Gov. Gavin Newsom last week signed into law more than a dozen bills pertaining to elections, including three authored by Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside).
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The first two, Senate Bills 1164 and 1360, dubbed the California Voting Rights Act of 2026 (CVRA 2026), seek to update the state’s existing voting rights act to prohibit voter suppression and vote dilution, prevent voting discrimination, ensure voters are able to protect their rights in the state and guarantee and expand language assistance services for voters with limited English proficiency.
“Voters want their voices heard, they want their votes to count, and they want free and fair elections,” Cervantes said in a news release. “The California Voting Rights Act of 2026 is part of the solution to protect the sacred right to vote while addressing the continued actions to dismantle our democracy by the federal administration. I will always be a defender of voting rights and stand firmly behind the protections this legislation provides.”
The final bill, Senate Bill 1418, builds on Senate Bill 73, which Newsom signed into law earlier this year, by extending many of the chain-of-custody protections for voted ballots to other forms of election records.
“In California, we will not allow our democracy to be taken from us. SB 1418 is direly needed as we face an attack on democratic principles by both the federal administration and local elected officials,” Cervantes said in a news release. “The enactment of Senate Bill 1418 further protects the integrity of California’s elections as we head into the midterm elections. Thank you to Governor Newsom for signing this vital bill into law to ensure that election records cannot be seized from the custody of county registrars.”
On Monday, Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a letter with the California Supreme Court in both pending cases regarding Sheriff Chad Bianco’s election probe informing them about the law, which he wrote “conceivably extends to all of the materials seized by Sheriff Bianco from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters.”
He also noted that while the new legislation generally applies to pending cases, he said it wasn’t necessary for the court to address the scope of the new law, since doing so could delay the resolution of the case.
“Instead, as the Attorney General suggested at the oral arguments recently held in these
companion cases, the Court may issue a writ in Cervantes limited to the return of the ballots,
which are indisputably covered by both the prior and current versions of [the law],” he wrote. “The Attorney General could then exercise his supervisory authority to ensure the return of any other materials seized by the sheriff but not covered by the writ in Cervantes.”
Two days after Bonta filed the letter, the court announced it would be releasing its opinions for both cases Thursday at 10 a.m.
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