Politics
'Why do we need to rush?' California's Lake County may have the nation's slowest elections department
LAKEPORT, Calif. — Maria Valadez would like everyone to chill out.
Every election, the prickly Lake County registrar follows California’s litany of voting laws and certifies thousands of ballots by the time she is required to. And every year, people still complain.
“The state gave us a deadline, we meet the deadline,” an exasperated Valadez said from her small office in Lakeport as a handful of staffers sat at computers verifying signatures more than two weeks after election day, when they had tallied fewer than half of the votes. “I just don’t understand, why do we need to rush?”
In a state known for its slow processing of election results, Lake County, with only about 38,000 voters, is often the slowest of them all.
Ballots ready for processing at the Lake County registrar’s office in Lakeport.
For years, the rural Northern California county — known for local disputes over marijuana cultivation and several brutal wildfires — has been among the state’s last to announce votes after elections, often frustrating candidates and befuddling political pundits.
The reason appears to be a combination of factors, including an under-resourced elections budget in one of California’s smaller, lower-income counties and a desire to keep a meticulous, steady process that was instilled by trusted staff decades ago, even as technology advances.
“Elections are a lot of security, transparency and accountability. That’s what we do here. And it has been like this for all of the years I’ve worked here,” said Valadez, who was hired in 1995 and trained by the prior registrar, who was hired in 1977. “We have a lot of checks and balances. We do them as we go.”
She repeated: “We have a deadline, we meet the deadline.”
State law requires counties to finalize their official results 30 days after the election, this year by Dec. 5. Though Valadez is adamant that she’ll make it, the pace of progress is startling compared to most of the country. Shortly before midnight on election night, Lake County reported just 5,784 ballots. A few thousand more have been counted since. Yet by Thursday — 16 days after the election — Lake County still had more than 10,000 ballots left to count, according to the secretary of state.
Workers process ballots at the Lake County registrar’s office, which is slower than many others in submitting final election results.
“I’m not unsympathetic to the challenges that come with unfunded top-down mandates from Sacramento, but there is a pattern of sheer awfulness with Lake County in particular going back at least a decade and they’ve earned all the scorn coming their way,” Rob Pyers, who operates the election guide California Target Book, said on social media last week.
He said Lake County is “in the running for slowest election department worldwide.”
This year, that may not matter much. Unlike some other counties in California, where daily ballot counts are still changing results in tight races for the House of Representatives that will determine the size of Republicans’ majority in Washington, Lake County did not have many hot contests on the ballot.
Still, the slow count means residents are waiting to find out who will serve on local schools boards, the Clear Lake City Council and the county board of supervisors.
Lake County’s lag has delayed statewide outcomes before.
In the 2014 primary election, the race for state controller was razor thin. California voters had to wait a month to know who would compete in the general election as Lake County officials took their time with the final ballots even as they were barraged with phone calls from politicos feverishly refreshing their browsers for updates.
Lakeport is the county seat of Lake County, which is often the slowest of all California counties to report election results.
It was Lake County that declared Betty Yee had edged out fellow Democrat John Perez by fewer than 500 votes and would advance. The county met its deadline. Democracy lived on.
Now, it’s a different world than when Valadez first started working in elections 30 years ago, and her department’s speed — or lack thereof — has spurred conspiracy theories like those inflamed by Donald Trump when he lost the election in 2020.
As Valadez and her staff calmly processed ballots Wednesday, an angry man from North Dakota called to inquire about what’s taking so long.
Conservatives have singled out Lake County on social media as proof that deep blue California is aiming to rig elections. The man who lives 1,600 miles east and can’t vote in Lake County suggested something nefarious was going on.
Valadez invited him to visit her office off the shore of Clear Lake, to her tightknit community where the security guard at the courthouse next door calls entrants “kiddo.” She has nothing to hide, she said.
“We take our job very seriously,” Valadez said of her small staff. “The integrity of my work is very important to me.”
Lake County Registrar Maria Valadez at work in her office in Lakeport.
