California mail ballot rejection reasons in the June primary were led by lateness, as the state rejected 148,241 mail ballots. That total represented 1.73% of all mail ballots and put a sharp rise in rejected ballots back in focus for voters whose envelopes arrived after the counting window.
Of the ballots rejected, 93,479 were set aside for lateness. Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said in an email that “Ballots rejected due to lateness are caused primarily to being postmarked too late to count, not because they arrived too late to count.”
California Voter Foundation
The scale of the June rejection total was higher than in recent primaries. California rejected 108,982 mail ballots in the 2024 primary, a 1.56% rate, and 105,818 in the 2022 primary. Mindy Romero of the Center for Inclusive Democracy said the growing number of ballots set aside for lateness “does really demand the question why this is happening.”
California allows a mail-in ballot to arrive at an election office seven days late if the envelope is postmarked by Election Day. Even with that rule, the June tally showed a larger share of ballots being removed from the count because the postmark timing did not fit the standard used to accept late arrivals.
Postal Service
Voting experts suspect the ballots that came after Election Day may have postmarks that make them ineligible to be counted, which leaves the timing of mailing and postmark handling at the center of the dispute. In January, a group of mostly Democratic U.S. senators sent a letter to the U.S. Postal Service about mail-processing changes, and updated agency policy says postmarks might not indicate the first day the Postal Service received the mail.
On Thursday, Tammy Baldwin and Tony Evers called on the U.S. Postal Service. Their action keeps the issue squarely on the timing of postal handling, not on the counting rules themselves.
June primary
The June primary produced the clearest sign yet that lateness drove the rejection problem. The unanswered practical question is whether the late ballots were mostly mailed late by voters or delayed by postmark processing at the Postal Service, and that distinction will determine where the pressure for a fix falls next.
