The Brief

When public officials tasked with holding criminals accountable cheat to win a conviction, it can lead to reduced sentences — even freedom — for other convicted criminals, sometimes dozens of them. It can also give people who were wrongfully convicted a shot at redemption.

A new tally released earlier this month lists criminal cases against 57 Orange County defendants that were tainted as a result of official misconduct uncovered in the trial against the county's deadliest mass shooter, Scott Dekraai, who gunned down eight people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011.

In these cases, which include 35 homicide cases, charges against a defendant were dropped or lessened, or the defendant was granted a new trial. For five defendants, all charges were dismissed.

"Either an innocent person was charged or a guilty person went free, neither of which we like as a society," said Maurice Possley, senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations.

The tally was done by Scott Sanders, the O.C. assistant public defender who, nearly a decade ago, was largely responsible for exposing the county’s notorious "snitch scandal." The number of cases tainted by the scandal is much higher than previous, publicly released estimates. And Sanders said there could be many more.

"I'm not saying it's complete by any nature," Sanders said of the list. "It's not."

On top of the cases already impacted by the snitch scandal's long reach, Sanders outlined dozens more cases in a recent court filing that could be revisited because of new evidence of potential misconduct. That misconduct, Sanders alleges, was carried out by O.C. law enforcement officers and a former top prosecutor who is now a superior court judge.

"Whether those cases get justice is very much in question at this moment," Sanders told LAist.

The O.C. District Attorney's Office has yet to file a formal response to Sanders' allegations, which the public defender says justify dropping murder charges against one of his clients. An initial court hearing on the matter is scheduled for Friday in San Diego.

Here's how misconduct uncovered in one case can affect so many other, seemingly unrelated cases.

Assistant public defender Scott Sanders (right) surfaced evidence of a secret, unconstitutional jailhouse informant program while defending Scott Dekraai (left), accused of killing eight people in a Seal Beach beauty salon.

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O.C.'s snitch scandal, a recap

The official misconduct uncovered in the Dekraai murder case, which has been confirmed by courts, internal investigations and the Department of Justice, was twofold: misusing jailhouse informants, commonly known as snitches, and hiding information about it from defendants.

The misconduct happened under the previous O.C. district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, who lost his re-election bid to current district attorney Todd Spitzer in 2018. Spitzer has implemented reforms and pledged not to tolerate cheating among prosecutors and law enforcement.

Rackauckas, who is now in private practice, did not immediately return a voicemail left on his cell phone asking for comment.

Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff said jailhouse informants are a common feature of the U.S. criminal justice system. But the way the system works, and its abuses, are often kept quiet.

"Every once in a while there's an enormous debacle … that shines a light not just on an individual jailhouse snitch, but the marketplace within that particular jail," she said.

That's what happened in the Dekraai case.

"Orange County, I think, can fairly be said to now be the poster child for the institution-wide jailhouse snitch scandal model," Natapoff said.

It's not illegal for authorities to use confidential informants — in or out of custody — to collect information. But once someone has been charged with a crime, the Sixth Amendment and subsequent court decisions guarantee them the right to have an attorney present during questioning by a law enforcement representative, including an informant secretly working for law enforcement. This is sometimes called the "Massiah" rule after a Supreme Court case.

Prosecutors must also turn over evidence from, and about, jailhouse informants used in a defendant's criminal case because it could help the defendant question the informant's credibility. Failing to do so violates the 14th Amendment and related court decisions, which require prosecutors to share with defendants any evidence they have that could help them prove their innocence. This is sometimes known as the "Brady" rule after another Supreme Court case.

The origins of the snitch scandal

In 2014, Sanders was defending Dekraai and another man, Daniel Wozniak, who was later convicted of double murder, when he began to uncover evidence of a secret informant program in O.C. jails.

The mass murder case against Dekraai should've been a slam dunk — he confessed to the crime soon after the shooting. But deputies decided to put him in a jail cell with a confidential informant, motivated by the possibility that Dekraai might try to plead insanity, according to a 2020 audit of the misconduct commissioned by Spitzer.

Then, prosecutors hid evidence from Dekraai's defense team about the informant and his work on behalf of law enforcement.

