The Humboldt County Elections Office made a shocking discovery Monday — a stack of 596 sealed ballots from the most recent election had been left at the bottom of a locked voting drop box.
The stockpile of uncounted ballots will not affect the outcome of the November 2025 statewide special election for Proposition 50, the county elections office said in a news release Wednesday. However, officials said they are working hard to get all the votes legally counted.
The office learned that ballots were not counted due to staff error. The office said that when employees checked the drop box, it was incorrectly informed whether it was completely emptied or not.
“This result is unacceptable and contrary to the core principles of this office,” County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Juan Pablo Cervantes said in a statement. “Although this mistake was caused by a poll worker not following proper procedures, responsibility for what happened ultimately rests with me.”
Following the discovery of the ballots, elections staff confirmed that the sealed ballots had not been tampered with and worked with the California Secretary of State to determine next steps. Under California law, ballots must have been counted before the election was certified on December 5 and destroyed six months later.
The election office said it has changed its protocols to ensure such a mistake does not happen again, implementing a new “lock out, tag out procedure” to ensure each drop box is empty and secure before election results are returned.
“I promise you we are taking this seriously,” Cervantes said. “We will strengthen our processes and continue to move toward the standard our community expects and deserves.”
The discovery comes as California continues to be under the microscope for voter fraud allegations.
Within minutes of voting opening for California’s special election in November, President Trump claimed on Truth Social that the Proposition 50 vote – which redrawn several congressional districts in favor of Democratic candidates – was rigged.
“The unconstitutional redistricting vote in California is a massive scam in which the entire process, especially the voting, was rigged,” Trump wrote.
When asked later that day to clarify Trump’s claims about how the election was allegedly rigged, White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt said that California “has a universal mail-in voting system that we know is ripe for fraud.” He also accused the state of counting ballots from undocumented immigrants.
Election officials and Democratic leaders, including Governor Gavin Newsom, called those claims baseless. “The bottom line is that California’s elections have been validated by the courts,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a statement in November.
More recently, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco has led an investigation into using his position as Riverside County Sheriff to seize approximately 650,000 ballots in the county to determine whether they were fraudulently counted. Critics condemned the move as another attempt by Republican electorate deniers to disenfranchise voters.
Humboldt County, which covers 4,052 square miles of rural California down to the Oregon border, has largely been spared election-related turmoil in recent years. However, in 2008, Humboldt election officials discovered that they had the software they used to tally votes 197 ballot papers could not be counted From an area.
More recently, nearby Shasta County has become Electoral denialism and the center of MAGA politicsIts board of supervisors voted to end the use of Dominion Voting Systems machines in favor of pursuing a hand-counting system in 2023.
Times staff writers Hailey Branson-Potts, Jenny Jarvie and Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
