elections. The state relies heavily on mail ballots, and Mr. Trump has taken particular aim at that form of voting.
One bill prohibits the seizure of ballots, election records or voting technology before an election is certified. Another makes it a felony for people in positions of authority to direct their workers to interfere with the delivery of a mail ballot or its return to election officials.
Mr. Newsom signed a package of 13 bills, including a measure that prohibits arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day, with exceptions for acts related to disrupting the election or crimes against people or property. Democrats have feared that the Trump administration could send federal agents to polling places in immigrant communities.
Mr. Trump, who has voted by mail twice this year, has claimed that absentee voting is rife with fraud. He and his administration said in July, without evidence, that California and three other states had allowed about 278,000 noncitizens to vote in federal elections.
California’s Democratic leaders said they were responding to a spate of unusual challenges from Mr. Trump, and local officials aligned with him. Mr. Newsom signed the bills in Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum, where Border Patrol agents showed up outside a rally the governor held last summer.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order in March that sought to restrict the use of mail ballots. And earlier this year, Chad Bianco, the Republican sheriff in Riverside County, seized more than 650,000 ballots that voters had cast last year because he said he was investigating a discrepancy in the count. California challenged both actions in court. The Supreme Court on Monday sided with California and other Democratic-led states by blocking Mr. Trump’s plan to restrict voting by mail.
The new state laws add small but meaningful protections to California’s ability to prevent outside involvement in its ballot process, said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who worked on voting rights for the Biden administration.
“There’s a vigilante mood afoot,” Mr. Levitt said. “This acts as a little bit of a deterrent for people who are cosplaying election officials.”
Shannon Grove, a Republican state senator who voted against the bills, said she believed one of the laws would allow criminal charges against U.S. Postal Service workers who handle ballots as a routine part of their job. Under that bill, it would be a misdemeanor for anyone in charge of a mail ballot to interfere with delivering it to a voter.
“This is about the postal workers, and that’s pretty bold,” she said.
In a brief interview last month, Mr. Newsom said the legislation wasn’t aimed at prosecuting postal workers who are doing their jobs properly.
The bills are targeted at those “carrying out illegal activity or illegal orders and directives,” Mr. Newsom said. “With these enhanced sanctions, if you break the law we’re going to hold you accountable, and it doesn’t matter who you are.”
Among the other bills that Mr. Newsom signed are two that took aim at “deepfake” ads generated by A.I. that mimic a politician’s voice or appearance to deceive voters.
In 2024, voters in New Hampshire received a voice message that was made to sound like President Joseph R. Biden Jr. urging them not to vote. That same year, an online ad imitated the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris saying Mr. Biden was senile.
California passed legislation cracking down on deepfake political ads that year, but it was later blocked by courts for violating free speech. The new legislation takes a narrower approach meant to strengthen it against constitutional challenges.
Mr. Newsom also signed a bill that could accelerate California’s notoriously slow process for counting votes.
It calls for election officials to tell people how to vote early, which reduces the glut of envelopes that arrive on Election Day. It also requires informing voters that they can submit mail ballots at a polling place. Doing so allows election officials to count ballots faster by eliminating the envelopes that are cumbersome to process.
Most election-related bills relied on Democratic support to pass, but the legislation to encourage early voting and in-person submission of ballots had sweeping bipartisan support.
Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he was skeptical that California would be successful in stopping officials from the U.S. Department of Justice if they tried to collect ballots during an election, a scenario that has not occurred in modern times.
But, he said, the laws could be enforced against state and local officials. The state has already sued Mr. Bianco, and the parties in that case are awaiting a decision from the California Supreme Court.
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