Dekraai pleaded guilty in 2014, but his sentencing was delayed for three years while the court investigated police and prosecutor misconduct in the case. Eventually, courts removed the entire Orange County District Attorney's Office (OCDA) from Dekraai's case and ruled that he couldn't be sentenced to death because of the misconduct.

After that ruling, Paul Wilson, whose wife Christy was among those killed by Dekraai, told LAist: “They’ve taken the largest mass murder in Orange County history and they have completely and utterly screwed that case up.”

News of misconduct spreads

As people in custody and their lawyers found out about the debacle, which was extensively covered by local and national media, some discovered their own cases involved the same methods and actors as the ones behind the misconduct in Dekraai’s case.

"If you're sitting in state prison, you're going to probably know about it, you're going to hear about it," Sanders said about early news of the snitch scandal. "People would write in. People would say, 'Hey, I want to have my case addressed.' All sorts of things like that."

Some realized that police officers or sheriff's deputies who testified in their cases were associated with misconduct in the Dekraai case, giving them grounds to question those officers' testimony.

Others came to suspect there might be evidence about informants used in their case that hadn't been turned over to their defense team.

Ramon Alvarez was among those who successfully challenged his conviction. He had been found guilty in 2012 of shooting a man in the head and then storing the body in a Santa Ana yard in a kiddie pool full of ice.

His murder conviction was dismissed last year after he presented evidence that a known jailhouse informant had lied in his case in exchange for an $11,000 check from the Santa Ana Police Department. An assistant district attorney had told the jury in Alvarez's trial that the informant had not been offered anything for his testimony.

A report last year from the Justice Department confirmed that failing to disclose the police department’s payment violated Alvarez's constitutional rights. Federal investigators also pointed to the prosecutor's motive. "The prosecutor conceded during our interview that he could not have successfully prosecuted Alvarez without [the informant]’s testimony," the DOJ investigators wrote, adding that "the only reason for the jury to believe [the informant], who 'had a rap sheet a mile long,' was that he was getting nothing for his testimony."

Judge Ebrahim Baytieh, who has been accused of misconduct while a prosecutor in the O.C. District Attorney's office, now runs Orange County's CARE Court, a court-mandated mental health treatment program.

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Snitch Scandal 2.0?

In some of the cases revisited because of alleged misconduct, O.C. sheriff's deputies refused to testify about their use of informants in order to protect themselves from self-incrimination. In other words, they pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

That's what led a judge to throw out a murder conviction against Paul Smith in 2021. Smith was convicted in 2010 for allegedly stabbing his childhood friend Robert Haugen to death in 1988 and setting his body on fire in Haugen's Sunset Beach apartment.

But a judge ordered a new trial after deputies refused to testify. Spitzer, O.C.’s district attorney, said at the time that top prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, who's now an O.C. Superior Court judge, failed to turn over evidence of the informant use to the defense.

Spitzer fired Baytieh in February 2022, but the former prosecutor went on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.

In a lengthy court document filed last month in Smith's case, Sanders now alleges that Baytieh was at the center of an "enormous web of deception" designed to cover up misconduct that helped prosecutors win cases while cheating defendants out of their right to a fair trial.

[Read our story: OC Snitch Case: Former Top Prosecutor, Now Judge, Accused Of Criminal Cover-Up By Public Defender]

"As detailed for the first time in this motion, Baytieh energetically worked to prevent both the informant program from being uncovered and evidence about specific informants being disclosed because he knew that these disclosures would make it more difficult to win particular cases," Sanders wrote.

Sanders also alleges that Baytieh — who had been lauded for his ethics at the district attorney's office and put in charge of determining which evidence prosecutors needed to disclose — was in fact among the worst offenders in the jailhouse snitch scandal.

A spokesperson for Orange County Superior Court has said the court and judicial officers are prohibited by ethical rules from discussing active cases. The district attorney's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.

In the motion, Sanders cites an additional 98 cases — 45 of them involving murder charges — where he said defense attorneys should have been handed evidence that could help their clients' cases.

Sanders argues that the misconduct is so egregious that the murder charges against Smith should be dropped.

How common is this kind of misconduct?

