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It happens in close races in almost every major election. Early California returns show Republicans winning or at least faring better than expected. Then, as votes are counted over the following days, the tallies shift in Democrats’ favor.

This “blue shift” or “red mirage” isn’t a result of California Democrats “finding votes” or rigging elections, as President Donald Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claimed. 

Trump and his allies in the federal government are already laying the groundwork for questioning the election results as they embark on an unprecedented attack on California’s elections, setting up what could be a showdown over the fundamentals of American democracy. 

Experts urge you not to be fooled by their claims of “rigged” elections based on early returns.

The shifts in early tallies, experts say, are merely the result of when and how Democrats and Republicans tend to vote and the length of time it takes California election officials to count millions of ballots. 

Examples of the ‘blue shift’ and ‘red mirage’

The phenomenon has been described since at least 2013, but the terms gained traction around the contentious 2020 elections. 

Six years ago, election night returns showed Trump leading Joe Biden in several key states, but as counties nationwide counted ballots over the coming days, Biden ended up winning in the states that put him over the top in the Electoral College.

In the final weeks of his first term, Trump made claims, which have been repeatedly debunked, that the race was stolen from him. Thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in the deadly riot on Jan. 6, 2021. 

California has seen its own red mirages in congressional and local races over the years. In 2018, for instance, four Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives appeared to be ahead on election night, but ended up losing to their Democratic opponents by the time all votes were counted.

In the primary this June, Spencer Pratt, a Republican former reality TV star, appeared to be beating progressive Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman in early returns in the race for LA mayor. Raman ended up pulling ahead and advanced to the general election to face incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.

The shift led Trump to call the results “rigged” and others on the MAGA right to declare Democratic shenanigans were at work.

Experts and elections officials say you shouldn’t believe such claims.

Why vote counts shift

First, let’s state the obvious: California is the most populous state. There are 23 million registered voters in California; that’s more voters than the entire populations of the 16 least-populated states combined.

Los Angeles County — the most populated in the country — alone has nearly 6 million registered voters.

There are also lots of Republicans in California, even though Democrats greatly outnumber them.

Want to blow some minds at your next cocktail party? Ask your friends to name which county in the U.S. had the most Trump voters, by raw numbers, in the 2020 election. The answer: deep-blue Los Angeles County, where Biden overwhelmingly won.

So how does that translate into a red mirage?

In the June LA mayor’s race, the city’s Republicans turned their ballots in earlier than Democrats did.

The high court refused to intervene in a case involving 20,000 people the Republican administration flagged as likely noncitizens on the largely Democratic state’s voter rolls.

It was the latest in a flurry of election-related litigation the day before the midterm elections, which will decide control of Congress for the last two years of Trump’s second term.

In California, the Trump administration had asked the high court to set aside the challenged ballots until the voters’ citizenship status could be verified. But officials there said that the list appeared to be filled with errors and that setting the ballots aside could effectively disenfranchise legal voters. alt="" />

The high court did not detail its reasoning, as is common in emergency decisions. The justices previously rejected Trump’s push to restrict mail ballots around the country in September, even though the justices have sided with his administration in a series of other emergency docket appeals.

The Republican Trump administration has prioritized identifying noncitizen voters this year, despite them being rare.

A district court judge previously denied the Justice Department’s request and warned that the demand could disenfranchise citizens in Tuesday’s midterm elections to determine control of Congress.

Also on Monday in Washington, another federal judge ruled against the administration’s efforts to make last-minute demands of California election officials, finding they violated the U.S. Constitution.

“The Executive Branch has likely violated the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which commits authority over election rules to the states and Congress alone,” wrote Chief Judge James Boasberg.

The administration, for its part, said segregating the ballots was a modest request that would eventually allow legal votes to still be counted.

The administration has faced a remarkable string of losses in court in its push, as well as criticism for waiting until a few weeks before the election to make its demands of California election officials with a list that even the Department of Justice admits is not entirely reliable.

During a hearing over whether to lift her own order forbidding the administration from threatening to prosecute election workers who let potentially illegal voters cast ballots, District Court Judge Trina Thompson drilled down on reports of widespread inaccuracies in the Justice Department’s data.

“Would you agree there’s a high error rate?” Thompson asked Kenneth Kao, a Justice Department attorney.

“That’s a fair statement,” Kao said. “That’s why we ask for the registrars’ aid in verifying these are all valid voters.”

