Trump, California and the multi-front war over the next election

Los Angeles Times ^ | Feb. 8, 2026 3 AM PT | Kevin Rector, Hailey Branson-Potts and Ana Ceballos

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• California election officials are preparing for scenarios where Trump administration officials demand ballots or place agents at voting sites.
• State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta vows to seek restraining orders within hours if the administration interferes.

In recent weeks, Marin County Registrar Natalie Adona has been largely focused on the many mundane tasks of local elections administrators in the months before a midterm: finalizing voting locations, ordering supplies, facilitating candidate filings.

But in the wake of unprecedented efforts by the Trump administration to intervene in state-run elections, Adona said she has also been preparing her staff for far less ordinary scenarios — such as federal officials showing up and demanding ballots, as they recently did in Georgia, or immigration agents staging around polling stations on election day, as some in President Trump’s orbit have suggested.

“Part of my job is making sure that the plans are developed and then tested and then socialized with the staff so if those situations were to ever come up, we would not be figuring it out right then and there. We would know what to do,” Adona said. “Doing those sort of exercises and that level of planning in a way is kind of grounding, and makes things feel less chaotic.”

Across California, local elections administrators say they have been running similar exercises to prepare for once unthinkable threats — not from local rabble-rousers, remote cyberattackers or foreign adversaries, but their own federal government.

State officials, too, are writing new contingency plans for unprecedented intrusions by Trump and other administration officials, who in recent days have repeated baseless 2020 election conspiracies, raided and taken ballots from a local election center in Fulton County, Ga., pushed both litigation and legislation that would radically alter local voting rules, and called for Republicans to seize control of elections...

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TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: democratcorruption; democratfraud; democratmedia; electionrigging; highspeedfail

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California don't need no racist election integrity.

[Obadiah]

No mention of Virginia in the headline or the article. I’m sure that’s just an honest oversight.

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[Mariner]

CA

10% of US House Seats

10% of Electoral College

The place where all manner of fraud has been perfected