A conservative group opposed to mass voting by mail is using millions of unused ballots in California – one of eight states that conducts all-mail elections — to make a misleading claim.
A recent report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group that has been critical of mail voting, said that in California, there were "10 million mail ballots unaccounted for" in the November midterm election.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation is chaired by Cleta Mitchell, who, as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump’s campaign, was on the phone with Trump when he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to "find" enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state.
The report was cited in headlines and articles on several conservative media sites, including Breitbart, The Daily Signal and The Epoch Times.
The headlines also were shared in social media posts that were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Election officials and experts said the ballots are not considered to be "unaccounted for" and are not evidence of a problem, as the report’s language implies. They are simply ballots that voters didn’t cast.
California election officials sent out about 22 million ballots in November’s midterm election, and about 9.8 million votes were cast by mail. And 1.4 million more voters cast ballots in person.
The insinuation that the state can’t account for the remaining ballots misleads about how elections work. Only about 51% of registered voters cast ballots in California in November, which is not unusual in a midterm election. And experts say there’s no expectation that unused ballots would need to be accounted for or returned.
California began sending mail ballots to every active registered voter in the 2020 election during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. A law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2021 made that a permanent practice.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s report used data from a California election report about rejected ballots, which shows 22,184,707 ballots were mailed out and 9,781,328 were accepted. The state data said 120,432 more mail ballots were rejected for several reasons, including arriving past the deadline to be counted.
California’s "Statement of Vote" said that 1,391,422 Californians decided to vote in person, which remains an option in the state, even for voters who received a mail ballot. Voters do not need to bring their unused mail ballots to vote in person, but some election officials may ask these voters to fill out provisional ballots that will be counted after confirmation their mail ballots weren’t used.
The foundation said the remaining ballots, which it numbered at 10,891,525, are "unaccounted for."
The official certified tally showed about 10.6 million unreturned ballots.
Regardless of the exact number, election officials and experts disagreed with the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s conclusion that unreturned ballots are not accounted for. Those are ballots that simply were not cast, and it was expected that many wouldn’t be returned, they said.