DOJ Launches Audit of CA Voter Rolls Amid Sluggish Vote Count

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(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

In Los Angeles this week, on the floor of a vast 144,000-square-foot ballot processing center, the work stations sat largely empty. Outside, the days passed. Inside, the ballots waited. This is California in June 2026, where the count drags and the questions sharpen. On Friday morning, Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor said out loud what many Californians have been saying quietly for years. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced that his office, working with the FBI, has multiple election fraud investigations underway. And he announced something else: a comprehensive audit of the state’s voter rolls, in coordination with the

Procedure or Plot? Trump Targets Cali’s 30-Day Vote Count

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(Photo Illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

There is a ritual to California’s elections now, and the ritual is patience. The polls close, the night ends, and the counting goes on — for days, sometimes weeks, in a state so large it counts like a small nation. To those who live there, it is procedure. To the President of the United States, watching from across the country Thursday, it looked like theft. “The Dumocrats are at it again,” Donald Trump wrote on TRUTH Social, in the capital letters that have become their own form of punctuation. He accused Democrats of trying to “STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA

Cali’s Improbable Contest: Establishment vs. Upheaval

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There is a particular kind of political theater that only California can stage, and on Tuesday, it raised the curtain again. Out of a field of sixty-one — sixty-one! — the voters of the nation’s largest state narrowed their choices to two men who could not be more different in pedigree or promise. Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra are now headed toward a November contest to replace the term-limited Gavin Newsom, and the early-morning returns suggested neither man intends to be modest about it. For Hilton, the moment carries the weight of history, or at least the hope

Where Trump’s Diplomacy and Netanyahu’s War Diverge

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

There are calls that change a war, and then there is the one President Trump placed to Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday — blunt, profane, and, by every account that has leaked since, decisive. Israel had ordered strikes on Hezbollah positions in southern Beirut, Iran had walked away from negotiations with Washington in protest, and Trump saw months of his own diplomacy slipping toward collapse. So he picked up the phone and, according to Axios, opened with a question no aide would put on letterhead: “What the f–k are you doing?” It did not soften from there. A U.S. official summarized

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