California rejected nearly 150K mail-in ballots in state primary, postmark cited as possible issue

Mail-in ballots for nearly 150,000 California voters were rejected for the state's June primary, according to the secretary of state's office. 

The volume of rejected ballots is a spike over recent elections – 108,982 mail ballots were rejected in 2024 and 105,818 in 2025 – and the primary reason for the rejection numbers is the ballots missed the deadline. 

California is trying to make it easy for anyone to vote. Among the changes toward that goal is sending ballots to every registered voter and allowing the ballot to arrive at the election office seven days late and still be counted, provided the envelope is postmarked by Election Day. However, the multiple changes over the years that were intended to increase turnout have done little to achieve that goal, according to the Associated Press. 

The wire service report doesn't include a definitive reason why the hundreds-of-thousands of votes were rejected, citing only "voting experts" who suspect the main problem is postmarks on ballots that came after Election Day, making them ineligible to be counted. The culprit could be U.S. Postal Service changes that might affect the timing of when postmarks are applied, also according to the wire service story.

Calls to the California election office on Friday to attempt to learn exactly why the ballots were rejected were unsuccessful. 

The 150,000 rejected mailed ballots represent a rate of 1.73% of all mail-in ballots.