California is among the slowest states to call elections not only because of its huge population, but also because of voting laws designed to increase voter participation, including sending all registered voters a ballot by mail, which can prolong when some races are called.
“California deserves all the scorn it gets for holding up House election results,” screamed a headline last week in the New York Post. The article went on:
“Hey, bud, what’s the rush? seems to be Golden State officials’ work ethic.”
Derek Tisler, who focuses on elections as counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, confirmed that Lake County is among the slowest to process ballots in the U.S. this year. But that’s OK, he said.
“We get impatient, but I think everyone would agree that at the end of the day, we want things to be accurate,” Tisler said. “That is what election officials are going to prioritize. It makes sense they’re doing things in a way that they feel confident in.”
As a wall of rain beat down this week on most of Lake County, a place that struggles with meth and opioid abuse, where 73% of public school students qualify for free and reduced-price meals, Valadez said she’s doing her best “within staffing and resource limitations.”
Jim Emenegger processes ballots at the Lake County Registrar of Voters office.
The Lake County registrar’s office has five full time-employees, and one is currently on leave. A few retirees have been added as temporary help. The county — population: 67,000 — does not have a machine to verify signatures, instead verifying them manually.
Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said places like Lake County don’t get the same resources as bigger tourism destinations with urban centers and higher property taxes. The state does not help counties pay for elections staff or voting equipment even as it issues more mandates, she said, making local officials’ jobs harder and uneven, depending on where they live.
“I get really frustrated when I hear lawmakers complaining about how long it takes to count, because they could actually do something about it,” Alexander said. “If elections were not a chronically underfunded government service, we could have faster results.”
Valadez also pointed to voting preferences as a potential reason for the timing of the county’s results. Unlike a growing number of counties, Lake County does not offer voting centers, a hybrid model that allows voters to drop off ballots several days before the election.
Voters here prefer to vote in person at their neighborhood polling precincts and some are still getting used to receiving a ballot in the mail, Valadez said.
But even if Lake County got a boost in funding, and more voters sent their ballots in by mail early, it’s unclear if elections officials would change much of their decades-old strategy.
Diane Fridley and Jim Emenegger process ballots at the Lake County registrar’s office.
Wearing a bright red pixie cut and a Carhartt flanel, Diane Fridley, 71, worked to verify votes this week at a computer in the registrar’s office in Lakeport, scrolling her mouse across the screen to identify any issues with ballots.
For more than 40 years, Fridley was the Lake County registrar. When she retired in 2019, she passed the torch to Valadez. But in between babysitting her grandchildren, Fridley comes in to help around election season.
A Lake County native, Fridley remembers when voters had to bring their birth certificates to their polling stations. She has lived through the days of hanging chads. As someone who likes to have the same breakfast every morning — a slice of apple pie — and is hypervigilant about counting ballots, all the changes have been hard, but exciting.
“Yeah, it takes us a little longer, but we dot our I’s and we cross our Ts,” she said. “We’re positive whatever totals we have are correct. I’m not saying other counties don’t do that, but we try to be perfect.”
Fridley and Valadez exchanged a knowing look.
“There’s a deadline for a reason,” Fridley said, echoing Valadez. “We always meet the deadline.”
U.S. military forces stopped and boarded a second sanctioned tanker carrying oil from Iran in the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon said on Thursday, ramping up pressure on Tehran as the Trump administration seeks to resume negotiations to end the war.
A naval boarding team roped down from hovering helicopters and fanned out on the vessel, the M/T Majestic X, according to a Pentagon statement that included a 17-second video of the operation.
The military said the boarding was part of a “global maritime enforcement to disrupt illicit networks and interdict vessels providing material support to Iran, wherever they operate.”
Earlier this week, Navy SEALS boarded another ship in the Indian Ocean, the M/T Tifani, after the Pentagon said it was carrying oil from Iran.
Navy destroyers are also shadowing several other Iranian vessels, including the Dorena and Sevin, which had left from the Iranian port of Chabahar before the U.S.-imposed blockade began on April 13, a U.S. military official said. The Navy is directing those ships to return to an Iranian port, the official said.
