“They send out 38 million votes. Nobody knows where they're going.”

Press gaggle before departure, Joint Base Andrews

California does not have 38 million voters to send ballots to. The Secretary of State's Report of Registration of May 18, 2026, two days before he spoke, counted a record 23,155,447 registered voters, about 15 million fewer than the ballots he described. County officials mail vote-by-mail ballots to all active registered voters, so the number mailed cannot exceed the number registered.

Where the ballots go is also tracked. The state's Where's My Ballot service lets a voter see where their ballot is and its status at every step. This entry has no countervailing fact on the record. The nearest available defence is a pending federal suit alleging that about 873,000 long-inactive registrations remain on California's rolls, which is a claim about roll maintenance rather than about ballots mailed, and it could only be cited from a court docket that was not retrieved.