Possley, from the National Registry of Exonerations, said we don't really know how common it is for law enforcement officials and prosecutors to withhold evidence because it's a "hidden crime."

"What we know is that sometimes this stuff comes to light decades later," he said.

The National Registry of Exonerations found in a 2020 report that official misconduct, usually by police officers or prosecutors, contributed to false convictions in 54% of cases where the defendant was later cleared of charges. Black exonerees were more likely than white exonerees to have faced misconduct in their cases, especially when charged with murder or drug crimes.

The report found that hiding evidence that could have helped a defendant prove their innocence was the most common type of misconduct, having been involved in 44% of the cases they examined.

The researchers didn't specifically look at how often the use of jailhouse informants was tied to the misconduct. But a review of the registry's database turns up 164 out of 3,385 cases in which official misconduct and jailhouse informants played a role in a person's exoneration.

The registry, which has been collecting data since 1989, defines exoneration as being completely cleared of charges based on new evidence of innocence.

Not all snitch scandals have such a far reach

Orange County is certainly not the first place to get caught up in scandals over jailhouse informants. The problem goes way back and wide — across the country and right next door in Los Angeles.

L.A.'s own jailhouse informant scandal, which came to light in the late 1980s, blew up when a prolific informant named Leslie White showed authorities how he could fake a murder confession from a defendant in jail by impersonating officials to get information about a case. He would then finagle placement in the same room as the target so he could make a confession look plausible.

"Perjury has been committed," White wrote from jail in a 1988 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "That is a fact, not a possibility."

At the time, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office said it planned to review every case in the preceding decade in which a jailhouse snitch testified to getting a confession.

A few years later, a grand jury investigating the scandal reported there were between 150 and 250 criminal cases in which jailhouse informants had testified over the previous decade. But it's unclear how many of those cases were reopened because of the damning revelations about informants in L.A. jails.

The National Registry of Exonerations includes nine people in L.A. County whose ultimate finding of innocence was at least partially due to official misconduct and the use of a jailhouse informant.

But unlike Sanders' list of cases affected by misconduct in the O.C. snitch scandal, LAist could find no record of the total number of cases impacted by L.A.'s snitch scandal, including cases in which sentences were reduced or a new trial was ordered.

Why the apparent difference? Possley said a big reason is Sanders. In L.A., there was no similarly determined defense attorney working to identify and revisit cases that may have been tainted.

"Sanders has had to swim upstream the whole goddamn time," Possley said.

He said there has historically been resistance among criminal justice officials to make the kinds of misconduct connections that Sanders has among disparate cases. "Because they know that there's a problem and that starting to tug on that string might unravel a pretty big piece of fabric," he said.

Sanders himself credits the O.C. public defender's office for giving him and other colleagues the time and resources to investigate the extent, and effects, of misconduct.

"Our office has encouraged and allowed me and others to do this work now for nearly a decade," Sanders said. "We're going into the second decade here. … And even with that, it's going to be difficult for all of the cases to get addressed in the way they should."

Natapoff, the Harvard scholar who's an expert in snitching, said the O.C. scandal is "both a cautionary tale of what happens when we leave the informant market unregulated and also a sign to us that without public defender offices and attorneys willing to spend the resources to uncover these kinds of scandals, we are likely never to learn about them."

A new conversation about criminal justice

Natapoff says informants are just one aspect of a system that has turned criminal justice into a marketplace.

"The people who run the jails understand that this market is robust, that information can be obtained — fabricated or not, as it were — and prosecutors understand that there is a machinery for producing information in the jails, which comes with its own baggage," she said.

Incarcerated people — and most anyone who's spent time in custody — also understand "that if they can produce information about a cellmate or someone else in the jail, that a reward will be forthcoming," Natapoff added.

One of the reasons the public doesn't hear more about the misuse of jailhouse informants, she said, is because the vast majority of criminal cases — about nine in 10 — end in plea deals, not trials.

"In effect, the informant market is the sort of under-the-table, black market version of our general plea bargaining system, which says we negotiate all cases, we negotiate all guilt," Natapoff said. "We almost never litigate the facts anymore."

