Almost 600 unopened ballots were discovered in a northern California county months after voters approved a statewide Democratic redistricting measure, a tabulation error election officials called “unacceptable.”
The Humboldt County Office of Elections said in a statement reported earlier this week that the 596 sealed but uncounted ballots were left unopened in the bottom of a locked drop box for the November statewide special election.
The ballot measure centered on Proposition 50, which will allow the state to draw new congressional districts, that critics say will favor Democrats, a proposal pushed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The uncounted ballots would not have affected the outcome of the measure, which passed by a more than three-million-vote margin.
The election office said when workers checked the drop box, there was a miscommunication about whether it had been fully emptied.
“That outcome is unacceptable and runs counter to the core of what this office stands for,” Juan Pablo Cervantes, county clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, said in a statement. “While the mistake occurred after an election worker did not follow proper procedures, the responsibility for what happened ultimately sits with me.”
If the county’s historical voting patterns remain consistent, the uncounted ballots likely did not favor opponents to the Democrat backed measure. Humboldt County voters have been predominantly Democrat, with many reportedly also favoring the Green Party in recent years.
“We have taken corrective action and already updated our protocols. A new lock out, tag out procedure has been implemented for every ballot drop box to ensure each box is physically verified as empty and secured before election results are finalized,” Cervantes said in a statement reported by Fox News.
“I promise you that we are taking this seriously,” Cervantes added.
Humboldt County encompasses 4,052 square miles of rural California and has a population of some 136,000 residents. It sits below the Oregon border and features an epic coastline, a spread of old grown redwoods, and a massive stock of privately harvested timber further inland.
Humboldt is also notorious for both legal and illegal marijuana farming in its section of the so-called Emerald Triangle, a three-county region which reportedly produces more cannabis than any other region in the United States.
The discovery of the uncounted ballots comes as California “continues to be under a microscope for allegations of voter fraud,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
The outlet cited President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post minutes after the polls opened for the Proposition 50 vote that the election “was rigged.”
“The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump wrote.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said California’s voting process was being questioned by the president because it has “a universal mail-in voting system, which we know is ripe for fraud.” She also accused the state of counting ballots from undocumented immigrants, according to the Times.
As Breitbart News reported in March, Riverside County Sheriff and Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco seized some 650,000 ballots in his county to determine whether they were fraudulently counted in the November election.
Proposition 50 allowed the state to temporarily use legislature-drawn congressional maps for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections instead of those drawn by an independent redistricting commission, which was supposed to take partisan politics out of the process.
Analysts saw the proposition as Gov. Newsom’s response to a redistricting effort in Texas that was expected to give Republicans more seats in Congress.
However, despite the passage of the proposition and calls for new districts, leading California Democrats have no intention of redrawing the maps before the 2026 midterms, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.
California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks pointed out Democrats need to win the seats created under the state’s existing map they redrew last year.
“We have yet to fully win the seats in the map that was drawn in 2025,” Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks told the newspaper. “It seems a step too far to say we’re going to go back to the drawing board and redraw the map.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more
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