加利福尼亚州与共和党选民欺诈论调的危险死灰复燃

California, and the dangerous sudden resurgence of GOP voter fraud fever

2026-06-08T17:59:54.865Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/08/politics/california-voter-fraud-claims-republicans

• The long delay in California primary results have brought back GOP voter fraud claims that had largely subsided since 2020.
• Trump and prominent GOP figures are making fraud allegations despite zero evidence, fueled by the state’s slow ballot-counting process.
• The resurgence comes five months before midterm elections that, if Democrats perform well, could hinge on a single close Senate race.

AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.

Around noon on Sunday, Fox Business Network’s Charles Gasparino declared on X, “I hate the ‘stolen election’ stuff from the president …”

Just two hours later, though, Gasparino himself was entertaining the idea that an election is being stolen. After former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger noted that President Donald Trump is claiming last week’s election in California is “rigged,” Gasparino responded: “Maybe it is.”

There is zero evidence that there is anything fraudulent about the election results in California. As CNN’s Elex Michaelson has explained, the state’s ballot-counting process takes a long time because of how its elections are run, and late-counted mail ballots have typically favored Democrats in large part because Trump has turned Republicans against voting by mail.

But through a combination of disinterest with those details, internet silos and raw politics, theories that Democrats are stealing the California governor’s race and the Los Angeles mayoral race have caught on like wildfire on social media. It has even extended to Republicans who previously kept such voter-fraud claims at arm’s length.

After five years of voter fraud fever on the right going somewhat dormant, it’s back with a vengeance — ignoring the fact that this exact rhetoric led to ugly and violent places at the seat of the US government on January 6, 2021.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last epitomized this trend.

DeSantis was never a leading election denier in the aftermath of 2020. And when he was challenging Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries, he dismissed Trump’s claims of a stolen election, saying, “All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.”

But on Wednesday, DeSantis decried how new batches of votes in California “always seem to go one way.”

“Count until you get the result you want?” DeSantis added, conspiratorially.

A major problem with Trump’s voter fraud crusade after the 2020 election was that he struggled to get his own Justice Department to take his claims seriously. Both his current and former attorney general resisted, and Trump infamously tried to elevate someone to that post who would entertain his wild claims, Jeffrey Clark.

But today, his DOJ is playing into the idea that something is amiss.

The US attorney’s office in Los Angeles over the weekend announced “multiple election fraud investigations,” while citing supposed “serious structural vulnerabilities.”

And on Monday, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, was on CNBC feeding into such suspicions. While qualifying that he wasn’t claiming there was fraud, he said California had created “the opportunity for fraud.”

Even just saying that goes afield of how prosecutors, who generally strictly deal in evidence and not theories, are supposed to conduct themselves.

Clayton was also asked twice about false viral claims that large numbers of votes had been added to the totals in the Los Angeles mayoral race without any of them going to Republican candidate Spencer Pratt. Neither time did Clayton push back on that assertion — even though the US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles had already debunked those claims.

Social media is also rife with people suggesting it’s unthinkable that Democrats were gaining so much after primary day — despite that being a common occurrence in deep-blue California. Trump himself leaned into that narrative on Monday, saying it was “not possible” for Pratt to have fallen behind “after the big lead he had.”

“Rigged Elections!” Trump said on Truth Social.

(In fact, that’s how things almost always go in the Golden State; it just so happens that the candidacies of Pratt and former Fox News host Steve Hilton for governor made more people on the right pay increased attention to California, which is often an electoral afterthought nationally.)

While responding to a clip of Trump saying California’s election was rigged, conservative TV personality Meghan McCain said, “For whatever it’s worth, people in my life who have never ever spoken about stolen elections in any capacity are now saying this about California.”

That tracks more widely, too. And disturbingly, it’s happening after years of election suspicion trending down.

Even though Republicans under-performed in the 2022 midterm elections, it was mostly the likes of Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake complaining about fraud, while the rest of the party ignored her.

Trump’s win in 2024 gave the GOP little reason to complain about supposed fraud. And the 2025 results were so decisive for Democrats — and in just a few states — that it wasn’t conducive to such complaints.

Polling shows a decline in concerns about fraud. Washington Post-University of Maryland polling showed about 3 in 10 Americans and 6 in 10 Republicans thought there was “solid evidence” of fraud in the 2020 election, in surveys conducted in 2021 and 2023. But those numbers dropped to 16% and 21%, respectively, after the 2024 election.

That being said, this is clearly still a tinderbox.

After months of Republicans baselessly claiming voting by undocumented immigrants is a major problem and pushing for legislation to prevent it, a March Marist College poll showed confidence in the fairness of the upcoming election was lower than it’s been at any point in recent years — including ahead of the 2020 election.

The survey also showed 70% of Republicans expected fraud to mar the upcoming election.

An April Reuters-Ipsos poll also showed more than 8 in 10 Republicans believed noncitizens cast large numbers of illegal votes (there is no evidence for this), and were concerned about fraudulent mail‑in or absentee ballots (there is no evidence this is a major problem).

It’s not hard to see how this could get ugly.

While voters have largely been spared super-close election results in recent years, even a strong showing for Democrats in 2026 could result in a tight battle for the Senate majority. A single close race could well decide which party holds a major lever of power.

California’s time-consuming ballot-counting process seems to have reawakened this sleeping giant inside the American right. And apparently the passage of time and Trump’s efforts to rewrite the history of January 6 have inured people to the potential consequences.

Indeed, even after the 2020 election, many prominent Republicans didn’t necessarily endorse Trump’s theories; they largely watered them down or merely declined to disagree with him.

But this time, the right seems to be along for the ride, happy to join him in seeding suspicion despite the lack of evidence. That’s a scary prospect five months before the 2026 election.