ALEXANDRIA, VA — California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s claim that mail-in voting is “safe” and “secure” glosses over the state’s documented ballot rejections and voter-roll errors identified by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and ignores the state’s lack of basic safeguard such as voter ID or verification of citizenship of registered voters.
PILF’s 2022 California mail-ballot report found that election officials rejected 226,250 mail ballots across the primary and general elections. In the general election alone, 57,568 were rejected for lateness, 47,963 for signature mismatches, and 11,897 for missing signatures.
The report estimated that more than 10 million mailed ballots remained outstanding in November 2022 after accounting for polling-place votes and rejections. Neither Bonta nor any other election officials have any idea of what happened to those ballots, whether they were misdelivered, delivered too late to voters, or whether the recipients just discarded their ballots.
In its September 2025 findings sent to California’s secretary of state, PILF flagged 94,516 apparently deceased registrants within a sample of roughly 2 million active registrants with no recorded votes in the preceding decade. It also identified 3,104 instances of same-address duplicate registrations.
“Attorney General Bonta continues to ignore California’s mail-in ballot failures,” said J. Christian Adams, PILF President and General Counsel. “Hundreds of thousands of rejected ballots and errors on the voter rolls demand accountability. Californians deserve a system that protects their ballots from the moment they are issued until they are counted.”
“Automatic mail-in ballots depend on accurate voter rolls,” said Logan Churchwell, PILF Research Director. “PILF’s findings flagged apparently deceased registrants and duplicate active records. California should investigate and resolve those problems before stating that California’s mail-in voting is safe and secure.”
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity. The Foundation exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections. Drawing on numerous experts in the field, PILF seeks to protect the right to vote and preserve the Constitutional framework of American elections.
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