In a system that runs on deals, she said, “law enforcement is incentivized, even systemically encouraged, to engage in all kinds of deal-making with suspects and defendants who might be useful to them."

But as informant scandals have emerged over the years, an increasing number of jurisdictions have enacted reforms, which Natapoff chronicles on her website.

Plus, she said, the conversation around criminal justice has changed over the years.

"Twenty years ago, we did not have the so-called bipartisan consensus that mass incarceration is a terrible idea. Twenty years ago, we were not having a conversation about Black Lives Matter or debtors' prison or all the conversations that we now have about the unfairnesses and the dysfunctions of our criminal system," Natapoff said.

Innocence projects have increasingly sprung up to help people who were wrongly convicted challenge their fate. On the institutional side, many district attorneys' offices, including Orange County, have opened "conviction integrity units" to investigate claims of innocence.

But because of the decentralized nature of criminal justice in the U.S., reforms tend to be piecemeal, Natapoff said, and uncovering misconduct is often up to outsiders.

"The criminal system itself does not divulge these facts," Natapoff said, referring to the big informant scandals of recent decades. "It was advocates, it was the innocence movement, it was journalism starting to chip away at the culture of secrecy."

The Department of Homeland Security says they have put some colleges and universities “on notice” that they could be in violation of federal rules that dictate work opportunities for international students.

The directive has left some of those students feeling worried, as their schools pause opportunities to work in the United States.

And experts warn that it could have adverse effects on U.S. industry and global growth.

What does DHS say?

In late August, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, part of the Department of Homeland Security, issued a statement stating that they have “observed a rise" in violations related to Curricular Practical Training.

CPT is paid or unpaid work that students do as part of their degree program, like an internship. The administration says regulatory requirements permit CPT only where the training is “an integral part of an established curriculum.”

In a written statement, an unnamed DHS spokesperson told LAist, “Nothing about these regulations has changed. However, schools and employers should consider themselves on notice: under President Trump, abuse of this generous system will no longer be tolerated.”

LAist reached out to DHS for the percentage increase in CPT violations and specifically asked for data related to Southern California schools. We have not received an answer.

How have local universities responded?

Following the memo from the department, several universities including the University of Southern California, UCLA and UC Berkeley have paused or required additional information to determine if work experience is a requirement for a particular degree program.

In a written statement to LAist, a spokesperson for the UCLA Dashew Center said, “UCLA has paused certain Curricular Practical Training authorizations while the university reviews recent federal guidance and determines next steps. UCLA is communicating directly with students who have affected CPT applications and remains committed to supporting our international students as we navigate these changes.”

Why it matters

For students, this is causing uncertainty.

“It came as a surprise to all the international students. We were not aware of it and there is a lot of tension among the international students,” said Nitesh, a student from India at USC. He asked that we only use his first name for fear of repercussions from speaking to the media.

Those who applied for CPT authorizations after Aug. 23 at USC now are in limbo waiting to see if their applications will be approved.

 ”It is a real industry exposure to us when it comes to learning,” Nithesh said about the CPT component. “We definitely get lots of learnings and value from classes and by doing projects, but CPT is a way for us to understand what happens in the industry and keep us up to date.”

Nitesh, who took out an $85,000 loan to come to the U.S. for his degree program, said he would have reconsidered coming here had he known about these regulations ahead of time.

 ”Because there is a lot happening and nobody has clarity, so there is a lot of ambiguity, and we are just waiting for the right information to come in,” he said.

International enrollment impact

The memo is the latest in a string of directives targeting international students. Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced new rules limiting how long international students can remain in the country, as opposed to remaining in the U.S. for as long as it takes to complete their degree program.

Santa Monica College has seen a drastic drop in international student enrollments: In fall 2016, the community college had more than 3,500 international students enrolled; that number has dropped to less than 1,600 this year.

Grace Smith, a spokesperson for Santa Monica College said, “In recent years, several interconnected federal restrictions continue to exert pressure on international enrollment and are likely to impact future enrollment cycles.”

Declining international student enrollment has a “significant impact on the college’s fiscal outlook,” Smith said as international student enrollment accounts for about 8% of the college’s unrestricted revenue.

