Newsmax75%
US Attorney Opens Investigations Into California's Elections 20%
By MICHAEL BLOOD0% NICHOLAS RICCARDI73%
6/5/2026, 5:02:04 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Framing Effect, and Status Quo Bias, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 14.1% saturation with 103 hits. Analysis detected 742 faulty-reasoning hits from 730 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.1% and a BS Rank of 20% (17,684 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 80.80% of the article peer group.
The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said Friday it had opened "multiple election fraud investigations" related to California's elections and sent a prosecutor to the county's vote-counting center.
The developments came a day after President Donald Trump made claims of mass fraud in California's drawn-out vote count from Tuesday's primary.
Late-tallied Democrat-leaning mail ballots were continuing to eat into the vote totals for the president's preferred candidates for governor and Los Angeles mayor.
The announcement by U.S.
Attorney Bill Essayli, Trump's appointee as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, and the visit to Los Angeles County's ballot tabulation center came a day after Trump alleged fraud in California's vote count.
Trump weighed in again Friday while participating in a roundtable discussion in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, claiming that Democrats were rigging the election.
"You look at what's happening — it's getting tighter and tighter and tighter," he said.
"And the people who were supposed to win, bad things are happening.
It's a crooked state."
Trump has often said that changes to vote totals as late ballots are counted are a sign of fraud.
Election officials say the shifts reflect the continued counting of ballots received before the deadline.
On Thursday, Trump said his Department of Justice was investigating the California count.
By Friday morning, Essayli posted on X about ongoing investigations without providing details, saying only that California's elections have "serious structural vulnerabilities."
An assistant U.S. attorney came to the main ballot processing center Friday morning, according to a statement from Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for Los Angeles County's Registrar-Recorder.
The prosecutor "was provided an overview of the public observation program and participated in a walkthrough of the ballot processing operations," Sanchez said.
He added that "election officials routinely host observers representing a wide range of interests."
It was not the first time Trump's Justice Department has taken an interest in California's elections.
Last fall, it sent observers to monitor polling sites in five counties, including Los Angeles, during the special election asking voters to change California's congressional map.
Also on Friday, Republican Steve Hilton, who is Trump's favored candidate for governor, called for a sweeping overhaul in California's election laws to limit mail ballots to only those who request them, rather than to all registered voters.
He also called for an Election Day deadline to accept them rather than the seven-day grace period the state currently allows as long as they are postmarked by the final day of voting.
Hilton said in an interview that the U.S. attorney's office might know more than his campaign does but noted his team has been monitoring the count and has seen nothing that seems illegal.
"We certainly haven't seen anything of that nature that would warrant legal action," Hilton said.
Still, Hilton said the sluggish count has made California "a national and international laughingstock."
He proposed the state government send an emergency detachment of state workers to California's 58 counties to speed up the vote count.
Jesse Salinas, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officers, said he welcomed Hilton's eagerness to help but the proposal would do no good.
"It'd be more disruptive than helpful at this point," said Salinas, who's also the clerk and registrar for Yolo County.
Anyone who handles a ballot or machine used in the vote-counting process would have to be trained by the very people working feverishly to tally mail ballots that poured in Tuesday.
And, added Salinas, his own vote-counting facility is already full, with no more room for any additional staff.
Hilton, who has been endorsed by Trump, is battling two Democrats for one of the two slots on the November ballot.
Reality television star Spencer Pratt, another candidate backed by Trump, is likewise competing with City Councilwoman Nithya Raman for the chance to face Mayor Karen Bass in the November election.
Because Democrats usually vote by mail and held on to their ballots unusually late in the crowded primary, their votes are often tallied after those of more Republican-leaning voters who might have cast ballots early.
The net effect is that Republican candidates appear at their high-water marks in the first batch of returns on election night, only to see their leads whittled away in the days or weeks that follow, when election workers complete the lengthy process of tallying late-arriving mail ballots.
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100%flagged-word coverageBill Essayli
22 attributed words5.3% of attributed speech79% writer coverage
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