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Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Padilla in January 2021 to fill Vice President Kamala Harris’ vacant senate seat after she was sworn in to her new White House position.

Californians elected Harris to the senate in 2016, a six-year term that runs through January 2023. But a law signed by Newsom last year prevents Padilla from finishing Harris’ term as an appointed senator.

Instead, he must compete with a slew of other candidates for both the partial term and for a new six-year stint.

Voting experts say there’s nothing wrong with the ballot. It’s just a strange set of circumstances that California voters will be called upon to sort out — both in the June primary and again this fall in the November general election.

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With a political landscape that remains polarized and after several examples of harassment, California lawmakers are now considering a bill to protect election poll workers. 

"People who are frustrated with the conduct of election or the outcome of elections, are starting to take it out on the people administering elections," said the author of the bill, State Senator Josh Newman (D-Fullerton). 

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Elections in the U.S. have become so polarizing that California is considering treating poll workers with the same caution as domestic violence victims by letting them keep their addresses hidden from public records.

The California Legislature on Monday advanced a bill that would add some election workers to the state’s “Safe at Home” program that’s lets some people to keep their physical addresses secret. The program was originally designed to protect domestic violence victims, but has since been expanded to include people who work at abortion clinics and their patients.

From her second-floor office window in Medford, Oregon, elections administrator Chris Walker vividly remembers reading the unsettling words painted in big white letters on the parking lot below in late November 2020: “Vote don’t work. Next time bullets.”

Her heart sank, she recalls, wondering whether or when the threat would materialize. Former President Donald Trump had won her southern Oregon community, and despite his lie that the election was stolen, she never expected this anger.

While her office is nonpartisan, Walker, the Jackson County clerk, has been a registered Republican for as long as she’s been able to vote. She’s frustrated to see the amount of election misinformation from members of her party. The pressure from constituents has not let up over the past two years. In emails, she is called a crook and a criminal just for doing her job: running elections.