With hours to go until polls close on California’s House redistricting ballot initiative, President Donald Trump and his aides are already attempting to undermine the result with seemingly unfounded claims of widespread fraud.
The president took to Truth Social just hours after polls opened across the Golden State to claim that the “unconstitutional” vote on whether to temporarily adopt a congressional district map to counter GOP-led redistricting efforts in Texas is “a giant scam” because “the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED.”
Trump then added: “All “Mail-In” Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are “Shut Out,” is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!”
It was not immediately clear how the president would have been able to judge that the California balloting outcome was somehow pre-determined through nefarious means, and White House officials did not respond to a query from The Independent seeking clarification.
But the president has a long history of claiming that California’s elections are illegitimate, dating back to his 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton, when afterwards he claimed he would have have won the state’s electoral votes but for massive numbers of illegal immigrants voting illegally.
California has been a solidly Democratic state since the early 1990s following a backlash to a Republican-led ballot initiative to deny basic services to illegal immigrants.
Pressed on whether Trump has evidence to back up his allegations, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt baselessly claimed there is “blatant fraud” in California’s elections on account of the state’s widespread use of postal balloting and said Trump would sign an executive order to crack down on such alleged fraud.
“It's absolutely true that there's fraud in California's elections. It's just a fact. It is just a fact. They have a universal mail in voting system, which we know is ripe for fraud,” she said.
Leavitt also claimed to possess evidence of “rigged fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in” both “in the names of other people” and “in the names of illegal aliens who shouldn't be voting in American elections.”
“There's countless examples, and we'd be happy to provide them,” she added.
The president’s threats and the White House’s unsupported claims of fraud come with just one year remaining until voters decide whether to hand control of either the House, the Senate, or both chambers to Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.
Since taking office, he has attempted to exert more control over federal elections through a series of legally dubious executive orders which have largely been blocked by federal courts.
The Justice Department has also been pressing states for detailed information on their voter rolls in what the administration characterizes as a search for illegal aliens who’ve unlawfully registered to vote.
But Democrats and civil society advocates fear he is laying the groundwork for an attempt to overturn any election results that go against the GOP in the way he attempted to do four years ago after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Then, after courts refused to hear baseless claims of fraud brought by his campaign in multiple contested states, his allies attempted to pressure then-vice president Mike Pence into illegally rejecting electoral vote certificates for those states in favor of forged certificates listing him and Trump as the winners of that election.
When Pence refused, the president directed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, at which point thousands of them broke through police barricades and sacked the building as Congress was beginning the quadrennial joint session to certify the election results.
