Yee to abandon the race. Padilla won the election on November 4, 2014, with 53.6% of the vote, defeating Republican Pete Peterson. On June 29, 2017, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which President Donald Trump created on May 11, requested data on enrolled voters from every state, dating back to 2006. Padilla said that California would not supply the data. On November 6, 2018, Padilla was reelected with 64.5% of the vote, defeating Republican Mark P. Meuser. On October 16, 2020, Padilla was involved in a controversy between the state and the California Republican Party, as the party deployed unofficial ballot boxes for voters to submit their ballots at select locations, including churches and gun stores in competitive California districts. Padilla issued a cease-and-desist order, arguing that the ballot boxes were illegal and failed to ensure ballot security. Local Republican leadership refused to follow the order and said the boxes were a form of legal ballot harvesting that had been enabled by recent Democratic legislation (which lacked a chain of custody requirement), and were a way to increase voter turnout. Accusing Democrats of hypocrisy given their widespread door-to-door ballot harvesting in the 2018 United States elections, the state Republican Party later agreed to a set of collection procedures and said a volunteer's mistake of affixing a sign denoting the ballot box as "official" had contributed to the political standoff; Padilla's office said it was continuing to investigate whether ballots were being handled correctly and that the "ineptitude or unlawfulness of a political operative or campaign volunteer" could nonetheless lead to "serious legal consequences". In early 2020, Padilla announced a $35 million no-bid contract for a statewide voter education ad campaign with partisan public relations firm SKDK (then known as "SKDKnickerbocker") called "Vote Safe California", but State Controller Betty Yee blocked the funding because Padilla's office did not have the authority to use federal money that was allocated to county governments; the campaign proceeded anyway. The group had marketed itself as being on "Team Biden", and the awarding of the no-bid contract under supposed "emergency powers" despite the group's ties with the Democratic Party and work for Democratic politicians running for office in California received bipartisan criticism. Amid ongoing litigation by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, who contend that the contract bypassed fair competition rules and misappropriated federal election funding for local elections operations, and was therefore illegal, Governor