LA Squawk Box for Tuesday, June 2, 2026
It's Election Day. The LA Reporter's guide for monitoring the election situation, Huang campaign still trying to get matching funds on election's eve, and PDI tracker shows strong voter turnout.
What’s happening today?
The LA Reporter has a guide for monitoring the situation of the LA city election: Election Day is here. Long live election day. Polls close today, but it will take several days for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk to process all of the ballots received. There’s a glut of voter guides, but The LA Reporter is providing a different kind of guide — one that gets you through the days of results trickling out. It focuses more on how to check the results, since knowing what is about to or has already happened, even if we don’t have much control over it now, has its appeal. The results have implications for what’s going to happen in LA politics and policy. And I know you’re excited or nervous about all that if you’re subscribed to newsletters like The LA Reporter, and the LA Squawk Box. Read the guide here.
What just happened?
Should the Sheriff and District Attorney appoint members to LA County’s new Ethics Commission? Veteran journalist Robert Greene provides an update on LA County offcials’ effort to create their first ever Ethics Commission, and one thing that has been a bit of a controversy is around whether the Sheriff and the District Attorney should be able to appoint membera to the critical oversight panel. An interesting detail in the story is that Derek Hsieh, executive director of the association for deputy Sheriffs, ALADS, said he’s okay with excluding the Sheriff from appointing someone to the county’s Ethics Commission. Hsieh sits on the task force implementing the governance changes approved by voters as part of Measure G — which include expanding the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members, and creating an elected CEO whose duties are similar to that of LA city’s mayor — that worked on the proposal for the Ethics Commission. Here’s an earlier story by Greene, for background about this panel getting created.
Huang campaign, yet to unlock matching funds, does last minute fundraising push on eve of election: Rae Huang’s campaign sent out an email to supporters, on the eve of election day, seeking donations and saying they are close to “maximizing” on matching funds. However, there was no matching funds posted for Huang’s campaign as of late morning the next day. The campaign had previously said they were hoping to get a check by last week, as early as Tuesday. Those statements mirrored earlier hopes that also did not ultimately get fulfille as reality. Campaigns can still try to resolve debt, including via matching funds, but that was not a reason specifically stated for the fundraising push by Huang’s campaign on Monday night. Their stated reason was that the funds raised would “have an outsized impact on our ability to finish strong and continue building this movement beyond Election Day,” which appears to hint at the funds being used after. The LA Reporter published a story last week about the Huang campaign’s struggles with qualifying for matching funds, despite making claims as early as two months prior that not only had they unlocked the funds, they were the first ones to do it.
New state law leads to brief hiccup for LA candidates going to vote at the polls: The LA Times reports that some LA city election candidates had some trouble voting, because their names and other information were kept off the ballot for privacy reasons due to a new state law, AB 1392. The candidates who were told they weren’t listed on the voter rolls including Controller Kenneth Mejia, Council member Eunisses Hernandez, and a candidate Maria Lou Colanche. Some were able to fill out provisional ballots, while others filled out and submitted their mail-in ballot. Mejia said there ought to be a way for the poll workers to still have acccess to rolls that list their information. Election officials said candidates were told about the new law when they registered to be on the ballot, and were told they could opt out. The law was proposed, and adopted, after Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse were killed in an attack last June.
There looks to be strong voter turnout this election: PDI’s Paul Mitchell report a huge dump of returned ballots on Monday, June 1, as shown on the tracker created by his firm, which provides voter data to campaigns. You can find PDI’s tracker on ballots returned here. If you poke around on the tracker, you’ll see that turnout before election day was already close to what the 2022 voter turnout ended up being after everything had been counted, indicating potential for strong voter turnout, which is quite interesting for a primary election and one that’s inbetween presidential elections. PDI this year added this prior election data, and it’s been helpful for comparing a comparable election to this one, in terms of turnout, which by the way, is broken down by age and party affiliation — something that still matters despite LA city races being technically non-partisan.