We Audited California’s Election Reform. The Results Aren’t Encouraging.

Last week, California mailed a ballot to every one of its 23.1 million registered voters. Between 13 and 17 million of them didn’t send it back.

That gap is the central, unresolved problem of the Voter’s Choice Act, California’s 2016 election reform. The law was built on a simple premise: remove every barrier to casting a ballot and participation will follow. As of June 4, the Secretary of State reported 5.6 million ballots counted with roughly 3.6 million more still outstanding. The last comparable primary, in June 2022, drew 7.28 million ballots from 21.9 million registered voters.

The VCA requires every participating county to file a detailed voter outreach plan with the Secretary of State and get it approved before closing neighborhood polling places. John Myers, a veteran California political journalist, recently challenged reporters to read those plans and compare the commitments to actual voter experience. So we did.

The results weren’t encouraging. We found detailed promises, almost no measurable goals, a 34-to-1 gap in per-voter spending between the lowest and highest investing counties, and a Secretary of State approval process that has never publicly rejected a single plan.

What the VCA Does

Before any county can operate under the VCA model, it must file an Election Administration Plan with the Secretary of State. The EAP must detail how the county will conduct voter outreach and educate residents about changes to the voting system. Under state law, the Secretary of State must formally accept, reject, or accept with modifications each county’s voter education and outreach section.

Every plan is publicly posted at sos.ca.gov. Every approval letter is posted alongside it.

The California Secretary of State also commissioned the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC to independently evaluate VCA implementation in the 2020 general election. Researchers submitted their findings in July 2021. The Secretary of State released them in May 2022. The researchers noted in the report that the SOS did not transmit the findings to the state’s official VCA Task Force.

The 2020 data showed that just over one-third — roughly 37% — of eligible voters in VCA counties reported knowing that their county had changed its voting system. Among eligible Asian American voters, the figure was 28.2%. Among Latino voters, 36%. These figures came after every participating county had conducted outreach campaigns under Secretary of State-approved plans.

Understanding the Plans

Reading the 30 EAPs reveals a consistent pattern. Each document lists planned activities, names community partners, describes advisory committee structures, and cites applicable code sections. Most plans commit to the same categories of activity: direct mail, social media, press releases, community events, vote center outreach, and website updates.

What the plans generally do not include are measurable outcome targets. Of the 30 reviewed, fewer than six commit to a specific awareness rate, a demographic-specific turnout goal, or a metric for determining whether outreach reached its intended audience. The remaining plans describe what counties intend to do, without specifying what results they are aiming to achieve or how performance will be assessed.

The Secretary of State’s approval process covers each county’s outreach section. There is no public record of the SOS rejecting a county’s outreach plan, requiring substantive revisions, or imposing conditions based on prior-cycle performance. San Benito County, approximately 58% Latino eligible voters, had its most recent EAP approved on May 9, 2024. El Dorado County’s plan was renewed in August 2025.

El Dorado County

El Dorado County’s current EAP, approved in August 2025, commits to contacting every registered voter at least once by postcard and once by email before each election. The plan describes public service announcements targeted to “Latino radio stations 99.9 FM La TriColor and 104.3 La Suavecita and Latino television station Telemundo 33,” bilingual election workers at every vote center, and a Language Accessibility Advisory Committee.

In 2020, El Dorado County spent approximately $0.05 per registered voter on outreach — among the lowest rates in the state that cycle. In the USC Center for Inclusive Democracy survey, El Dorado reported conducting no voter outreach for the 2020 general election, citing COVID-19 restrictions. The Secretary of State had approved the county’s plan. The county’s plan was subsequently renewed.

Fresno County

Fresno County is 44% Latino eligible voters. In 2020, Fresno spent $541,000 on outreach — but did not separately budget for it, had no dedicated outreach staff person, and logged only 123 staff hours.

Fresno’s current EAP commits $500,000 to voter outreach. The plan includes Spanish-language partnerships and requires Spanish-speaking election workers at vote centers. Those represent more substantial commitments than prior cycles reflected. The current plan does not assess the county’s prior performance or establish accountability for past outreach spending levels.

Imperial County

Imperial County is approximately 70% Latino eligible voters, one of the highest proportion among VCA counties. It joined the program in 2022. Its current voter outreach budget is $77,500.

The plan describes “PSAs, feature stories and in-person outreach” as “a no to low-cost option that will not impact the designated outreach budget.” Bilingual PSAs are required under California election law. The plan includes plan includes a $27,500 outreach budget, bilingual workshops, mailers, and media partnerships. The Secretary of State approved this plan in October 2025.

Madera County

Madera County joined the VCA in 2018, one of five original pilot counties. It is 44.1% Latino eligible voters. The county’s EAP, adopted in September 2023, includes this language regarding planned voter education workshops: “Collateral to be used during workshops is still being developed at this time.”

In 2020, Madera did not track staff hours dedicated to voter outreach and could not report to researchers what it had done. Its social media outreach budget was $0 in 2022. The plan states the VCA “has had a positive impact on voter participation” without citing supporting data.

Higher-Performing Counties

San Mateo County, one of the five original VCA counties, tracked 1,225.7 staff hours spent on voter education in 2020. The county spent $1.02 per registered voter from a $450,000 base budget. It targeted specific neighborhoods in North Fair Oaks and East Palo Alto with community-based outreach, and ran a text message pilot reaching 500 young voters in low-turnout areas.

Los Angeles County spent $11.5 million in 2020, $2.06 per registered voter. Its current voter outreach program operates in 18 languages. Orange County developed a standalone Voter Education and Outreach Plan with five numbered goals, each with specified methods for assessing effectiveness.

These counties operate under the same statutory framework and face the same Secretary of State approval process as El Dorado and Imperial. The variation in outreach investment across counties is substantial, and the approval process does not appear to account for it.

Commitments Without Measurable Outcomes

Across the majority of EAPs, the same structural gap appears: detailed lists of planned activities, no commitments to measurable outcomes. No county sets a specific target for voter awareness among historically underrepresented communities. No county establishes a mechanism for evaluating whether outreach reached the populations it named as priorities.

The counties with the highest shares of Latino eligible voters tend to have among the lowest outreach budgets relative to population. Imperial, at approximately 70% Latino, has a $77,500 outreach budget. Kings, at approximately 50% Latino, has a budget in the $47,250–$48,750 range. San Benito, at approximately 58% Latino, has a larger budget but no independently audited performance data.

The USC study found that Latino and Asian American eligible voters were less likely than white non-Latino voters to be aware that voting options had changed in their counties. Those are the same communities that counties identified in their EAPs as outreach priorities.

Open Questions for Sacramento

Myers asked reporters to read the plans and compare the commitments to voter experience. The plans are public records. The CID data provides a baseline for the 15 counties audited in 2020. For the 15 counties that joined after 2020, no comparable independent audit has been conducted or publicly released.

Several questions follow from this record. Has the Secretary of State ever rejected or required substantive revisions to a county’s outreach plan? What criteria does the SOS apply in evaluating whether a plan is adequate? Did the SOS review El Dorado County’s 2020 performance before approving the 2025 renewal? Does the SOS compare promised outreach activity to actual spending before granting approvals? Why were the CID findings not transmitted to the VCA Task Force?

This analysis represents a starting point. We reviewed all 30 current Election Administration Plans, cross-referenced the 15 original counties against the 2020 USC audit data, and identified the most significant gaps between what counties committed to and what the evidence shows they delivered. But a more thorough investigation would require pulling actual outreach spending records from each county, requesting correspondence between county elections offices and the Secretary of State on plan approvals, and interviewing the communities that the outreach was supposed to reach.

The material for that investigation is largely public. The plans are posted at sos.ca.gov. The approval letters are next to them. The USC research is available and has been since May 2022.

What has been absent is sustained media interest in the question of whether a major election reform has delivered on its equity commitments, and whether the state’s oversight of that reform is functioning as the law intended.

California runs its elections with the Voter’s Choice Act every two years. The next primary under the system will be in 2028. The patterns documented here are not fixed. They can be changed by public pressure, legislative oversight, or the Secretary of State choosing to treat its approval authority as something more than a formality. But that requires someone to keep asking the hard questions.