As Californians voted on Tuesday for a new congressional map, United States President Donald Trump falsely said the process was rigged.
“The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
“All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!”
A reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for Trump’s evidence that the election was rigged.
“It is just a fact,” Leavitt said. “They have a universal mail-in voting system, which we know is ripe for fraud, … fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in, in the names of other people and the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections.”
Democratic state officials in California, including Governor Gavin Newsom and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, challenged Trump’s assertion. “Where exactly is this fraud? Ramblings don’t equate with fact,” Weber said.
When PolitiFact contacted the White House, a spokesperson responded with several points, many of which had also been shared in an X post. These points criticised California’s voting system but included only one case of a person charged with voter fraud. The White House also misrepresented the numbers on voter registration and voter removal to support its claims.
Trump has repeatedly spread falsehoods about “rigged” elections, including in California. Rigging a state election would require election officials across the state to work together to commit felonies. There is no evidence that happened.
What did happen: The largely Democratic-voting state overwhelmingly approved a proposition to redistrict its congressional map to increase the chance of adding five Democratic seats to the US House of Representatives to negate a similar redistricting in Texas aimed at adding Republican seats.
White House evidence does not prove the election was rigged
Vote by mail system: Much of the White House’s evidence criticises California’s system of mailing ballots to all active registered voters. It is one of eight states that conduct elections by such a system. Millions of ballots are sent to Californians and not returned, as the White House noted, but that doesn’t prove fraud. Election workers verify voter identities by matching signatures on the mail ballot envelopes with registration records.
Although voters are mailed ballots, they can choose to cast a ballot in person instead. Voters generally don’t have to provide an ID. Election workers can ask for an ID if the person is voting for the first time and didn’t provide an ID when registering to vote.
The White House cherry-picked one sentence from a 2005 bipartisan report that said: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Although the report generally communicated a dim view of absentee voting, it didn’t call for its elimination. It recommended ways to improve security and further study.
Noncitizen voters: The White House said, “San Francisco allows noncitizens to vote in local elections, which creates a high risk of fraud in federal elections,” and acknowledged noncitizens aren’t allowed to vote in federal elections. The city allows noncitizens to vote only in school board elections.
The US Department of Justice sued Orange County, California, in June after it redacted personal identifying information when it provided records to the department about 17 noncitizens on the voter rolls.
Bob Page, the county registrar of voters, said the 17 people self-reported that they wanted to cancel their voter registrations, including eight who voted before they cancelled their voter registration.
Duplicate registrations: “California reported 2,178,551 duplicate registrations in the 2024 election cycle – 15.6 percent of total registered voters,” the White House said.
The statement misleadingly gives the impression that those people appear on the voter rolls more than once. “Duplicate registrations” refer to the number of registration applications that California election officials received but didn’t process because they were identical to existing registrations. Duplicate registration can happen by accident; some people register and forget they did so or submit registrations both through the mail and online.
The number the White House cited represents the number of times California election officials caught the mistake, not made one.
The number comes from a 2024 national survey on voting activity and election administration from 2022 to 2024 by the bipartisan US Election Assistance Commission.
The national average for duplicate applications is 12.7 percent.
Removing voters after death: The White House said, “California only removed 378,349 registered voters for death (11.9 percent), which was well below the national average,” between the 2022 and 2024 elections.
This figure is cherry-picked. The White House cited voters removed because of death, which is just one reason for striking a voter from the rolls.
From 2022 to 2024, California removed more than 3.177 million voters from its rolls for all reasons, including death, according to the same election survey. That’s a 12.4 percent removal rate of all registered voters, compared with the national average of 9.1 percent.
California removed a larger proportion of voters for reasons other than death, such as moving or failure to return a confirmation notice.
Voter fraud: The White House pointed to one woman charged with voter fraud.
In September, authorities charged a woman from Costa Mesa, California, with five felonies for illegally registering her dog to vote. The dog’s vote was counted in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election but rejected in the 2022 primary. The Orange County District Attorney’s office said the woman “self-reported that she had registered her dog to vote”.
Laura Lee Yourex, 62, said she wanted to prove a point about flaws in the state voting system, according to her lawyer.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database shows 69 cases in California from 1982 to 2025. The database shows dozens of cases in states that vote primarily Republican, such as Florida, which does not send a mail ballot to all voters.
Our ruling
Trump said voting in California is “rigged”.
The White House’s explanation misrepresented data about duplicate registrations, cherry-picked data about dead voter removals from registration rolls, pointed to one woman charged with voter fraud among about 23 million registered voters and baselessly blamed San Francisco’s allowance for noncitizen voting in school board elections.
The White House did not prove California voting is “rigged”. We rate Trump’s statement false.
Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.
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