Majority of California voters fear federal government may try to stop vote count, poll finds

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Set us as preferred Nearly two-thirds of California voters are worried that the Trump administration may try to halt the vote count early, stoking disquieting levels of election anxiety on the eve of the midterms, a new poll shows.Those fears arise as the Justice Department continues its aggressive efforts to challenge or wrest control over state voting processes, including threatening to prosecute uncooperative elections officials in California, after years of baseless claims of widespread election fraud by the Republican president.

Among California voters, 63% worry that the federal government may attempt to stop the counting of votes in California and other states in the days following Tuesday’s election, according to the poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times.Around half of voters — 49% — are not confident that the state’s election will be free of federal interference, the survey found.“Both of the items, together, I think should raise alarms for threats against democracy in California,” said Matt Barreto, director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project.California voters also have grievances with the state’s ballot propositions, a slate of 14 measures that include new taxes on billionaires and funding for cancer research.

More than 8 in 10 of the state’s likely voters said that this year’s propositions were worded in a way that made them hard to understand and that special interests groups have too much influence over which propositions appear on the ballot.Those concerns were shared across partisan lines, unlike how Californians felt about the threats posed to integrity of elections by the Trump administration.

The high level of fear in the state reflects the fact that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by nearly 2 to 1 in California.Whil...