Caltech’s president Ray Jayawardhana told LAist’s AirTalk program that he came to the U.S. as an international student from Sri Lanka.

“ Growing up in Sri Lanka, I thought of universities like Caltech in the United States as beacons on a hill,” he said. “They really were beckoning the best and the brightest from around the world, and I think it behooves us to preserve that attraction, preserve that draw, so that this country and the world at large benefits from students, from researchers, from scholars.”

While the uncertainties are “discouraging,” Jayawardhana said, Caltech is seeing “continued interest that's as strong as ever.”

Hits to the U.S. economy

Rachel Banks,  senior director for public policy and legislative strategy at NAFSA: Association of International Educators, said the current climate for international students is the “most difficult and most challenging” it has been since World War II.

“Having gone through the first [Trump administration], there were certain expectations of what we might see coming,” she said. “What I think was unexpected was the severity and degree to which we saw the Trump administration make moves specifically with respect to international students.”

Banks says her organization projects that the loss of around 111,000 international student enrollments could cost the U.S. economy $3.4 billion and nearly 4,000 jobs. California’s economy could see a hit of about $500 million because of declining enrollment.

The volume of visa revocations, particularly for students involved in campus protests for Palestinian rights, was “unprecedented,” she said. The State Department’s move to pause on interviews for visa applications and renewals was also something that hadn’t happened at this scale before, Banks said. And the new visa limits for international students, she said, is “incredibly disruptive” and takes the decision making away from students and universities.

The new memo about CPT authorizations adds to the uncertainty, she said.

Following World War II, the government put a lot of emphasis into fostering and developing our higher education system, Banks said, which allowed universities “to attract the best and brightest talent and that has led to the numerous innovations and achievements that we've been able to see come out of the United States.”

That talent, she said, will now look to go to other countries more favorable to international students.

In less than two years, the Olympics and Paralympics will take over Los Angeles for the summer of 2028, temporarily transforming the city and the region around it.

Hosting the world’s largest sporting event will mean commandeering a fleet of nearly 2,000 public buses, reserving stretches of freeway lanes just for Olympics traffic flow, deploying thousands of law enforcement officers across venues, taking over UCLA and USC to make way for athletes and journalists, and flooding Southern California with millions of fans.

What will everyday Angelenos get out of all this? That depends. And it’s the question LAist is dedicated to answering every Monday as we spotlight our ongoing reporting on the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Los Angeles residents have more at stake than just inconvenience, ticket prices and traffic. The city of L.A. is the financial backstop for the Olympics, meaning taxpayers will pick up the tab if LA28, the private organization planning the Games, runs a deficit.

That makes every plan for the execution of the 2028 Games hugely important for the city — from how L.A. pens agreements with LA28 on reimbursement for city services to whether or not the federal government will pay for the enormous cost of policing the mega-event.

L.A. has hosted the Olympics before — first in 1932 and again in 1984. Both times the Games turned a profit — a rarity for a global event that has gained a reputation over the decades for leaving cities with debt and empty stadiums.

Local officials say they’re confident L.A. can pull off a third Olympic Games (and its first-ever Paralympics), pointing out that hosting will not require building any new sports venues.

Still, there’s plenty to watch, including how temporary construction will turn existing venues into Olympic competition sites, where billions in contracts for things like cleaning and construction will go and whether that money will stay local, and how the expansion of the L.A. Convention Center could affect its role as an Olympic venue.

And there are the ways the Olympics and Paralympics could influence the lives of L.A.’s most vulnerable. Researchers estimate that close to 6,000 unhoused people live within a mile of Olympic venues in L.A. County, and could be removed due to security requirements tied to the Games. Others worry about the enhanced police presence that is guaranteed to accompany Olympic and Paralympic competitions, and what the Trump administration’s involvement in planning could mean for the city.

We’ll be following all this and more. Every Monday, you can listen to the latest on how Los Angeles is preparing for the 2028 Olympics on The L.A. Report and on our homepage.

Ballots are going out in less than a month, and California remains locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration over the president’s push to rein in universal mail-in voting.

The back-and-forth has some California voters likely wondering whether they’ll be able to vote by mail in this upcoming election. And if so, should they?

