California counties completed their final official vote counts for the June primary this week — but the turnout figures come as President Donald Trump and other skeptics are lambasting the state’s drawn-out voting process.
Statewide turnout reached 40.8%, according to preliminary figures from the California Secretary of State. That’s an increase from the 2024 primary at 35% and in 2022 at 33.2%.
Even with that short-term improvement, experts note that participation has not reached the levels seen in some past primaries since 2000 and well below pre-1980s when primary turnout was consistently above 40%.
That’s despite California Democrats heavily expanding mail-in voting in 2016 in the name of increasing turnout and voter access. Every voter receives a mail-in ballot that can arrive seven days late if postmarked on time.
“We haven’t seen significant jumps in turnout,” Director Mindy Romero of the Center for Inclusive Democracy told the Associated Press. “We still have very significant disparity in turnout with race and ethnicity. The numbers don’t lie.”
The only thing the expanded mail voting seems to have done is increase the length of vote counting, experts said. A report last week by the California Voter Foundation blasted the state for having the slowest vote-counting process in the nation and found the number of ballots counted within two days of Election Day decreased from 81% in 2004 to 66% in 2024.
“California has one of the most accessible voting systems in the world, but our long count overshadows our strengths,” said Kim Alexander, president of the foundation. “When results take weeks, it creates space for confusion and misinformation.”
That frustration boiled over last month when scores of Californians cried foul after Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s Election Night lead evaporated in the days that followed as officials continued tallying late-arriving mail ballots. Trump weighed in, claiming the election was “rigged.”
The awareness that turnout is still lacking despite expanded mail voting has been going on for years. The 2024 presidential election in California saw a 71% turnout, five percentage points lower than in 2004.
The Public Policy Institute of California concluded in a 2025 study that the expanded statewide vote-by-mail law has “generally fallen short of the reform’s original goal of a larger and more representative electorate.”
Turnout is obviously affected by more than just mail access, experts noted. The reason this month’s primary had a relatively higher turnout than in recent years was due to a wide-open competitive primary, said Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Often in a primary, turnout is low because everything is so partisan,” he told the Sacramento Bee. “So voters don’t get riled up about distinctions between candidates within parties, but we just had the first truly open gubernatorial primary in a long time.”
Regardless, California’s mail voting system may be here to stay despite Trump’s attempts to undermine it. California Republicans blasted a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing states to continue counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.
The ruling could “undermine confidence in elections in California” by “giving a green light to the corrupt, anti-democratic banana republic practices that have been running rampant,” said Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton.
