California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday warned President Donald Trump that he is “deploying election lawyers to key battleground districts in California to protect every vote” and said he “just made it a FELONY to illegally seize ballots,” in a post on X framed as “A warning to Donald Trump.”
The post came shortly after Trump, before boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, called California elections “extremely corrupt” after a federal judge denied a Justice Department bid to sequester roughly 20,000 mail ballots. “California is very corrupt; the elections are extremely corrupt,” Trump said. “We found 20,000, but there are hundreds of thousands of bad ballots, bad votes in California, millions. In my opinion millions.”
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter on Oct. 28 denied the government’s application for a temporary restraining order in United States v. California. Carter wrote that “never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures,” and that granting the request would risk disenfranchising more than 20,000 registered Californians. The Justice Department said it would appeal.
Newsom’s office and the California Democratic Party are fielding statewide election-integrity teams that include more than 800 poll observers, 134 election-law attorneys and 54 hotline operators, according to figures Newsom provided to USA TODAY. Attorneys and trained volunteers will be stationed at county election offices, especially in California’s 6th, 13th, 22nd, 45th and 48th congressional districts, which were redrawn under Proposition 50, the newspaper reported.
California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks said in a statement quoted by USA TODAY that “Donald Trump doesn’t get to decide which votes count, which ballots get counted, or who wins an election. California voters do,” and that the party is “mobilizing volunteers, deploying voter protection teams and working around the clock to ensure every eligible Californian can cast their ballot.” The party set up a multilingual voter-protection hotline at 1-877-321-VOTE (8683).
On Jimmy Kimmel Live, Newsom said he was “focused on getting over a thousand poll workers, folks out there to monitor the DOJ monitors that Trump’s going to send to try to steal this election,” according to USA TODAY. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. That we have to do this. We’re not screwing around. Nor is he, but we can’t screw around.”
The felony Newsom referenced is Assembly Bill 282, which he signed on Sept. 19. The governor’s office said the bill makes it a felony to seize, or cause or assist in seizing, ballots, election records or certified voting technology before election results are certified, and a higher felony for a person with authority who directs subordinates to do so. The chaptered bill text adds Elections Code section 18579, with penalties of 16 months or two or three years for a seizure, and two, three or four years for directing one. It took effect immediately as an urgency statute for the Nov. 3 election.
At the signing, Newsom said, “Donald Trump won’t stop until he can exert dictatorial control over your free vote and disenfranchise millions of people this November. California will stop him at every opportunity.” Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber said the package erects “a shield against multiple attacks against our elections,” and Attorney General Rob Bonta said the administration is “waging an all-out assault on our elections and voting rights.”
The Justice Department’s case rests on a list of roughly 20,000 people it called “likely noncitizens” who were sent vote-by-mail ballots. Carter’s order recounts that the County of Los Angeles found the October list spanned addresses statewide, that sample review showed many records cancelled or inactive, and that similar federal lists in other states have produced false positives, including a Nevada subset in which officials later confirmed all 185 people were citizens. California’s Constitution and election code already limit the franchise to citizens and criminalize fraudulent voting by ineligible voters.
The Justice Department hand-delivered the October list to Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan on Oct. 13, after the county had already mailed about 5.9 million vote-by-mail ballots and processed more than 331,000, Carter’s order states. The county and Secretary Weber rejected the 48-hour demand to segregate ballots; the United States sued the same day. Sister courts have questioned similar federal matching lists, including a Northern District of California finding that USCIS processes rely on “unknown artificial intelligence tools” and commercial databases with a “high likelihood of error,” the order notes.
Newsom wrote that he “just made it a FELONY” to seize ballots, though he signed that law on Sept. 19, more than a month before his post. Trump’s claim of “millions” of “bad votes” in California is his opinion; Carter denied the government’s request to sequester the 20,000 ballots at issue, and the court found the government’s methodology lacked credible error rates and validation. Newsom’s claim that federal monitors are being sent “to try to steal this election” is his own characterization; the Justice Department has said its California case targets ballots sent to people it identified as likely noncitizens.