“This isn’t speculation. This isn’t a theory,” Essayli said, later conceding there may be errors on the list.

Voting has been underway in California since early October. All of the state’s roughly 23 million registered voters are mailed a ballot. Hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been processed. California election officials have said that finding and setting aside the challenged ballots now would be logistically impossible.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said the appeal “reeks of desperation and is another attempt to undermine our elections and trample on the rule of law.”

“If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” wrote U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

A 2-1 appeals court panel upheld his order, with one judge appointed by Trump and another appointed by President Joe Biden, a Democrat, voting in favor. The third judge on the panel, also appointed by Trump, argued in a dissent that California’s unwillingness to separate the ballots encourages the “violation of federal law.”

The Justice Department has sought to move the case along quickly, unsuccessfully asking an appeals court to intervene early.

The appeal is the department's latest foray into state election administration, which a federal judge referred to last week as "a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials."

After that judge, David Carter, a Clinton appointee, and a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel rejected the DOJ's request to order California to set aside and stop processing the ballots of thousands of people, the DOJ filed a notice Monday that it is seeking injunctive relief from the high court.

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will agree to intervene and, if so, whether it would weigh in before Tuesday's Election Day.

The DOJ says it has identified 20,000 "likely" noncitizens on California's voter roll whose ballots should not be counted until their citizenship can be verified.

Courts so far have sided with California and Los Angeles County's arguments that the federal government's list is unreliable, and that creating a novel system to segregate ballots while voting is already underway is infeasible.

"[T]here is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the County's entire election," 9th Circuit Judges Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, wrote in their Friday decision rejecting the Justice Department's emergency request.

The two judges cited longstanding legal precedent, known as the Purcell principle, that election rules should not be altered on the eve of an election, as well as the fact that the Constitution gives states authority to run elections. The opinion also cited the National Voter Registration Act, which bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election.

The panel's third judge, Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented.

The actual number of ballots in dispute is likely much smaller than 20,000, since county election officials have found that many of the people on DOJ's list did not have active voter registrations and were not mailed ballots.

Over the weekend, data scientists at University of California Los Angeles' Voting Rights Project were granted access to the DOJ's list through a court order in another lawsuit and found that 42% of the names on the list do not appear on California's current voter roll. That analysis also found naturalized citizens on the DOJ's list.

The Justice Department's appeal to the Supreme Court comes as it has been escalating its feud with California election officials.

In recent weeks, the Department of Justice has sent subpoenas to election officials in California, and reminded officials that they could be criminally prosecuted for allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots.

A federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order late Friday barring the Trump administration from threatening, intimidating or coercing election officials to demand they stop processing the ballots of registered voters that the federal government alleges are ineligible to vote. The federal government has appealed the order.

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Sunday defended the accuracy of a list of what it says are more than 20,000 suspected noncitizens registered to vote in California and suggested that a federal judge consider whether an immigrant rights group and its lawyers should face contempt charges after they published an analysis of the names.

On Friday, U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg allowed the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, access to federal government data on 20,000 people the Trump administration alleges are noncitizen voters in California. Boasberg, based in Washington, D.C., ordered the plaintiffs not to disclose any names on the list and use the data only for their arguments about why they have legal standing to challenge the Trump administration's use of it.

On Saturday, attorneys for the immigrant rights group filed court papers revealing that their analysis found more than 40% of the people on the list do not appear in the state's voter file. It also identified 22 people on the list who were likely naturalized U.S. citizens while saying that thousands more U.S. citizens appeared to be on it, as well.

The Justice Department said in a filing Sunday that the analysis by the immigrant rights group had nothing to do with the group's legal standing and therefore violated Boasberg's order.

“The report’s political grandstanding about alleged inaccuracies that purportedly impact California voters generally, or comparisons between the government’s list and the full ‘California voter file,’ has no relevance to whether the particular plaintiffs in this case have standing,” it said.

The filing also suggested Boasberg refer the matter to the Justice Department for investigation for possible criminal contempt of court.

Alberto Lammers, a spokesman for the University of California, Los Angeles' Voting Rights Project, which filed the case and did the data analysis for the immigrant rights group, said in an emailed statement: “Plaintiffs’ counsel and their experts fully complied with the Court’s orders.”

