California’s jungle primaries have sparked widespread discussion of election fraud over the past week, as batches of mail-in ballots have eroded the comfortable leads of Republican candidates. One Republican, however, will be advancing to November’s general election. Political strategist and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, an outspoken ally of President Donald Trump, was officially declared by Decision Desk HQ one of the California gubernatorial primary’s two winners on Monday, and will advance to the general election in November, where he will face off against Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra, former Health and Human Services secretary under former President Joe Biden.

Early last week, in the immediate wake of the election, Hilton was ahead of Becerra by approximately 160,000 votes. Batches of mail-in ballots — that are still being counted; as of time of writing, only about 83% of votes have been counted, one week after the election — eroded Hilton’s lead, and Becerra was declared one of the primary election’s two winners on Friday. Meanwhile, Democrat Tom Steyer gained significant ground thanks to the mail-in ballot dumps, leaping forward by nearly one million votes over the course of several days. The surge in mail-in ballots has also seen Los Angeles city councilwoman and Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman (D) leapfrog ahead of Republican Spencer Pratt in the L.A. mayoral primary, despite Pratt’s commanding lead over Raman last week.

The Golden State’s lengthy, shadowy ballot-counting process has garnered national attention, with the president accusing California Democrats of rigging elections against Republican candidates. “They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election,” Trump said Sunday, before storming out of an NBC News interview. “You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged, your network knows that they’re rigged,” he continued. “Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.”

Democrats have been quick to respond, claiming that there is no evidence of election fraud and charging that Trump intends to lead the GOP in allegations of widespread voter fraud if Republicans suffer a defeat in November’s midterm elections. “There are no details, there is no specifics, there is no specific allegation of any individualized act of voter fraud,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said in response to the president, adding that alleged election fraud is “only a figment of the imagination of Trump and others who follow that conspiracy theory.” He insisted that “there is no widespread voter fraud.”

Bonta, however, is currently fighting the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to prevent a federal audit of the state’s voter rolls. First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli remarked, “If California genuinely wants voters to trust its elections, it should open its records, not fight to keep them closed. What are they afraid of?” Essayli further reported that the DOJ has opened “multiple election fraud investigations” in California.

Just last month, California resident Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong pleaded guilty to federal charges of election tampering. According to the DOJ, Armstrong had routinely been paying homeless people to register to vote, and was herself being paid for every individual that she registered to vote. Since the homeless people she solicited voter registrations from did not have home addresses or mailing addresses, Armstrong typically provided them her own address so that they could successfully register.

“Because California automatically sends a vote-by-mail ballot to every registered voter, this also meant ballots in some homeless individuals’ names could have the potential to be sent” to Armstrong’s home, the DOJ noted, “where the homeless individual did not live or collect mail.” Armstrong “didn’t do this for charity or out of the kindness of her heart: The more signatures she got from registered voters, the more her supervisors paid her,” Essayli pointed out. “California’s lax attitude towards voter registration endangers our democracy. We won’t stand by when ballot box corruption threatens the foundations of our republic.”

A new lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch also alleges that nearly one million individuals currently named on California’s voter rolls are ineligible voters. According to the lawsuit, at least 873,092 names on California’s voter rolls are likely ineligible voters — those who have moved out of state or died — which means that those 873,092 names are likely being mailed ballots. “Judicial Watch’s federal lawsuit confirms California has a dirty voting rolls crisis — with thousands of old names on the rolls going back at least 10 years,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. “Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections. And California and its counties must take immediate steps to clean the over 870,000 dirty names on the voting lists.”

Pollster and political strategist Mark Penn, a former advisor to then-President Bill Clinton and now a Trump supporter, detailed the major flaws with California’s elections in a social media post. He noted that California not only allows mail-in ballots received for up to one week following the election to be counted but also allows ballot harvesting, which he described as “the mass canvassing and collection of ballots favorable to you.” The dual election integrity flaws, he said, allow Democrats to “game the system” by effectively determining how many votes are needed to beat a Republican candidate and then forge that many fraudulent ballots. California’s vote-counting system, he said, is “a model of how to sow doubt by taking weeks rather than hours to count votes.”

“[B]allot harvesting is banned in most states and should be banned everywhere as it promotes people sitting around tables pressured to vote certain ways as their ballots are collected by partisans. Add loose registration rules in states with a lot of non-citizens and you compound these problems,” Penn suggested. “Mail in votes should be counted only if received by the time the polls close and ballot harvesting should be banned and those two reforms would return fairness. And of course in California proof of citizenship is essential as well to provide confidence in the count. But it’s the harvesting rules that likely are the most problematic.”