SAN MATEO, Calif. (KGO) — Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who is currently leading in the race and is likely to advance to November’s primary, is calling for faster ballot counting as officials continue processing votes.

Hilton appeared in the Bay Area, holding a rally Friday morning outside the San Mateo County Elections Office in San Mateo. There, he criticized the state’s ballot-counting timeline, urging changes to speed up results.

Election officials say the system prioritizes accuracy over speed. California law allows ballots to be counted if they arrive up to a week after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by then. State officials argue the policy ensures more voters are able to participate, particularly those casting mail-in ballots at the last minute.

Hilton has proposed additional resources to accelerate the counting process, including an “Emergency Election Support Corps” to assist counties.

Slow CA vote count criticized by Trump, GOP governor hopeful Steve Hilton: ‘Another Democrat fiasco’

“It involves surging workers to these election centers so you don’t just have empty places, nothing happening,” Hilton said. “People working around the clock to make this happen. I’m proposing a regional surge team for every area where the counties don’t have the resources.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office pushed back in a statement, saying, “It’s concerning that a candidate for Governor doesn’t know the Governor has nothing to do with counting ballots.”

Local election officials also disputed Hilton’s characterization of the process. Jim Irizarry, San Mateo County’s assistant chief elections officer, said staffing is already in place and working continuously.

“Well, that’s not correct,” Irizarry said of Hilton’s claim that there are election centers with nothing happening. “Here in San Mateo County, we have two crews working full-time here to actually process all of the ballots that we have. In California, we’re governed under the ‘California Voters Choice Act,’ which provides a 30-day certification process to ensure that every vote that is cast is counted. So it’s very inclusionary. It’s safe and secure, and it takes time.”

Inside the elections office, ABC7 Eyewitness News saw workers processing ballots, including conducting what officials call a “1% dice roll” to determine which votes will be manually double-checked Monday, a step designed to ensure accuracy in the count. Officials say crews are working overtime, around the clock.

LIVE: See latest election results here

Final results are still days, and possibly weeks, away as ballot processing continues statewide.

County elections officials need to finalize their official results by 30 days after the election. The Secretary of State certifies results 38 days after the election.

Hilton is stopping short of claims by some GOP members that California is rigging votes by taking time to count and certify election results, despite continuing delays in final tallies.

There is no evidence to support such claims.

Around half of California waterways tested by regulators are contaminated with pesticides considered Pfas, “forever chemicals”, a new analysis of state and federal records shows, highlighting a risk in the substances’ wide use that is only beginning to come into focus.

The pesticides are linked to a range of health problems, including cancer, and the review is the first to systematically check for the dangerous substances in streams and rivers, which include drinking water sources.

More than half of sediment samples also showed some levels of the pesticides, which are increasingly applied to California and the nation’s food crops.

The review of California department of pesticide regulation and United States geological survey data was released this week, just days before a proposal to eventually ban Pfas pesticides failed to make it through the state assembly. However, pieces of the legislation, including a moratorium on approvals of the new pesticides, passed.

The findings are “alarming but not surprising”, said Varun Subramaniam, one of the report’s co-authors with the Environmental Working Group (EWG) non-profit.

“It’s concerning that we’re finding these levels of Pfas pesticide … but they were applied at really high rates on produce, so it makes sense that they’re in the streams and sediment,” he said.

Pfas are a class of at least 16,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they can persist for thousands of years in the environment, and are designed to be indestructible.

The chemicals are added as an active ingredient to food crop pesticides to kill weeds or insects, or used as an inert ingredient. At least 60% of active ingredients in pesticides fit the most widely accepted definition of Pfas, a 2023 analysis of EPA data found.

California farms applied an average of 2.5m lb of Pfas per year on cropland from 2018 to 2023, a review of state records last year revealed. Recent regulatory testing found the pesticide residues on 37% of all produce. But about 90% of peaches, plums and nectarines contained Pfas, while 80% of strawberries and grapes showed them.

Public health advocates have said the pesticides almost certainly pollute nearby water sources, and the new analysis confirmed their theory. Regulators only tested streams from 10 counties, and found the highest concentrations in agricultural areas, including Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties.

Previous research showed the highest applications of Pfa pesticides in Fresno and Kern counties, but water pollution data was not collected in those regions. The results are “almost certainly an undercount” because of the limited scope, Subramaniam said.