In a separate case, the Justice Department on Sunday also appealed a decision from Friday night by U.S. District Court Judge Trina L. Thompson. The ruling by the San Francisco-based judge barred the department from demanding that election offices remove possible noncitizens from voter rolls, separate their ballots or threaten legal action. The Justice Department has noted that Thompson ruled before the federal government was able to file its initial arguments.

Thompson scheduled a Monday hearing on the appeal.

That case is one of many the Trump administration has lost in its battle over its lists of alleged noncitizen voters. A federal judge in California rejected its demand that election officials there be forced to separate ballots cast by those voters, writing that such last-minute orders could “wreak havoc” on the state's election. Two appellate judges agreed.

California election officials also contend the list is riddled with errors and say they have no way to do the painstaking work required by law to remove voters from the rolls in the days before the election. People attest to being U.S. citizens when they register to vote and risk felony prosecution if they cast a ballot when they are not eligible.

The administration has said its list was carefully compiled from the state's own voter registration data and compared to federal citizenship records. The Justice Department issued a series of subpoenas for election offices in California and warned election officials who knowingly let noncitizens vote that they could face criminal charges.

Federal immigration officers on Saturday reportedly dragged a man out of the kitchen of a restaurant in Lincoln, according to local immigration advocates. 

Hours later, Autumn Gonzalez with NorCal Resist said she witnessed agents smash a woman’s car window and drag her husband out of the vehicle.

“It was like witnessing a kidnapping in broad daylight by armed masked men,” Gonzalez said.

She said the woman was left covered in glass and in shock.

In another incident, Gonzalez said agents detained a man from his work truck and left his 14-year-old son unattended in the vehicle along a freeway. 

Federal immigration officers Saturday, Oct. 31, 2026, after detaining an individual along Highway 99.(Courtesy/NorCal Resist)

“There’s many more officers, agents, whatever you want to call them, running around town right now than there were a month ago,” she added.  

The incidents were among several reported across the Sacramento region Saturday just days before the election. 

Giselle Garcia, programs director for Sacramento-based immigrant support organization NorCal Resist, said her group has documented at least 83 detainments since Oct. 6 — when advocates say the surge started.

Before October, Garcia said the organization averaged about 21 documented detainments a month. NorCal Resist also recorded 138 dispatches this week, which Garcia notes is not including Saturday’s activity.

But she cautioned against attributing the increase primarily to the election.

“For us, pinning this all on the election is reductionist,” she said. 

Garcia pointed to the Trump administration’s increased funding for immigration enforcement, which she said has allowed the agency to hire more agents, acquire additional vehicles and conduct multiple operations simultaneously. 

“We do think we might be looking at the new normal,” Garcia said.

An election-related escalation?

UC Davis law professor Kevin Johnson said he sees a connection between the increase in immigration enforcement and the approaching election. 

“I think that it’s not a coincidence that Election Day is coming and this administration has pushed and pushed and pushed on immigration enforcement,” he said. 

He noted that there have been reports of immigration officers near ballot drop-off locations — including in Sutter County — while the administration has also pursued legal action related to allegations of noncitizen voting. 

Johnson acknowledged that the expanded enforcement may represent a longer-term shift.

“The new normal is heightened immigration enforcement and a little twist of that is the non-citizen voting angle and the claim that the election results may be corrupted by immigrant voting,” he said. 

Johnson also said the activity could intimidate people who are legally eligible to vote, including people of color and recently naturalized citizens. 

Ellen Chapman, an organizer with Indivisible Sacramento, said her group is concerned that increased enforcement could discourage some people from voting.

“Our fear is that that’s what they want,” Chapman said. “That if you increase ICE activity right before an election, of course, it puts a chilling effect on… families that are mixed status.”

Chapman said Indivisible groups are coordinating with a national coalition monitoring potential threats to the election. 

The coalition has established what she described as “red lines” — incidents that could trigger a rapid mobilization of protesters. That could include ICE agents appearing at polling locations or other actions that organizers believe threaten the voting process.

“We’re not afraid and we have agency,” she said. “That’s what I want people to know.” 

CapRadio reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment but they did not respond.

By SAFIYAH RIDDLE, GEOFF MULVIHILL and ALI SWENSON, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday rejected the Justice Department’s request for California to set aside disputed ballots received in the midterm election, and hours later another federal judge barred the department from intimidating election workers involved in processing those ballots.