With the M/T Tifani and M/T Majestic X now at least temporarily in the custody of the military, a U.S. military official said it was up to the White House to decide what to do with the sanctioned vessels and their cargo. The administration previously seized several tankers carrying illicit oil from Venezuela after a U.S. commando raid there in January that seized Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president.
“International waters cannot be used as a shield by sanctioned actors,” the Pentagon said in its statement on Thursday, adding that the department would “continue to deny illicit actors and their vessels freedom of maneuver in the maritime domain.”
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted last week that the U.S. military would likely commence boarding operations like the ones this week. He said that U.S. military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”
The U.S. Navy has turned back at least 31 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since an American blockade outside the contested Strait of Hormuz began about a week ago, U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday.
Last Sunday, a Navy destroyer disabled and seized the Touska, an Iranian cargo ship, after it tried to evade the blockade. It was the first time a vessel was reported to have tried to evade the U.S.-imposed blockade on any ship entering or exiting Iranian ports since it took effect last week.
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained why President Donald Trump does not consider Iran’s seizure of two ships in the Strait of Hormuz a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Leavitt made the statement during an interview with Fox News’ Martha McCallum on Wednesday just hours after Iran captured the Greek and Mediterranean-flagged vessels.
“Does the seizure of two ships — as we said, they were Greek and Mediterranean-owned ships with cargo on them, and the reports are that Iran basically seized them and then moved them into Iranian waters. We don’t know what’s going to happen to these crews. We’re not sure where all of this is going. Does the president view that as a violation of the ceasefire?” McCallum asked.
“No, because these were not U.S. ships. These were not Israeli ships. These were two international vessels,” Leavitt responded.
US FORCES ATTEMPTING TO BOARD SANCTIONED RUSSIAN-FLAGGED OIL TANKER IN NORTH ATLANTIC, SOURCES SAY
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, conducts a press briefing. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“And for the American media, who are sort of blowing this out of proportion to discredit the president’s facts that he has completely obliterated Iran’s conventional Navy, these two ships were taken by speedy gunboats. Iran has gone from having the most lethal Navy in the Middle East to now acting like a bunch of pirates. They don’t have control over the strait,” she continued.
“This is piracy that we are seeing on display. And the naval blockade that the United States has imposed continues to be incredibly effective. And, to be clear, the blockade is on ships going to and from Iranian ports. And the point of this is the economic leverage that we maintain over Iran now. While there’s a ceasefire with respect to the military and kinetic strikes, Operation Economic Fury continues, and the crux of that is this naval blockade,” she added.
The Iranian made ‘Seraj’ a high-speed missile-launching assault boat on display in Tehran on August 23, 2010, as Iran kicked off mass production of two high-speed missile-launching assault boats the ‘Seraj’ (Lamp) and ‘Zolfaqar’ (named after Shiite Imam Ali’s sword) speedboats which will be manufactured at the marine industries complex of the ministry of defense. (YALDA MOAIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said the vessels, identified as the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, were operating without proper authorization and had tampered with navigation systems, accusations that could not be independently verified. The ships had earlier reported coming under fire near the strait, underscoring the increasingly volatile conditions in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes.
US ‘LOCKED AND LOADED’ TO DESTROY IRAN’S ‘CROWN JEWEL’ ‘IF WE WANT,’ TRUMP WARNS
The Guard attacked a third ship, identified as the Euphoria, which had become “stranded” on the Iranian coast, Iranian media reported. It did not seize that vessel.
Ships and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Musandam, Oman, April 18, 2026. (Reuters)
Both the U.S. and Iranian sides have targeted commercial and cargo vessels as part of a broader pressure campaign tied to stalled negotiations. U.S. forces have also moved to seize at least one Iranian-linked vessel in the region, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a fragile ceasefire.
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The Strait of Hormuz is a vital artery for global oil shipments, with roughly 20% of the world’s supply passing through it. Traffic has slowed dramatically as ships reroute or avoid the area amid gunfire, seizures and conflicting directives from both militaries.
