Last Updated October 8, 2024
The following bills have been signed into law since the last update; they go into effect on January 1, 2025.
AB 3123: Revises code of conduct and lobbying laws that apply exclusively to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) to more closely mirror rules established by the Political Reform Act (PRA).
SB 399 (California Worker Freedom from Employer Intimidation Act): Prohibits an employer from subjecting, or threatening to subject, an employee to discharge, discrimination, retaliation because the employee declines to attend an employer-sponsored meeting or affirmatively declines to participate in, receive, or listen to any communications with the employer or its agents or representatives, the purpose of which is to communicate the employer’s opinion about religious or political matters.
SB 1181 / SB 1243 (Levine Act amendments): Raises contribution threshold in Section 84308 from $250 to $500; removes aggregation of contributions by party/participant and agents and prohibits contributions from agents; excludes annual compliance reviews of development agreements and certain other contracts from “proceeding;” excludes membership dues from “financial interest” in “participant;” excludes a city attorney or county counsel providing legal advice to their agency from “officer;” extends the timeframe to cure a violation from 14 days to 30 days.
AB 2642 (Protecting Elections from Armed Coercion and Extremism (PEACE) Act): Prohibits a person from intimidating, threatening, or coercing, or attempting to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for engaging in specified election-related activities. Authorizes an aggrieved person, an officer holding an election or conducting a canvass, or the Attorney General to file a civil action to enforce this prohibition. Creats a presumption that a person who openly carries a firearm or imitation firearm while interacting with or observing the specified election-related activities would be presumed to have engaged in prohibited intimidation, in the absence of an affirmative showing to the contrary by a preponderance of the evidence. This bill is an urgency bill and goes into effect immediately.
AB 3184: Prohibits elections officials from certifying the results of the November 5, 2024, election prior to E+28 (Tuesday, December 3, 2024), except under specified conditions. Provides that the last day for elections officials to accept either a completed signature verification statement, an unsigned identification envelope statement, or a combined statement is E+26 (Sunday, December 1, 2024) for the November 5, 2024 election. Requires elections officials to include a single, combined VBM ballot signature verification statement and unsigned ballot identification envelope statement, along with the instructions for the completion of the statement, on the elections official’s website. This bill is an urgency bill and goes into effect immediately.
AB 2655 (Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024): Requires large online platforms to remove materially deceptive and digitally modified or created content related to elections, or to label that content, during specified periods before and after an election, if the content is reported to the platform.
AB 2355: Requires any political advertisement that is published or distributed by a political committee to include a disclaimer if content in the ad was generated or substantially altered using artificial intelligence.
AB 2839, which went into effect immediately as an urgency bill and would have prohibited the distribution of campaign advertisements and other election communications that contain media that has been digitally altered in a deceptive way, has been preliminarily enjoined by a U.S. District Court on October 2, 2024.
The Governor vetoed the following bills: SB 1170 (Use of Campaign Funds for Mental Health Expenses), SB 1155 (Postgovernment Employment Restriction for Elected and Appointed Agency Officials), SB 1337 (modifies the requirements for what is included on petitions for state referenda), SB 299 (requires DMV and SOS to develop a new IT system for processing voter registration data based on citizenship and registration status).