At least 10 Pfas in pesticides were identified across the state. The pesticide bifenthrin, which is among the most toxic and linked to cancer, was found in all San Luis Obispo waterways, and more than 80% of samples in Stanislaus county, which holds Modesto and portions of the Central valley.

The health threat is difficult to determine because pesticide laws do not require companies to assess many of the health threats common to Pfas, like immunotoxicity, reproductive harm, or hormone disruption, in part because the regulators do not have proper resources, Subramaniam said. Regulators also do not consider the cumulative effect of drinking water contaminated with the Pfas, then eating produce containing its residues.

“The fact that the chemicals are permitted is largely because we’re not considering all the ways that they can harm us,” Subramaniam added.

Amid pressure from the powerful agricultural lobby, the proposal to fully ban Pfas pesticides by 2035 failed, but the moratorium on new pesticides survived. The California Farm Bureau, in its opposition to the bill, wrote that the legislation is an “overly broad and unworkable approach that departs from science-based regulation”. It argued that California farmers would be put at an economic disadvantage with little health benefit to the public.

The legislation still includes a new requirement that pesticides come with warnings to farmers that alert them that they are using Pfas with health and environmental risks. Susan Little, California legislative director for EWG, said most farmers are unaware that they are spreading Pfas on food crops.

The legislation also gives local leaders more power to limit the pesticides’ use, and defines the pesticides as Pfas, which is in line with most scientific definitions. California’s pesticide office currently uses a narrow definition of Pfas that is favored by industry in part because it excludes smaller compounds like those used in pesticides.

Advocates say the legislation is especially needed with the Trump administration rushing to approve more Pfas pesticides for use. California’s pesticide office also recently reapproved the Pfas insecticide sulfoxaflor despite that its approval has repeatedly been struck down by state and federal courts over its high toxicity to honeybees and other pollinators.

Little said advocates are “disappointed” the ban did not make it into the final bill, but added the bill, if approved by the state senate, “will continue to address and reduce the use of Pfas pesticides in California”.

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.

The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained. 

EFF submitted an opposition letter to the California Senate Privacy Committee explaining why we continue to believe A.B. 412 is simply unworkable. To the extent developers do follow this law, it will have the effect of locking in the power of the largest companies in AI. 

A Burden That Can’t Be Met

A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training. 

That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but. 

There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public. 

And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status. 

The bill effectively asks developers to continuously cross-reference massive batches of online data against a copyright system that simply wasn’t designed to do so. If California passes A.B. 412, its impact will go far beyond the large AI companies we read about in the headlines. 

Not Just Big Tech

Supporters often frame this bill as a way to help creative workers have some leverage against Big Tech, but the bill reaches much further than the big AI companies. 

Its definition of “developer” extends to anyone who makes a generative AI model available to Californians. That includes indie developers tinkering with an existing model, open-source initiatives, nonprofits, and other non-commercial efforts. Recent amendments added exemptions for universities and government entities, which is important, but that still leaves out a vast swathe of non-commercial tech work that’s done by people without full-time jobs in government or academia. 

Large companies will hire compliance teams and lawyers to navigate these requirements. Smaller organizations and independent developers usually can’t. The result will be fewer opportunities for startups and new entrants. Faced with this massive compliance burden, some won’t even try. 

Courts Are Already Deciding These Questions

The bill is premised on the idea that copyright owners currently don’t have good remedies if they’re mistreated by AI companies. That simply isn’t true. And the growing wave of federal court filings in this space prove it. Content companies that want to sue tech companies, large or small, have no problem doing so. Those courts are still working through important questions about fair use and transformative use. Some courts have already concluded that many AI training activities qualify as fair use. Others continue to evaluate the issue.

California lawmakers should not rush to impose new state regulation while those questions remain unresolved. This is why copyright is governed at the federal level: both creators and fair users benefit from a single set of nationwide rules. 

At this point, the bill remains a solution in search of a problem. Rights holders already have powerful tools to protect their interests under existing federal law. What this bill adds isn’t clarity or transparency, but a costly and essentially impossible compliance burden that will discourage small developers and researchers. 

California has been able to support both artistic creativity and tech innovation for decades now.  But A.B. 412 does not strike the right balance. 

If you are a California resident and interested in speaking out about this bill, you can find and contact your representatives through this website.