Election Day Is Almost Here, and Remember: Polls and Pundits and Forecasts Can Be Wrong, So Never Assume–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Nov. 2, 2026

Indy Digest: Nov. 2, 2026

Tomorrow is Election Day!

I am about to share with you the first three paragraphs of a story published today by The New York Times. Please read it (as well as the rest of the story, if you’d like; this is a gift link), and then take a few moments to ponder how incredible and atypical (and NOT in a good way) it is that we’re dealing with all of this right now in the United States of America.

Local law enforcement and election officials are bracing for a tense Election Day as President Trump has kept up a sustained attack on the integrity of U.S. elections, including by offering a $1 million reward for information that leads to an election fraud conviction.

In response to Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about voting problems and his campaign to assert more federal control over state-run elections, officials have prepared for potential worst-case scenarios in which the federal government tries to intervene in voting.

Now some local authorities have said they also fear that the president’s offer of a large financial incentive could foster unrest or even vigilantism, with Americans eying one another with suspicion as they head to the polls.

Amazing. Horrifying.

Here in California, the legal battles continue over more than 20,000 voters (including 1,355 here in Riverside County) the U.S. Justice Department says may be non-citizens. Well, it turns out that a big chunk of these potential non-citizen voters apprently do not exist. PBS News reports:

More than 4 in 10 names flagged as possible noncitizen voters in California by the Trump administration cannot be found on the state’s voter rolls, according to a legal filing Saturday by an immigrant-rights group. …

The contention was made in a filing by two data analysts at the University of California, Los Angeles. They analyzed the 20,930 names that the department demanded that California election officials treat as possible illegal voters by separating their ballots during the vote count on Election Day.

Multiple judges have rejected the demand as unconstitutional and a threat to democracy, and local and state officials have said the list appears riddled with errors. …

The breadth of the problems with the list was outlined in Saturday’s filing. It describes an analysis by two members of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project, who filed a lawsuit challenging it with the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA.

The research found that 8,880 of the names, representing 42% of the entire list, do not correspond to anyone in California’s current voter file. It also found at least 22 are U.S. citizens, and many more may correspond to those of confirmed citizens.

Despite all of this, the feds have continued their effort to keep the supposed ballots from these supposed people from being counted—and they were denied, yet again, by the highest court in the land today. As CNBC reported: “The Supreme Court, in an order Monday evening, denied the Department of Justice’s last-minute request to temporarily block California from counting mail-in ballots from about 20,000 voters who it suggested may not be U.S. citizens. The one-sentence order came hours after the DOJ sought the injunction, and on the eve of Election Day.”

There’s a two-word phrase to describe all of this: desperate incompetence.

One last thing: No matter what the polls and pundits and forecasts are saying right now, we can’t assume ANYTHING about the 2026 election results.

Polls and pundits and forecasts can be wrong. We know this from recent experience.

If you’re a registered voter who has not yet voted, get to the polls tomorrow (Tuesday). If you have your ballot but have not yet returned it, take it to a polling place or drop-box location tomorrow (Tuesday).

Don’t assume. NEVER assume.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Speaking of not assuming: Our partners at CalMatters offer this friendly reminder that in California, vote-counting goes on for a while—and the final results may be quite different from the results as of Election Night: “It happens in close races in almost every major election. Early California returns show Republicans winning or at least faring better than expected. Then, as votes are counted over the following days, the tallies shift in Democrats’ favor. This ‘blue shift’ or ‘red mirage’ isn’t a result of California Democrats ‘finding votes’ or rigging elections, as President Donald Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claimed. … The shifts in early tallies, experts say, are merely the result of when and how Democrats and Republicans tend to vote and the length of time it takes California election officials to count millions of ballots.”

• Also from CalMatters: Some California counties’ election officials have been going a wee bit too far with their rules regarding media coverage of polling places—and the secretary of state’s office may actually be at fault: “Some of California’s most populous counties are issuing guidelines restricting the press from documenting Election Day proceedings at polling places in ways that appear to violate state statutes and the First Amendment. A coalition of media outlets, led by CalMatters, and a First Amendment advocacy group sent a letter to Kern County raising these concerns. The coalition has identified other counties with similar prohibitions. These restrictions potentially stem from recent notices and poll worker training standards from the California secretary of state, which sets policy on election rules. In the guidelines, electioneering—or efforts to persuade voters to vote a certain way—is prohibited. The guidelines prohibit photographing or recording voters who are entering, inside or exiting a polling place without their permission. But as long as outlets do not try to influence voters, these restrictions go beyond what state law limits and possibly run afoul of constitutional protections of a free press, said Ginny LaRoe the advocacy director at the First Amendment Coalition, which is part of the group raising alarm. … On Oct. 27 the Kern County election office issued media guidelines that prohibited media personnel from filming from within 100 feet of poll sites and ballot drop boxes.”

• ProPublica published a piece headlined “‘Chaos’ in the Air: Five Ways Voting Could Be Disrupted on Election Day.” A snippet: “An incident in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle, illustrates the widespread anxiety about law enforcement at the polls. Mark Earley, the county’s supervisor of elections, told ProPublica he was ‘furious’ when two marked U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicles parked outside the county’s busiest early voting location last month, after he’d been repeatedly reassured by the administration that agents would not do this. He reported the sighting to the FBI, then learned that the agents, who were headed out of state, had just stopped by to try to vote themselves. The episode generated a flurry of news coverage. ‘Given the negative media coverage regarding federal agents at the polls, it shows pretty bad judgment that they showed up in their official vehicles,’ Earley said. It’s against the law for federal law enforcement to be near polling places.”

• In non-election news, CNN reports on a new human bird-flu death: “A person in Yakima County, Washington, who caught bird flu after being exposed to infected dairy cows has died following a severe illness, county health officials said Sunday. This is the first known person in the US to die from complications from avian influenza in 2026 and the third in the US to die from bird flu since February 2024, when the virus jumped into dairy cattle for the first time. … The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded bird flu cases in more than 70 people in the US since 2024. Most of the people who’ve become ill have worked on farms with infected cattle or poultry. Health officials say that most cases have been mild and all have been so-called dead-end infections, in which a virus jumps from an animal to a person but doesn’t spread farther.”

• And finally … today’s recall news involves … blood pressure medications! USA Today elaborates: “More than 3,700 bottles of blood pressure pills (generic Tribenzor) have been recalled nationwide. Macleods Pharmaceuticals first recalled the tablets on Oct. 7 for ‘failed dissolution specifications,’ meaning the drug does not release its active ingredients at a proper rate inside the body. This can lead to the drug being ineffective in treating the condition it’s supposed to—in this case, it may not lower blood pressure as expected. The Food and Drug Administration rated the recall as Class II on Oct. 26, meaning use of the product may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences, but is unlikely to cause serious health issues.”

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