There is no evidence and there is no data, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said on October 10, 2026, about the federal case for changing the way Americans vote by mail.
Weber runs elections in a state with about 23 million registered voters, and she is the first African American woman to hold the office. Her office declined to hand unredacted statewide voter roll data to federal authorities after the Department of Homeland Security warned California and three other states to cooperate with a review that flagged more than 250,000 people as potential non-citizens. The Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from imposing new mail voting requirements before the November election. Trump then said people can vote by mail if they want, because, in his words, there seems to be no choice.
Weber’s read on the reversal was four words. “Sounds kind of desperate,” she said. “They don’t really know what they want.”
Her instruction to voters did not move. “Vote by mail, vote in person, and vote at the ballot box,” she said. “The bottom line, we say to you: vote.” She pointed people to drop boxes, which she said are huge, secure and available in the evenings, and said that once ballots are inside, they are locked down and cannot be taken back out.
On the people running the polls she was blunt. “We will not allow our poll workers to be abused and misused by anyone,” she said. “This is a criminal act.”
