Eric Eggers of the Government Accountability Institute explained why California’s elections are so bad and take so long to count the ballots: “the powers that be don’t want to change the way we conduct elections.”
Eggers, author of the 2018 book FRAUD: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, appeared on Perry Atkinson’s Focus Today program to dissect California’s election system that will be tallying ballots for four weeks after the polls closed. Eggers, whose book extensively covered the issues with mail-in ballots, ballot drop boxes, and ballot “harvesting,” also pointed out that the state has notoriously bloated voter rolls that mean ballots are mailed by the state to people who haven’t lived at the address on file for years.
“The Riverside County sheriff (who was a candidate in the 2026 gubernatorial primary) tried to seize a bunch of ballots after the redistricting ballot initiative [in 2025] because they were hearing reports about discrepancies of more than 40,000 votes,” he said. “They were actually stopped by government authorities in California including the court system.”
Even so, Eggers told Atkinson that the state’s incumbent governor finally recognized that California’s glacial counting of ballots is a problem. “even Gavin Newsom knows it’s become a national embarrassment,” he said.
The state has actively resisted sharing its voter rolls with the federal government, which under the Trump administration has begun a program to identify fraudulent and duplicate voter registrations. “The Department of Justice has said, listen, California, we would love to look at your voter rolls. We would love to inspect them to ensure there’s accuracy. And we want to know exactly what steps you’re taking to remove people from the rolls who shouldn’t be there,” he explained. “And instead of California saying, okay, of course, we’re all invested in having fair and free elections, they said, ‘No, we would prefer you not to make sure that our voter rolls are accurate.’ It’s insane.”
Eggers addresses ballot harvesting as well. That practice – using third-party organizations to collect completed ballots from voters and turn them in — is explicitly not allowed by most states but was made legal in California several years ago.
This all gets to a larger problem, he said. The ruling Democratic Party in the state has set these rules because it has the manpower through unions and NGO groups to do that harvesting. “Taking advantage of it doesn’t mean it’s illegal,” he said. “But I think most people would say it’s wrong, and the fact that it isn’t illegal makes it even more wrong.”
He noted that the problem with lax election security rules is that it is nearly impossible to find violations of the law later before a result is certified. “
“Let’s say you found that there were a bunch of people on the voter rolls who cast ballots but that we could prove shouldn’t have been able to do so. What you then have to do is say that the number of people that cast those ballots has to be greater than the margin of the election — and plus some more, because you can’t prove who someone voted for,”{ he said. “So, it’s always a challenging situation.”