The rulings Friday mark the latest setbacks for the Trump administration’s efforts to assert control over state-run elections.

The administration has alleged California sent ballots to some 20,000 people who may not be U.S. citizens. It wants the state to set those ballots aside and not count them until citizenship can be verified. California officials say the list is highly unreliable and most likely includes many people who are U.S. citizens.

A district court judge forcefully denied that request on Wednesday and warned that the Justice Department’s demands could disenfranchise citizens.

“As the district court found — and we discern no clear error — there is no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system,” the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel wrote in its 2-1 ruling.

The majority opinion was authored by Judge Mark J. Bennett, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, and Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden.

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the rulings. But in a statement about the sweeping efforts to root out noncitizen voting, it said: “Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting. Enforcing that law is not an agenda item. It is the Department’s job."

Millions of people have already voted in California in the midterm election that concludes Tuesday. Hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been processed. Elections officials have said that processed votes can’t be matched back to the voters who submitted them.

Elsewhere, the Trump administration issued a raft of subpoenas in Alaska in a spoiler-candidate controversy. The Justice Department has also provided a list of alleged noncitizen voters to officials in Washington state.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have previously said they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In his dissent, Judge Patrick J. Bumatay argued that California’s unwillingness to separate the ballots encourages the “violation of federal law.”

“California says it can do nothing to prevent illegal voting,” Bumatay, who was appointed by Trump, wrote. “That undermines the federal government’s interest in promoting election integrity and preventing the dilution of lawful votes.”

Another judge bars intimidation of election workers

Later Friday, a federal judge in California barred the Justice Department from threatening or coercing election workers to stop processing ballots.

The order issued by U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson in the Northern District of California was in response to a suit filed earlier Friday by labor unions seeking to bar the Justice Department from intimidating election workers.

Notably, the emergency order was issued without the Department of Justice weighing in on the case.

“Election Day is around the corner,” wrote Thompson, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden. “Ballots have already been issued. Americans have already begun voting. Workers have already begun processing ballots. Given the consequences of inaction, the Court sees no reason to delay its ruling.”

It also bars the Justice Department from demanding local election officials segregate or not count ballots that the federal government deems may have been cast by ineligible voters.

“This ruling is a victory for the workers who make our elections possible and the communities they serve” April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement Friday night.

The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, has warned that “any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy.”

On Thursday, The Associated Press obtained subpoenas issued to election officials in Los Angeles County. The subpoenas request any documents and communications related to letters sent in July and October by federal officials to state election officials outlining the allegations about noncitizen voters. They also seek any information about efforts to prevent noncitizen votes from being counted. At least three L.A. County election officials have been asked to appear before a grand jury the day after the election.

It is unclear whether the Justice Department intends to bring criminal charges against anyone. The department does not typically subpoena people whom it regards as targets of a criminal investigation to appear before a grand jury.

Outside groups win access to the disputed list

In a third Friday ruling, another federal judge ordered the Trump administration to share the disputed list of names with lawyers for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. They want to examine who is on the list and assess its impact on eligible voters.

It will be the first time that a nongovernment organization will have the opportunity to evaluate the merits of the list of some 20,000 names. The federal government promptly appealed the decision on Friday evening.

The Democratic candidate for California governor, Xavier Becerra, is an adviser to the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

The two groups sued the Homeland Security Department in early October to prevent it from using federal immigration data to challenge state voter rolls. The lawsuit cited examples in other states where the federal government’s data has been proven to mistakenly include thousands of citizens. It argued that the data-matching methods risk disenfranchising or deterring citizens from voting. On top of that, plaintiffs argued, the lists could disproportionately target naturalized citizens who are legally entitled to vote.

The Justice Department argues that there is just as much to lose if the ballots aren’t separated.

“Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the vote of an American citizen," Kiersten V. Pels, a spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email. "The Department makes no apology for protecting those votes.”

In a separate but related 9th Circuit Court decision on Friday, a panel of judges ruled that federal investigations into illegal voting by noncitizens will remain on hold in nine states until after Election Day.

The judges, all nominated by Democratic presidents, found that the aggressive and public investigations led some citizens to decide not to engage in election-related activities out of fear of being wrongly targeted.

The judges said the investigations, which are looking into alleged illegal voting in past elections, can resume after the midterms wrap up Tuesday.

___

Associated Press writer Swenson reported from New York; Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, New Jersey.