voting

It’s a common complaint that it takes so long for election officials to finish counting votes. But there are ways to get your ballot to count in the first round of results.

President Trump claims mail balloting is rife with fraud. But to win more elections, the state GOP is expanding its efforts to collect mail ballots to boost turnout.

Santa Monica, a bastion of progressive politics, is fighting an effort to change the way it elects city council members, with allegations that the city minimizes nonwhite representation.

From CalMatters state Capitol reporter Sameea Kamal: It was a case that some said threatened to erode California’s voting rights law. But after a ruling by the state’s Supreme Court on Thursday, some of its protections are reaffirmed, for now.   The case, filed by the Pico Neighborhood Association and others in 2016, alleged that Santa […]

It was a tale of two opposing events on parents’ role in California schools — though one was postponed because of Tropical Storm Hilary. In one corner was the California Family Council, a nonprofit, religious organization rallying at the state Capitol on Monday with pastors, attorneys and Sonja Shaw, Chino Valley Unified School District board […]

From CalMatters’ state Capitol reporter Sameea Kamal:  California has taken a number of steps over the past decade to make voting easier: Mailing ballots to all registered voters, plus allowing early voting and same-day registration.  Yet, the electorate hasn’t shifted to match the state’s growing diversity: Frequent voters are far from representative of the majority […]

The winter’s deadly and devastating floods are a distant memory for many Californians. Now, summer dangers, fueled by climate change, are top of mind. Across the U.S., wildfires have grown larger and more frequent since 2000. But California fires can quickly escalate to megafires or gigifires (fires that cover more than a million acres) in […]

The California Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments this week in Pico Neighborhood Association v. City of Santa Monica, a case that challenges whether at-large local elections are discriminatory. U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, California's former election chief, says the case could weaken civil rights protections if Santa Monica prevails.

From CalMatters state Capitol reporter Sameea Kamal:  It’s become a key part of the big business playbook: If an industry doesn’t like a California law, it uses the referendum process to try and overturn it.  Already on the November 2024 ballot: the oil industry qualified a ballot measure to kill a law that bans new […]

Advocates and lawmakers are calling for fully independent commissions to decide election districts for cities and counties across California. While about a dozen new commissions drew maps after the 2020 Census, in many other places, politicians or their appointees did.