President Trump is once again turning his aim on California, asserting that the state and its mail ballots are a center of vote fraud and that he has evidence.

He doesn’t. And state officials are livid about the president’s new round of charges, which have been widely discredited since he first made them days after his inauguration in 2017.

“Trump should focus on suppressing the virus, not the vote,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement Friday. “No-excuse vote-by-mail ballots are a vital way to protect both voting rights and public health during this pandemic.”

The latest brouhaha started Wednesday, when Trump was asked at a news conference to back up his recent statements that mail balloting, which is heavily used in California and many other states, is an invitation to voter fraud.

“I think there’s a lot of evidence, but we’ll provide you with some, OK?” the president answered. “And there’s evidence that’s being compiled just like it’s being compiled in the state of California.”

Trump then pointed to a settlement agreement reached last year in a suit by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, against Padilla and Los Angeles County over voter registration lists bloated with inactive voters.

“Judicial Watch settled where they agreed that a million people should not have voted, where they were 115 years old and lots of things, and people were voting in their place,” the president said.

But the settlement agreement said nothing about vote fraud or wrongdoing. Instead, it requires Los Angeles County and the state to take measures to purge the voter rolls of people who may have died, moved, changed their name or otherwise invalidated that registration.

Even the groups that sued didn’t say any fraud had taken place. An outdated registration roll “opens the door for voter impersonation and fraud,” Ellen Swensen of the Election Integrity Project California, which joined with Judicial Watch in the suit, said after the settlement.

Plenty of inactive voters have perfectly valid registrations but haven’t bothered to cast ballots in recent elections, said Wendy Weiser of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, which studies voting issues.

“Having out-of-date records is not an example of voter fraud, but of lists that haven’t been updated,” she said. “Inactive voters aren’t necessarily ineligible voters.”

An inactive voter, according to the state, is someone who has not voted in two consecutive federal general elections or in any election between them, and has not responded to address confirmation postcards from their county.

Los Angeles County officials admitted that they had been slow to purge their voter lists in an attempt to make sure all eligible voters were allowed to cast ballots.

“The settlement does not validate the inaccurate and misrepresented claims made by Judicial Watch and their clients that the county has more voters than eligible citizens,” said Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County registrar.

This isn’t the first time Trump has made this charge. In a June 23, 2019, appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the president said the Judicial Watch settlement proved “there was much illegal voting” in California.

Padilla was quick to dismiss that.

“No matter how much he repeats them, Trump’s lies about voter fraud are patently untrue,” Padilla said at the time. “Specifically, the settlement with Judicial Watch, Los Angeles County and the secretary of state contains absolutely no admission to or evidence of ‘illegal votes.’”

In the days after his inauguration, Trump also complained that more than 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election in California, another claim for which he had no evidence.

Trump’s charges that “mail ballots are corrupt” has a strong political element. In a Fox News interview March 30, the president said that “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again” if Democratic efforts to allow unrestricted absentee voting and boost mail ballots succeeded.

While vote fraud does happen, the amount that occurs with mail ballots is “infinitesimally small,” said Weiser, whose article on the Brennan Center’s website looks into those allegations.

Trump’s concern about vote-by-mail problems didn’t stop him from casting his ballot by mail in last month’s Florida primary. He said he did it “because I’m allowed to.”

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth