Steve Hilton touts his success in California system he called an ‘absolute farce'

SACRAMENTO - On Tuesday afternoon, Republican Steve Hilton posted a video to social media in which he called California elections an "absolute farce." He blasted the state's practice of mailing ballots to all registered voters, its rules for verifying ballots and the slow pace of ballot processing.

But he also said the most important update he wanted to share is that he was in second place in the polls.

*

Related: Executions among issues in play in Becerra-Hilton race

*

Read more: Steve Hilton secures No. 2 spot in governor's race, will face Xavier Becerra in November

"We are still confident we are going to be in the top two," he said.

As election fraud conspiracy theories proliferate among his conservative supporters, Hilton's comments were emblematic of a careful dance he's been performing. As results continued to trickle in over the last week, Hilton has continued to echo Republican complaints about California's system, while simultaneously touting his own performance within that system as legitimate.

Now that Hilton has amassed so many votes that he will advance to the general election in November, where he will square off against Democrat Xavier Becerra, he'll increasingly be forced to perform these balancing acts to win over voters in liberal California as a Donald Trump-endorsed Republican.

Hilton placed second in the primary in part because of Trump's endorsement, which helped vault Hilton past the other major Republican candidate in the race, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. But the endorsement represents a major liability for him in the general election, where most voters hold very negative views of the president.

Hilton has stopped short of the harsh critiques made by the president, who has asserted without evidence that California's elections are "rigged." Trump has been particularly critical of the Los Angeles mayor's race, where Republican reality TV personality Spencer Pratt placed third behind two Democrats.

California mails a ballot to every registered voter that they can return via mail or at a vote center. The system aims to make voting more convenient and increase participation, but mail ballots require a signature check, an extra layer of security that adds time to the vote-counting process. Ballots returned via mail also continue arriving at county registrars' offices for days after the election, and can be counted as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

That has provided fodder for conservatives angry with Pratt's poor showing. Pratt was always a longshot candidate in heavily Democratic Los Angeles, but conservatives have pointed to his higher vote share on Election Day, when roughly half of ballots had been counted, as evidence of something fishy.

Asked Tuesday about Pratt and potential fraud, Hilton said that while he and his team have been vigilant in looking for any instances of election impropriety or fraud and has a team of lawyers standing by to intervene, they have found none.

"We've seen nothing that would warrant that kind of intervention," he said.

As part of his election critiques, Hilton has seized on a provision in state law that says that if a ballot is not post-marked, or if the post-mark is illegible, that election workers should rely on the date the voter wrote on the ballot to check whether it was cast on or before Election Day. That, Hilton asserts, could allow a voter to illegally vote after the election. But he has not pointed to any instances where that has happened, nor is it clear how a voter would pull off such a scheme. Counties do process ballots returned via mail that arrive after Election Day, but those ballots are postmarked or date-stamped because they are sent through the mail. Ballots that do not have postmarks because they are returned by hand are only accepted through Election Day.

Hilton has also expressed support for a measure on the November ballot to implement additional voter ID requirements in California, which he asserts would help speed up ballot processing.

"If we had voter ID, we could get this done quickly, confidently, securely," he said Tuesday.

But that measure includes provisions that would require election workers to perform additional checks of mail ballots, meaning that rather than speeding up future counting, it could prolong results even further.

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 10:37 AM.