Ballots and election mail keep showing up at Los Angeles-area homes for people who moved away years ago, and the homeowners who say they've tried everything to stop it are running out of patience. Multiple residents across Pacific Palisades and the Westside told The California Post that California's voter registration system has failed to purge outdated records, leaving stacks of undeliverable ballots in mailboxes that belong to someone else.

The complaints surfaced just as a federal lawsuit landed against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, alleging the state is carrying more than 873,000 inactive voter registrations, some dating back over a decade. The timing is not coincidental. It is the predictable result of a state that treats voter-roll maintenance as an afterthought.

Ballots for people who left California years ago

Sue Pascoe, a Pacific Palisades resident and publisher of Circling The News, told The California Post that ballots continued arriving at her address for family members who no longer live in the state. One son is registered to vote in Texas. Another served in the military and spent time living outside the country. Her daughter moved away almost six years ago.

Pascoe said she tried to fix the problem, updating records through the Department of Motor Vehicles, repeatedly attempting to remove the outdated registrations. Nothing worked.

"If they're registered somewhere else, why are ballots still coming here?" Pascoe asked. She also raised a question that should trouble anyone who cares about clean elections:

"It's the expense, the waste and the question of what happens to all these ballots."

Pascoe lost her home in the January 2025 Palisades Fire. Even that catastrophe apparently did not prompt the system to catch up with reality.

She is not alone. Sharon Kilbride, also of Pacific Palisades, told the outlet she still receives ballots for people who haven't used her address in years. Kilbride said she had previously allowed several individuals participating in assistance programs to use her address as a mailing location while they sought housing and services. Those individuals moved on long ago.

"One has been gone for four years and another for five years," Kilbride said.

On the Westside, resident Pia Altavilla reported that her family still receives ballots for her brother, despite his having moved to Utah four years ago and establishing residency there. Election mail keeps arriving at the family's Los Angeles address anyway.

The pattern is surfacing elsewhere across Los Angeles County, too. A social media user posting under the handle @Tiffs_Notes claimed in a June 4, 2026 post on X that she receives ballots for all six of her adult children, even though each one has moved, notified the state, and re-registered in a new county.

"My six kids have all moved, notified the state and re-registered to vote in their new counties and we STILL receive a TON of ballots for all of them for every election!!"

She added: "Some people wouldn't think twice about using all these ballots to cast more votes!"

A federal lawsuit puts numbers to the problem

Days before California's June 2 primary election, Judicial Watch filed a federal lawsuit against Secretary of State Weber on behalf of Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner and the American Independent Party of California. The complaint alleges that California has failed to properly maintain voter registration records as required under the National Voter Registration Act.

The numbers in the filing are striking. The complaint identifies 873,092 inactive voter registrations still sitting on California's rolls. Of those, 326,608 have been inactive for at least three federal election cycles, roughly six years. Another 151,202 have been inactive for four cycles, approximately eight years. Some registrations, the lawsuit alleges, date back more than a decade.

The plaintiffs argue California has not made a reasonable effort to remove registrations belonging to voters who moved away or became otherwise ineligible. Under the National Voter Registration Act, states are required to maintain accurate rolls. California, the lawsuit contends, is not doing so.

The problem is not unique to the Golden State. The Department of Justice has sued 29 states over registration records, and recent federal findings have identified hundreds of thousands of dead voters still on rolls nationwide.

A problem that keeps getting worse, and getting ignored

What makes the California situation so galling is the sheer duration. These are not fresh oversights. Homeowners describe ballots arriving for people who left four, five, six years ago. The lawsuit describes registrations inactive for a decade or longer. At every level, the system had time to self-correct. It didn't.

The California Post said it reached out to the LA County registrar's office to ask about the extra ballots. No response from that office was reported.

That silence is its own kind of answer. When residents do the right thing, updating DMV records, contacting election offices, re-registering in new states, and the system still cannot stop sending ballots to the wrong address, the failure belongs to the institution, not the individual.

The broader context makes the stakes plain. A 2012 Pew Center on the States study estimated that one in eight voter registrations nationwide was inaccurate, out of date, or duplicated, including 2.8 million people registered in more than one state and 1.8 million dead voters still on the rolls. As Fox News reported, examples from Virginia, Kansas, New York City, and California-related cases have shown that noncitizen voting, duplicate registrations, and voting under another person's name have occurred in practice.

Concrete cases reinforce the point. A former Kansas mayor who was a noncitizen pleaded guilty to voting illegally in multiple elections. The case demonstrated that dirty voter rolls are not just a bookkeeping nuisance, they create openings for real fraud.

Meanwhile, questions about voter eligibility and dual-state registration continue to surface in political campaigns. A Michigan Senate candidate faced scrutiny for casting ballots in California after claiming she had moved permanently.

Federal efforts to tighten election integrity have met fierce resistance. The SAVE America Act, designed to strengthen voter-eligibility verification, hit procedural roadblocks in the Senate, drawing sharp responses from the White House.

What happens to all those ballots?

Sue Pascoe's question deserves a real answer: What happens to the ballots that arrive at addresses where the intended recipient no longer lives?

The California Post did not report any evidence that the ballots described by homeowners were cast or used. But the question is not whether fraud occurred in these specific cases. The question is whether a system that mails ballots to addresses where people haven't lived for half a decade is a system anyone should trust.

Every undeliverable ballot is a loose thread. In a state that mails ballots to every registered voter, 873,000 inactive registrations represent 873,000 opportunities for something to go wrong. Not all of them will. But the state's apparent refusal to clean its own rolls means California is choosing not to know.

Defenders of loose voter-roll maintenance often argue that safeguards prevent fraudulent ballots from being counted. But safeguards work only when the underlying data is accurate. When the rolls themselves are bloated with registrations belonging to people who moved to Texas, Utah, or out of the country years ago, the safeguards are built on sand.

The National Voter Registration Act exists precisely because Congress recognized that states need a legal obligation to maintain their rolls. California's alleged failure to comply is not a minor administrative lapse. It is a refusal to perform a basic function of election administration.

Accountability starts with honesty

Secretary of State Shirley Weber now faces a federal lawsuit demanding that California do what the law already requires. The homeowners quoted in this story have done their part, updating records, contacting agencies, trying to stop ballots from arriving for people who left years ago. The state has not done its part.

The LA County registrar's office has not publicly addressed the complaints. Weber's office has not responded to the substance of the lawsuit in any statement reported so far. The silence from California's election officials is consistent with a political culture that treats voter-roll integrity as a partisan talking point rather than a civic obligation.

Clean voter rolls are not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. They are a prerequisite for elections that voters can trust. When a homeowner in Pacific Palisades can lose her house in a wildfire and still receive ballots for family members who left the state six years ago, the system is not working.

California has 873,000 reasons to fix it. Whether it has the political will is another question entirely.