In short — yes, mail-in voting will still be an option this year. And yes, it’s still safe and generally reliable, although county election officials are urging voters to send in their ballots as early as possible ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

In case you missed it, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to issue a ruling that will determine, at least for now, whether President Donald Trump can force the U.S. Postal Service to restrict vote-by-mail ballots in time for the midterm election. Trump wants to create a federal database of registered voters that the postal service would then cross-reference to ensure mail-in ballots are only delivered to eligible voters — in other words, U.S. citizens. His plan would have the postal service refuse to deliver ballots in states that withhold the data.

The dizzying, monthslong legal saga has baffled voters and even some election officials, which some voting rights advocates argue is probably the point.

But California election officials say the state is well-equipped to administer the election, regardless of how the Supreme Court rules. Although county registrars are monitoring the court rulings, they’re also preparing to mail ballots as usual by the state’s Oct. 5 deadline. Local and state officials are urging voters to make a plan to vote early and to use the state’s various non-mail voting options, such as drop-boxes and in-person voting sites, if they’re worried about the postal service.

“Like we do for all of our elections, we have contingency plans or disaster plans put into place,” said Tricia Webber, clerk and registrar of voters for Santa Cruz County and president of the California Association of County Election Officials.

Some counties, including Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, are exploring options for pop-up stations where voters could request and submit ballots. In Santa Cruz County, Webber said her team is strategizing how to deploy their votemobile around the county to add yet another option for voters.

“Until there’s an answer,” Webber said, speaking of the pending court ruling, “California counties are doing business as usual.”

What does Trump want USPS to do?

Trump issued an executive order in March that sought to give the federal government control over who receives mail-in ballots. Almost immediately, more than 20 Democratic attorneys general, including California’s Rob Bonta, sued the Trump administration on the grounds that the Constitution allows only Congress and state governments to administer elections.

Federal district and appellate courts sided with the Democratic states and upheld a temporary injunction preventing the postal service from implementing any part of its plan while litigation continues.

The central questions in the case remain unresolved. The Supreme Court last month allowed the Trump administration to continue planning for how it would implement the president’s order. Democratic states promptly sued again to contest the postal service’s plans.

The postal service’s proposal, the final version of which was published in August, would create a system to track each voter’s ballot with a unique barcode and cross-reference it with a database of eligible registered voters.

While some states fear they’ll need to reprint envelopes if the postal service’s rule is upheld, the vast majority of California counties already use compliant ballot envelopes, Webber said.

The federal government does not have a comprehensive list of every eligible registered voter and would need to rely on states to submit voter information to a “federal ballot mail portal” that does not yet exist.

It seems unlikely that the postal service’s portal would even be functional in time for the 2026 midterm elections. A postal service whistleblower asserted that the process to develop and deploy the portal was “rushed,” “risky and haphazard” due to the “impossible timeframe,” according to Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office, which received the whistleblower complaint.

“In an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating substantial risk of a ‘catastrophic failure’ of the system that could ‘derail the midterm elections,’” wrote Blumenthal, of Connecticut, in a late August letter to Postmaster General David Steiner.

The postmaster in June told a congressional committee that the postal service would withhold ballots in states that refuse to share basic voter information, including name, address and the unique ballot barcode.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber, California’s chief elections administrator, has not said whether California would comply with the proposed voter information requirement.

“California’s elections officials will continue to do everything within our power to ensure that every eligible California voter has the right to cast a mail ballot and have that vote count.”

Last year, the U.S. Justice Department sued Weber and five other Democratic secretaries of state for refusing to turn over their unredacted voter files, which contain far more sensitive personal information than the postal service rule would require. A federal judge in Southern California dismissed that case in January.

Uncertainty could fuel more early voting

Ironically, concerns about the postal service’s reliability could facilitate what election officials and voting advocates have struggled to do for years — get people to vote earlier.

Unlike the lead-up to the June primary, where nervous Democrats urged fellow voters to wait until the last minute to pick a candidate for governor, social media is now awash with posts urging people to vote early and use ballot drop-boxes rather than rely on the mail.

“This whole play may backfire,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. “What you’re seeing now on social media in response to this court drama and this confusion are lots of people urging their friends to vote early — and that’s exactly what we’ve been saying.”

