California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Thursday, October 29, that he is deploying election lawyers to key battleground congressional districts across California ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, and warned President Donald Trump that illegally seizing ballots in the state is now a felony. In a post addressed as “a warning to Donald Trump,” Newsom wrote: “I'm deploying election lawyers to key battleground districts in California to protect every vote. And I just made it a FELONY to illegally seize ballots.”

Source: The Source

According to the reporting on the announcement, the election attorneys will be sent to several closely watched districts — CA-6, CA-13, CA-22, CA-45 and CA-48 — and nearly 1,000 volunteers are also being mobilised to monitor voting activity and help safeguard the count. Two of the named districts, CA-13 and CA-22, cover Central Valley communities around Modesto, Merced and the southern valley, where many Punjabi and Sikh families live, farm and vote.

The felony law behind the warning — signed on September 19

The legal muscle behind Thursday's warning is Assembly Bill 282, authored by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin. The bill was approved by the governor and filed with the Secretary of State on September 19, 2026, as Chapter 330, and it took effect immediately as an urgency statute. It added Section 18579 to the California Elections Code.

Source: California Legislative Information — AB 282 text

Under AB 282, it is a felony, punishable by imprisonment for 16 months, or two or three years, to seize, or to cause or assist in the seizure of, ballots, election records or certified voting technology before election results are certified by the elections official. A person in authority who directs someone under their supervision to carry out such a seizure faces a longer felony term of two, three or four years.

AB 282 was the centrepiece of an election-protection package Newsom signed on September 19 at the Democracy Center in Los Angeles. The governor's office said the package also included SB 259 by Senator Aisha Wahab, which makes it a felony for a person in authority to direct someone under their supervision to interfere with the delivery or return of a vote-by-mail ballot, and a misdemeanour for a person entrusted with such a ballot to interfere with its delivery to a voter.

Other parts of the September package require a local agency or elections official to notify the Secretary of State and the Attorney General within one calendar day of learning of any warrant, subpoena or active law-enforcement investigation seeking election records or certified voting technology (AB 1664), make it a crime to take election materials or voting technology from the custody of election officials (SB 1418), and expand language-access services and translated election materials for voters (SB 1360) — a provision of direct interest to Punjabi-speaking voters in the Central Valley.

Source: Governor's office release, via The Californer

At the September signing, Newsom said: “California will stop him at every opportunity. We have no bigger task than fighting to protect the right to vote from interference and meddling.” Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the package “ensures that California voters will not be silenced or intimidated,” and Attorney General Rob Bonta said California had secured a US Supreme Court victory blocking the Trump administration from implementing sweeping changes to mail voting for the November midterms. Those statements are the governor's office's account of the dispute; the administration in Washington disputes the interference claims.

The federal side, and why this week matters

Thursday's deployment came one day after the US Department of Justice told a federal court, in a case brought by the NAACP, that agents and employees of the FBI and ICE will not serve as monitors during the midterm elections. In that filing, reported by Reuters on October 28, the department said election monitors will mainly observe polling places and take notes, will be prohibited from carrying firearms, and will not be acting as law-enforcement personnel while monitoring. Employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the ATF and the DEA may still serve as monitors.

Source: Reuters, via TBS News

For California's large Punjabi diaspora, the fight is not abstract. Central Valley districts named in the deployment are home to gurdwaras, trucking businesses and farm families whose members vote in large numbers, many of them by mail. State officials say the new language-access rules and the one-day notification duty are designed so that any attempt to obtain ballots or voter data in those counties becomes public almost immediately, rather than surfacing after the count.