California’s vote-by-mail machine hit a nasty speed bump in the Nov. 4, 2025, special election, when thousands of ballots showed up too late to be counted, according to election officials. The bulk of the trouble landed in inland and rural counties and has reignited long-simmering worries about how Postal Service routing collides with a state that leans heavily on voting by mail.
A review by the Los Angeles Times of Secretary of State returns found that an average of eight out of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected for arriving too late in the Nov. 4 special election, roughly four times the rate in the 2024 general election. In an election where nearly 89% of votes were cast by mail, that spike meant delayed postmarks and missed pickups translated directly into lost votes.
County-level spikes cost thousands of votes
Kern County recorded 3,303 mailed ballots that were not counted in 2025, about 1.95% of returned mail ballots, up from just 332 the year before. Riverside County tossed 5,831 ballots that arrived late. Merced and several other inland counties also saw sharp increases. All of these figures appear in the official vote-by-mail rejection reports from the California Secretary of State.
Postal changes blamed
County and state election officials have pointed a finger at operational changes at the U.S. Postal Service as a likely culprit, including fewer mail pickups and longer routing through regional hubs. Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber warned voters who live 50 or more miles from one of six regional processing centers that ballots deposited in mailboxes or dropped off on Election Day could end up with late postmarks and might not be counted, according to KCRA.
Experts warn of disenfranchisement
Voting-data experts say the new guidance to mail ballots a full week before Election Day is a sharp break with recent practice and could trip up voters who have grown used to dropping their ballot in the mail on Election Day itself. “We’ve had six, eight years of elections where people were feeling confident about mailing in their ballot,” one expert told the Los Angeles Times, calling the change “dramatic” and potentially disenfranchising.
Legal and political stakes
The surge in rejected mail ballots arrives as election rules face heavy national scrutiny. President Trump signed an executive order aimed at tightening mail-in voting rules, according to CBS News, and the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh whether states can count late-arriving mail ballots under certain conditions, as reported by AP. Those fights could decide how strict postmark and receipt rules will be in future elections.
How voters can protect their ballots
Officials are urging voters who want to avoid the discard pile to use secure drop boxes, return ballots in person to county elections offices, or mail them well before Election Day. The Secretary of State offers a searchable list of early voting sites and secure drop-off locations at caearlyvoting.sos.ca.gov, and local reporting notes that the Postal Service recommended domestic voters mail ballots at least one week before the receipt deadline to minimize postmark delays.
