State Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) was joined Wednesday by gubernatorial candidate and UCLA Voting Rights Project (VRP) Senior Advisor Xavier Becerra at a press conference calling on legislators to support a pair of bills aimed at protecting the voting rights of Californians.
Stay up to date with the latest from The Record. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter today!
“We are here because voting rights are facing unprecedented challenges across the country,” Cervantes said. “Court decisions and federal actions have weakened longstanding protections that have safeguarded the rights to vote for generations.”
Cervantes’ proposal, the California Voting Rights Act of 2026, includes two separate Senate Bills. SB 1164 seeks to update the state’s existing voting rights act to prohibit voter suppression and vote dilution, prevent voting discrimination and ensure voters are able to protect their rights in the state. SB 1360 seeks to guarantee and expand language assistance services for voters with limited English proficiency.
Cervantes said the pair of bills would ensure that the state not only continued to defend voting rights, but also expanded access, which Becerra said was crucial for democracy to thrive.
“If Americans, if Californians, don’t vote, democracy dies,” Becerra said. “And unfortunately, we’ve seen too often how there are efforts underway by bad actors to diminish the vote, to interfere in the vote, to block the vote [and] to tell you you should not participate in democracy.”
Becerra said voters have to “stand up for democracy” when voting rights are being undermined at any level — federal, state or local.
“Wether it is the undermining of the federal Voting Rights Act…whether it is the attacks coming from Washington D.C. …whether it’s the effort to confiscate ballots, hundreds of thousands of ballots in California illegally by law enforcement to try to force people to believe that there is fraud occurring in our elections, or whether it is…through a ballot initiative, Prop 39, which is meant to interfere in the vote, we have to stand up,” he said.
The conference was held roughly two and a half weeks before the California Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases involving Sheriff Chad Bianco’s investigation into alleged election irregularities stemming from the November 2025 statewide special election.
The first case on the calendar was filed by VRP on behalf of a group of Riverside County voters, including Riverside Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes who is running for Assembly District 58 and is the sister of Sen. Cervantes.
Earlier this year, Sen. Cervantes said in an interview with The Record that her sister’s legal case against Bianco’s ballot seizure was “a different matter at hand,” and was completely separate from her legislative efforts, including SB 73, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law ahead of the June 2 primary.
That law, which went into effect immediately, prohibits the unauthorized access to voting systems, machines or voter data without a court order; requires the California Department of Justice to issue guidance to local elections officials when faced with requests by law enforcement to access areas where ballots are cast, processed or handled; protects the chain of custody of voted ballots by making it a felony to take ballots from a county registrar; and restricts peace officers from interfering with the administration of elections.
The Riverside Record is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet providing Riverside County with high-quality journalism free of charge. We’re able to do this because of the generous donations of supporters like you!