Fox News’ Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger met privately with President Trump and administration officials Wednesday to press for federal support and yet-unpaid wildfire recovery funding as the region continues to rebuild from the 2025 fires.
“This afternoon we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything,” Bass and Barger said in a statement. “We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe — and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on L.A. families.”
Barger said the two leaders had a “high-level discussion” with the president in the Oval Office, sharing stories about what fire survivors are experiencing day to day. She added that “we left details behind with the President,” but did not specify whether Trump made any funding or policy promises during the meeting.
“First and foremost, today’s meeting was to thank the President for his initial support of infusing federal resources to expedite debris removal, as well as his recent tweet about insurance companies, which have already proven fruitful,” she said in a statement provided to The Times.
Bass was similarly reserved about the discussions, telling reporters that “we will follow up with the details,” but signaled progress is being made on federal support.
“I think what’s important is that we certainly got the president’s support in terms of, you know, what is needed, and then the appropriate people were in the room for us to follow up. And that was Russ Vought, who is the head of the Office of Management and budget,” Bass told KNX on Wednesday.
The meeting comes on the heels of a yearlong standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over wildfire recovery funding, disaster response and whether the federal government should have a say in local rebuilding permitting.
California leaders, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, have accused the Trump administration of withholding billions in critical wildfire aid, prompting a lawsuit over stalled recovery funds. Officials allege political bias in the delay of billions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Newsom visited Washington in December. When he made his rounds on Capitol Hill, he met with five lawmakers, including three who serve on the Senate and House appropriations committees, to renew calls for $33.9 billion in federal aid for Los Angeles County fire recovery.
But the governor said he was denied a meeting with FEMA and would not say whether he had attempted to meet with Trump to discuss the issue.
Bass, meanwhile, appears to have found a path to the president on a subject that has been paramount for her community.
The fruitful meeting comes after Trump lobbed insults at the mayor at a news conference earlier this year, where he called her “incompetent” for how she handled last year’s wildfire recovery efforts. He alleged that under Bass’ leadership, the city’s delay in issuing local building permits will take years when it should have taken “two or three days.”
California officials, including Newsom, have urged the Trump administration to send Congress a formal request for the $33.9 billion in recovery aid needed to rebuild homes, schools, utilities and other critical infrastructure destroyed or damaged when the fires tore through neighborhoods more than 15 months ago.
What Bass and Barger’s meeting with the president ultimately produces remains to be seen.
The billions in recovery aid have not yet materialized, but the meeting could potentially give those discussions new momentum.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment about the meeting.
Earlier this month, Trump criticized insurance provider State Farm on Truth Social for its handling of the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires. He accused the insurance giant of abandoning its policyholders when tragedy struck.
“It was brought to my attention that the Insurance Companies, in particular, State Farm, have been absolutely horrible to people that have been paying them large Premiums for years, only to find that when tragedy struck, these horrendous Companies were not there to help!” Trump wrote.
But the rebuke didn’t come out of the blue. It stemmed from a controversial February visit to Los Angeles by Trump administration officials.
Trump tapped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in an effort to strip California state and local governments of their authority to permit the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Within the week, Zeldin was in Los Angeles, bashing Newsom and Los Angeles officials at a roundtable with fire victims and reporters, saying that residents were suffering from “bureaucratic, red tape delays and incompetency” and that leadership was “denying them … the ability to rebuild their lives”.
During the trip, officials heard direct complaints from local leaders and fire victims about insurers being slow, restrictive and insufficient with their claim payouts.
After these meetings, Trump directed Zeldin to investigate the insurers’ responses. State Farm, facing roughly $7 billion in fire-related claims, is also under formal investigation by California’s insurance commissioner over its handling of the crisis.
Despite tensions with the administration, Bass and Barger appeared confident that progress was being made on the insurance and funding issues.
“Our job is to fight for our communities,” their joint statement concluded. “When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”
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