California rejected its highest percentage of mail ballots in a decade during June primary 21%
By Sara DiNatale49%
7/24/2026, 3:34:44 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Appeal to Authority, and Burden of Proof, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 19.5% saturation with 196 hits. Analysis detected 1,379 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,004 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.2% and a BS Rank of 21% (17,315 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 79.10% of the article peer group.
California rejected the highest percentage of mail ballots in more than a decade when tabulating votes in the June 2 primary, according to new data from the secretary of state.
County election officials threw out about 148,000 mail ballots from the June 2 election, bringing the total percentage of illegible mail ballots to 1.73%.
That’s nearly an 11% increase from the 2024 primary, when 1.56% of the ballots were rejected.
Primary rejection rates are generally higher than in general elections, but the last time a rejection rate neared the current level was in 2014 when the general election rejection rate was 1.87% and the primary rejection rate was 2.86%.
“It’s worrisome,” said Kim Alexander, the director of the California Voter Foundation.
“It normally doesn’t accelerate that much.”
The spike in ballot rejections comes amid heavy criticism of California’s election system by Republicans.
Following the June 2 primary, Assistant U.S.
Attorney Bill Essayli visited the Los Angeles County ballot processing center and announced “multiple election fraud investigations” he was conducting, without sharing any specific allegations or examples.
Republicans have criticized California’s decision to send every registered voter a mail ballot, saying it creates opportunities for “ballot harvesting.”
Republican Steve Hilton, who is running for governor, has called California’s vote-counting “ridiculously slow” and said it reflects incompetence and creates potential for fraud.
Election officials rejected the majority of ballots — more than 93,000 — because they were postmarked after Election Day or arrived too late.
The rate at which ballots were rejected for lateness stayed steady between 2024 and 2026.
Counties did, however, reject a higher rate of mail ballots than previous elections because workers could not verify envelope signatures.
“Voters are complicated,” said Natalie Adona, the Marin County Registrar of Voters.
And it can be difficult to understand — or predict — their behavior.
The numbers do, however, make clear that Californians continue to prefer voting by mail even as President Donald Trump claims without evidence that “mail-in voting is mail-in cheating.”
Nearly 8.6 million California voters used mail ballots in 2026 — either by returning them by mail, dropping them off in person at an election office or using a ballot dropbox, compared with about 7 million in 2024.
Close to 44,000 mail ballots didn’t have signatures that matched state records, and voters didn’t fix those signatures within the 22-day window provided by law, according to the secretary of state data.
The rejected signature ballots made up 0.5% of the total ballots returned to election offices by mail.
That’s a 40% increase from the percentage tossed out for the same reason in 2024 and a higher rate than in 2022.
Adona said there are myriad reasons why signature rejections are rising.
“The particular election might make a voter more or less likely to answer a cure letter, younger voters aren’t asked to apply wet signatures to much of anything and might return a signature that doesn’t match their DMV record, older voters might have had a medical event that changed their signature, etc.,” Adona said.
Twenty-two counties provide an option to fix ballot signatures electronically, Alexander said, but it’s not required.
That means election officials may have to rely on the U.S.
Postal Service to mail notices about signatures that don’t match and then get the new signatures returned via mail.
Some voters simply don’t bother; others forget.
That’s why Alexander said she wants to see lawmakers require the secretary of state to create an electronic option to fix signature issues.
Doing so could also cut down the state’s 22-day window to “cure” ballots that would otherwise be rejected, thus allowing California to certify its elections more quickly.
California provides one of the longest periods in the county to allow voters to cure the signature on their ballot’s envelope if it doesn’t match the other signatures the county has on file.
Los Angeles County was a pioneer in electronic signature curing, and it now has one of the lowest rejection rates per capita in the state.
The rate of rejections for late-arriving ballots in Los Angeles County declined between the 2024 and 2026 primaries.
In 2024, 1.3% of all ballots were rejected for arriving too late; in 2026, that figure fell to just 0.8%, well below the statewide figure and even below some much smaller and wealthier counties like San Francisco and Santa Clara.
“Our office has increased staffing levels, training, and equipment capacity to better respond to the high number of mail ballots returned through drop boxes and at Vote Centers on Election Day,” said Dean Logan, registrar-recorder for Los Angeles County.
“These stats demonstrate the efficacy of those efforts and our responsiveness to voter preferences.”
Generally, Logan said, rural counties in California may see higher rates of rejection because of their distance from U.S.
Postal Service offices (data, though, show a mixed picture: Some rural counties have very low rejection rates, while others have very high rates).
Ballots must be postmarked on or before Election Day in order to be counted, but the Postal Service this year told voters they could not guarantee a ballot dropped at a mailbox the day of the election would be postmarked in time.
“A lot of ballots are rejected due to lateness because they’re postmarked too late, not because they arrived too late,” Alexander said.
“The changes to the timeline in Postal Services practices is a big shift voters may not be aware of.”
In 2010, the general election rejection rate for mail-in ballots was 2.8%.
Alexander said reforms like the state’s seven-day window to receive ballots, the growth of drop boxes and flexibility of allowing voters to bring their ballot to any election office all played a role in the drop over the last 16 years.
She said voters mailing ballots or dropping them off before Election Day, along with a robust electronic signature-curing system, would not only cut down on rejections but would speed up election results across the state.
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