Voting earlier helps county election officials tabulate results more quickly on election night, which helps race callers like The Associated Press declare winners faster. And since ballots in envelopes take the longest to process, dropping them off several days before the deadline is the best way to help election officials count faster, since they can remove ballots from envelopes and prepare them for counting before Election Day.

“Fortunately, we give voters lots of options, and that’s really going to work to California’s benefit,” Alexander said. “Other states do not have the kind of robust process that creates lots of redundancies and avenues for voters to vote.”

It can be the small, curved horn of a ram or the dramatic spiral of an African antelope. The sound it creates is unmistakable.

Creating that sound is not difficult, but it does take some practice, said Rabbi Alicia Jo Rabins, a musician based in Portland, Oregon.

You take a deep breath and purse your lips, like you are playing a brass instrument.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, begins at sunset Friday. Across the world, Jews will spend the two-day holiday in prayer, reflection and celebration. And for many, a highlight will be hearing the shofar: an animal's horn blown like a trumpet.

How did this primal instrument become a holiday's spiritual soundtrack?

" The most basic answer is that it makes noise, right? It calls people to attention," said Daniel Picus, an associate professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham who researches religious practices and rituals. "All of the instances in which a shofar is used in the Hebrew Bible, that is what it's doing."

Abraham Ribak , an Israeli, blows a shofar, a musical instrument used in Jewish religious ceremonies made from the horn of a ram.

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Shofar blasts marked the revelation of the Torah at Mt. Sinai and the start of the Jubilee year, Picus said. Priests blew shofars when they circled the walls of Jericho to bring down the walls. The shofar marks moments of heightened experience and emotion — and Rosh Hashanah.

"In the Hebrew Bible, Rosh Hashanah is the day of trumpeting and the day of remembrance," Picus said. "The association of the shofar with Rosh Hashanah is right there in the Biblical text."

Centuries later, the Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic codification of law, drilled down into greater detail in the tractate Rosh Hashanah, laying out exactly how a shofar should be prepared (hollowed out), repaired (it depends), blown (a complex series of blasts at several times during the service, thanks to debate over linguistic interpretation), and whether or not it can be blown when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat (no, although some modern synagogues have changed course).

And within the Talmud and for centuries thereafter, people have debated the meaning of the shofar.

Shofars are on display for sale at the Barsheshet-Ribak Shofarot company, in Tel Aviv, Israel.

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Rabbi Micha'el Rosenberg, who teaches at the Hadar Institute, a center for Jewish learning based in New York City, pointed to several sources that compare the sound of the shofar to the cry of a mother in pain — the mother of the slain biblical military commander Sisera, and the cries of a woman in labor.

Rosenberg said you can hear that in the sound — especially the broken staccato blasts, known as "teruah."

"You can really imagine someone so caught up that they can't get the full sound out even, that they're gasping with their cries," he said.

Another interpretation comes from Maimonides, the medieval Jewish rabbi and scholar known as the Rambam, who wrote "The Laws of Repentance." He describes the blast of the shofar as a sort of spiritual wake-up call to become your best self.

"In Jewish law, we have this expression of daled amos, my four cubits: I focus on the 6 feet around me, as it were," he said. "It's easy to do that — and there's value in doing that sometimes. But the shofar, per the Rambam, wakes us up and says, 'No, there's more beyond what I can immediately see around me.'"

Rosenberg also pointed to Hasidic theories that the blowing of the shofar reenacts the breathing of life into the world. But he said one of the most powerful things about the shofar is that it doesn't say anything at all. "It transcends my words, it transcends my rational thoughts, and it really is just a feeling that I can hope to hold onto," he said.

Rabins, the Portland rabbi and musician, said the shofar can call across time to speak to those wordless places inside us. "It really brings you into the moment, and you also feel connected to your ancestors, who have been hearing this sound and making this sound for thousands of years," she said.

It's a sound, Rabin said, that can wake you up to all the joy and sadness of life, whether it be a birthday horn or a mother's cry. And it makes you pay attention — both to this moment, and to the year to come.

This story was created through a partnership between NPR and Religion News Service.
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