Tipsheet

Gavin Newsom Has a Solution to California's Election Process. And It's Exactly What You'd Expect.

Dmitri Bolt
Dmitri Bolt  |  June 09, 2026 11:00 AM

Gavin Newsom has continued to defend California's election process as questions have mounted over its legitimacy and integrity, concerns the governor was aware of nearly a month before the state's primary election. Yet his proposed solution, increasing funding to help speed up the vote-counting process, failed to materialize before Election Day. 

Even worse, his approach reflects a familiar Democratic tendency: making few structural changes to a flawed process and instead relying on additional spending in the hope that the problem will be resolved.

"We've had detailed conversations with the legislature, and it was mutually agreed that we would work together over the course of the next month as we balance the budget to land specifically what those investments may look like, and we both agreed on that,"  Newsom told the press in May. "So on the basis of that question, no new resources in today's presentation, but absolute full commitment and cooperation with the legislature to land that in the final budget deal."

"What you're referring to is a letter I put out to all the county registrars to say get your act together, get these ballots counted. I'm very concerned that if we don't do that, particularly on the basis of the new rules and regulations that we've now implemented, where we're requiring them to do so, I think it will expose us to the accusations that will be exploited by the Trump administration."

And yet that funding has not yet materialized. Nor is it clear that additional funding is the right solution, since California already spends more on elections than any other state, both in total dollars and per capita, yet still struggles to count its votes in a timely manner, let alone a moderately timely one.

Even more striking, when Steve Hilton, a Republican candidate for governor, made a similar recommendation, he faced sharp criticism from the governor.

"Last week I proposed an Election Count Accelerator Fund to give counties more resources to process ballots," Hilton wrote on X. "Newsom said it showed I 'don't understand' how elections work and it's 'nothing to do with' the governor. Now he says he'll do what I said. What a joke he is."

This comes as Newsom has doubled down on the state’s election process despite accusations of fraud and concerns over how long it takes to count ballots. The governor and other state officials have defended those delays as a normal consequence of a system that prioritizes voting from home and ballot access over processing speed.