Fact check: Trump’s latest lies about California’s elections and mail-in voting

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump has for years told outlandish lies about elections in Democratic-dominated California. Trump made more false claims on the subject in a Fox News interview on Friday, prompting California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, to correctly note on social media that the president had told “an outright lie.”

Trump delivered the comments after a Fox host prodded him to disavow the idea of people on the political right taking revenge, other than through the peaceful means of voting, for the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“He’d want revenge at the voter box,” Trump said, “but unfortunately we don’t have so many ballot boxes because they have mail-in voting, which is totally rigged. You know, there are a lot of problems. I like ballot boxes, where you can – they do mail-in voting all over the place, which is rigged.”

Trump continued: “Any time – Jimmy Carter, they had a commission; he said, ‘Any time you have mail-in voting, it’s a crooked election,’ okay? ‘And they’ve gotta stop.’ But I say – so I can’t really say ‘at the ballot box,’ because in some cases – like California doesn’t have ballot boxes. They send out 38 million ballots, nobody knows where the hell they’re going, then they come back, Democrats get more than Republicans. It’s so unfair, the system.”

Here’s a fact check of six of Trump’s assertions.

“…they have mail-in voting, which is totally rigged.” It simply isn’t. Mail-in voting is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters to cast legitimate ballots. Elections experts say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots – but also that fraud rates in federal elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots.

Republican-dominated Utah is among the states where voters are automatically sent mail-in ballots (though it is now phasing out that policy); Utah’s federal elections, like California’s, have been free of widespread fraud. And it’s worth noting that Trump himself encouraged supporters to vote by mail in 2024.

“Jimmy Carter, they had a commission; he said, ‘Any time you have mail-in voting, it’s a crooked election.’” That’s not what Carter or the commission said. Trump has repeatedly misstated the commission’s conclusions.

It’s true that the commission Carter co-chaired two decades ago was generally skeptical of voting by mail. Its 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”

But the report did not say that “any time you have mail-in voting, it’s a crooked election.” In fact, the report highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections, saying that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections exclusively by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.” The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail.

Carter, who died in 2024, said in a 2020 statement: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.”

“…California doesn’t have ballot boxes.” False. In-person voting is available throughout California, though a mail-in ballot is also sent to every active registered voter to use if they prefer.

Trump’s claim “is not accurate,” the office of California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told CNN in an email on Friday. “In-person voting is a preserved option for all voters. Vote centers and ballot drop-off locations are available for those who prefer not to mail their ballots.”

About 3.1 million ballots were cast at in-person voting locations in California in the 2024 general election, representing about 19% of the total ballots cast in the state in that election.

“They send out 38 million ballots.” False; that “38 million” figure is not even close to accurate. California had about 22.6 million voters registered as of about two weeks prior to the November 2024 election and about 22.9 million voters registered as of early February 2025. There is no basis for any suggestion that some 15 million excess ballots were distributed in any election. (California had more than 39 million total residents in 2024, but that number includes children, adult citizens not registered to vote, noncitizens, and people in prison.)

“Nobody knows where the hell they’re going.” They do. California’s county elections offices send a mail-in ballot to the address on the voter’s registration file; an online system allows the voter to track when the ballot was sent out by their elections office, received back by that elections office, and counted. There are occasional errors by counties and the postal service, but it’s certainly not the free-for-all of Trump’s portrayal – and there are security measures in place to make sure that each ballot is cast by the voter it was meant for and that each voter only votes once.

Weber’s office said: “Elections officials use protocols to verify the eligibility and identity of the voter prior to sending the vote by mail ballot. When the ballot is returned, elections officials verify the voter’s identity through signature verification. If the elections official determines that the voter’s signature does not match, the identification envelope will not be opened, and the ballot will not be counted until the identification of the voter is confirmed.”

“Then they come back; Democrats get more than Republicans. It’s so unfair, the system.” It’s true that Democrats receive more mail-in votes than Republicans do in many California races, but that’s not a sign of corruption or unfairness. California, a liberal bastion where no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1988, has millions more registered Democrats than registered Republicans – and Trump’s frequent depiction of mail-in voting as corrupt and insecure has led some of his supporters to avoid that method.

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