SAN FRANCISCO — A growing chorus of Republicans are casting doubts about the integrity of the voting system in California, where the party lost at least six House seats in the midterm election — including a handful where the GOP at first appeared to have emerged victorious on election night.

A sentiment that began as a murmur among hard-line conservatives jumped to the Republican mainstream Thursday when House Speaker Paul Ryan suggested that the state’s “bizarre” voting system “just defies logic to me,” and may have contributed to the GOP’s historic thumping in California.


"We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,’’ Ryan said Thursday . “This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”

In part due to mail-in and provisional ballots that delivered the margin of victory to Democratic challengers in a handful of seats, California’s Republican delegation appears to have been slashed in half — in the new Congress, Republicans are likely to hold just seven of the state’s 53 House seats, the party’s lowest number since the 1940’s.

Ryan’s statements drew a sharp rebuke from California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who said Thursday that “it is bizarre that Paul Ryan cannot grasp basic voting rights protections.”

Padilla, a Democrat who oversees the elections process in a state with 19 million registered voters, told POLITICO that “our elections in California are structured so that every eligible citizen can easily register, and every registered voter can easily cast their ballot.”

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That concept, he said, “[might be] strange for Speaker Ryan, who comes from Wisconsin,’’ but Padilla added, “I’m happy to walk him through the bottom line.”


Ryan’s comments about a state’s elections process put him in league with some prominent California Republicans who have recently expressed befuddlement — and anger — about the series of GOP incumbents whose defeats came after officials completed the tallies of millions of absentee and provisional ballots.

In an op-ed earlier this week, former state GOP Chair Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee, stopped short of claiming outright fraud in the aftermath, but charged that California’s moves to expand vote by mail, “motor-voter” registrations, early voting and allowing voting for ex-felons have “systematically undermined” voter protection laws.

Steel cited Republican Young Kim’s loss to Democrat Gil Cisneros in a heated Orange County race to replace Republican Rep. Ed Royce, saying that Kim’s defeat was rooted in Democratic moves to “erode voter integrity” in California.


“How does a 14-point Republican lead disappear? Merciless and unsparing, California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule,’’ Steel wrote in the column published Wednesday.

Other Republicans, including President Donald Trump and conservative House candidates like former state Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, have gone even further, suggesting — without providing evidence — widespread voter fraud that possibly involved “millions” of ballots cast illegally by undocumented immigrants.

The losing GOP incumbents include Reps. Mimi Walters, Steve Knight, Jeff Denham and Dana Rohrabacher. Democrats also flipped open seats held by retiring GOP Reps. Darrell Issa and Ed Royce.

On Wednesday, battered California Republicans appeared to have suffered another defeat — GOP Rep. David Valadao, who was originally declared the winner by The Associated Press. His Democratic opponent, TJ Cox, gradually pulled ahead in post-Election Day tallies after trailing by nearly 4,400 votes on election night, and formally declared victory.

An angry Padilla said complaints by Republicans about California’s voter outcome is “nothing but an excuse” for the party’s own failures at the ballot box.

“We’ve been hearing Trump for years now make claims of massive voter fraud and millions of illegal votes and it is simply not true. And just as Trump’s ego could not handle losing the national popular vote and losing so badly in California,’’ now it appears Ryan is trying to “drum up an excuse” for the losses, he said.

“It’s their own fault that they fear a large and diverse electorate,’’ he told POLITICO.

California Democrats charge GOP leaders are now desperately trying to undermine confidence in the election without any substantive evidence to back their claims.


“Good luck to them using that line of attack … they’re basically being extinguished in California, and they don’t get it,’’ says veteran Democratic consultant Garry South. “So to cast doubt on the results here, instead of doing some soul-searching about why California is basically shutting out Republicans in every office ... the only place they have to look is in the mirror.”

Darry Sragow, the publisher of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan election resource, agrees that “for them to suggest the system here is rigged is beyond outrageous.’’

Sragow, who teaches election law at the University of Southern California, says the complaints are especially ludicrous in light of recent elections in Florida and Georgia, where he said Republicans have sought “to deny the right to vote to people of color, to college students and the poor people.''

Voting experts like Sragow say Republican critics are refusing to accept the realities of a solidly-blue state that has made every effort to make voting easier and more accessible: including early voting, vote by mail — now the preferred means for nearly two-thirds of state voters — and allowing voters to register and vote provisionally up until the day of the election. The changes were manifested in 2018 as millions of younger voters cast ballots for the first time — the overwhelming number of them Democratic, South noted.

But Steel, in his op-ed, charged that Democrats have put their thumb on the electoral scale with efforts that include so-called ballot harvesting — now legal after the passage of Assembly Bill 1921, which he said "now allows anyone,'' including campaign operatives, to collect and return an absentee ballot.

Strategist Rob Stutzman, a Republican moderate, says that while charges of widespread fraud are completely “absurd,’’ there may be some real issues that merit a closer look at “ballot harvesting” practices.

Stutzman said some Democratic groups apparently became very efficient in get out the vote efforts that included collecting mail ballots en masse, and making sure they got to the local registrar.

And while concerns about those groups are not about fraud, he said, there may be legitimate questions raised “about people honestly and genuinely voting their own ballot,’’ and about whether the new efforts may open the door for outside influences — whether money or “a pack of cigarettes” — to influence someone's vote. He said that “it would be nice to have some explanation on whether these operations were bounty-oriented because that creates a huge incentive for trouble.”


Padilla told POLITICO this latest criticism from Republicans appears “an attempt to smear the pro-voter policies that we have” in California, including newer efforts that he said were designed to “empower voters to decide for themselves who they feel most comfortable with” in returning their ballot — especially if they are older or handicapped and need assistance in doing so.

“What they call strange and bizarre,'' he said, "we call democracy.’’