Ahead of the 2026 midterms, investigations into suspected election fraud in California are underway, said Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California.
“And I do expect those will result in charges,” Essayli told The Epoch Times on June 9.
He did not elaborate, as Justice Department regulations prohibit discussing details on open cases.
“We are going to follow the evidence wherever it goes,” Essayli said.
With political tensions flaring during the recent primary elections, he cautioned that fraud is difficult to detect and challenging to prove.
“There’s a lot of confusion out there, and there’s a lot of people who have a lot of theories on election fraud, but theories are not evidence,” Essayli said. “We require evidence.”
He said part of the issue is the state’s mail-in ballot system, in which every registered voter receives a ballot.
“The problem in California is they have the universal vote by mail, so they mail out millions of ballots, and they allow them to be returned as late as seven days after the election,” Essayli said.
“So it’s very hard to understand on election night exactly how many ballots have been cast and how many are left to count, and that just breeds a ton of distrust and skepticism into the system—whether or not fraud exists.”
Essayli has prioritized election fraud investigations after being appointed interim U.S. attorney in April 2025 by then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
He leads one of the largest federal prosecutor’s offices nationwide, covering seven Southern California counties with a combined population of approximately 20 million. His office includes a team of approximately 500 attorneys and staff.
Voter fraud investigations have yielded one guilty plea so far, after Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina del Rey, California, was caught paying homeless individuals in Los Angeles to register to vote under fake addresses. According to the plea agreement, she worked as a petition circulator for approximately 20 years.
“False registrations undermine Americans’ faith in elections, even more so when payoffs are involved,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in a May statement.
Essayli’s office launched a new tip line on June 7, requesting information from the public.
“Any … evidence of election fraud crimes, whether it’s in the registrations to vote, or if it’s in the voting itself, or anything related to elections, people can submit information to that tip line,” Essayli said.
More than 538,000 ballots, many of which were received by mail, remain unprocessed as of June 11, according to the California secretary of state’s website.
Critics of the process raised questions after Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton’s early lead evaporated as more ballots were counted, and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt was eliminated from the race after Nithya Raman carried more of the late-arriving votes.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned California’s slow ballot-counting process, describing the situation as suspicious and calling the state a “third-world nation” with “rigged elections” in various Truth Social posts.
State elections officials described the lengthy process as routine, with delays due to signature verification, ballot tracking, and standard audit procedures.
Voter Rolls
Essayli criticized California policies that he said allow illegal immigrants to register to vote in federal elections.
“They will accept all kinds of documents that they claim are sufficient ID to comply with federal statute, including … a gym membership card, debit card, prescription label, health insurance card, and they give out health insurance cards to illegals,” Essayli said.
“So you can just see that there really is nothing in place that would stop someone who’s not a citizen from registering to vote in the state of California.”
He pointed to a state Department of Motor Vehicles audit as evidence that a thorough audit of state records is needed. The state audit, conducted by Ernst & Young, reviewed the 2018 integration of an automatic voter registration system, which revealed some noncitizens were improperly registered to vote.
The Department of Justice is currently at legal odds with the state over the release of voter rolls for audits to verify authenticity and citizenship after Dhillon launched efforts to obtain voter rolls across the country.
Essayli said that the department has been in litigation with California “for the past year or so to try to get them to comply with various federal statutes that permit us to inspect their voter rolls.”
“They’re supposed to provide them at the request of the attorney general, so we can audit their voter rolls to make sure they’re complying with some federal civil rights statutes and making sure that only legal, qualified U.S. citizens are registered to vote,” he said.
State officials are “stonewalling” attempts to review records, Essayli said.
“California has refused to comply,” he said. “We’re in court. They are making what we consider frivolous arguments.”
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber has argued that the Justice Department’s demands are unlawful and “[threaten] to give the federal government unprecedented access to California voters’ sensitive and private information, including social security and driver’s license numbers, partisan affiliation, home addresses and voting history.”
She said shielding the data were necessary to prevent the federal government from using the information to enforce immigration laws and challenge eligible voter registrations.
“I am entrusted with ensuring that California’s state election laws are enforced—including state laws that protect the privacy of Californians’ data,” Weber said in a statement. “I will continue to uphold my promise to Californians to protect our democracy, and I will continue to challenge this administration’s disregard for the rule of law and our right to vote.”
Lower courts sided with the state’s argument about privacy concerns, and the case is currently on appeal at the Ninth Circuit court.
“They could rule on that literally any day,” Essayli said.