SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers on Sunday approved bills aimed at preventing interference in this fall’s midterm elections and requiring more transparency from social media influencers who are paid by political campaigns.

They join a growing pile of bills on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk as the legislature nears the end of its two-year session, which adjourns early this week.

Social media influencers took on a more visible role in California’s 2026 gubernatorial primary. Candidates including Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer paid thousands of dollars to influencers who posted videos endorsing Steyer or talking about him in a positive light. These videos did not always disclose that influencers were paid by a candidate’s campaign.

Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) said his bill would ensure “that voters are not misled by paid content” by requiring a disclosure on paid posts and videos. Campaigns will also be required to report funds spent on social media posts.

If Newsom signs the law, it could result in fines for influencers and campaigns that fail to disclose such payments.

Two other bills sent to Newsom on Sunday would make it a felony to interfere with mail ballots or to seize ballots and other election materials before an election is certified. They come amid concern from Democratic lawmakers that President Trump or his supporters will seek to interfere with the casting and counting of ballots in the Nov. 3 election.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco drew outrage and legal challenges when he ordered his deputies to take more than 650,000 ballots from the county elections office over unproven claims of fraud. The case was argued before the California Supreme Court last week.

Newsom earlier this year signed a bill preventing local and federal law enforcement agencies from taking ballots without a warrant.

Legislation by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz) goes even further by making it a felony to take or order the seizure of ballots, election records or voting machines. Such actions would be punishable by up to four years in prison.

“The federal administration and those seeking to spread lies about our democracy continue to call for interference in elections in ways we have never seen before in this country,” Pellerin said Sunday. “AB 282 helps ensure that every lawfully cast vote can be counted, and that the will of the voters of every political party will be respected.”

Republican lawmakers argued in previous hearings that the bill is unnecessary because it is already a crime to steal ballots.

Another bill, SB 259, makes it a crime to interfere with a mail ballot on the way to or from a voter or order the seizure of ballots that are in transit to a local elections office.

Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto bills.

Those little dust grains that fall to Earth during meteor showers or end up as part of larger meteorites found on Earth may hold surprising clues to the formation of the Sun. That’s because they record the state of the magnetic field in the protostellar nebula from which Earth (and ultimately the planets) formed.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found records of extremely ancient magnetism imprinted in meteorite samples. They analyzed grains of material called calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) found in a meteorite called DOM 08006, found in Antarctica in 2008. Those inclusions formed during the first 200,000 years of the Solar System’s existence. To date, these are the oldest known material from the early Solar System. It’s likely they existed during the time when the solar nebula was still birthing the Sun, according to Professor Benjamin Weiss of MIT. Their existence is also a clue to the strength of the magnetic field in the protosolar nebula. “Other meteorites went through many different processes over this 4.5 billion year history,” he said. “They were formed in the solar nebula, then added to bodies with water, then got destroyed, moved to the asteroid belt, and then landed here. But somehow, DOM has experienced less alteration than any other meteorite.”

A cross section of the DOM 08006 meteorite, found in the Dominion Range, Victoria Land, East Antarctica. Inclusions in this meteorite show the imprint of the earliest known magnetic field in the protosolar nebula. Credit: Davidson, Jemma, et al. Geochimica and Cosmochimica Acta.

Magnetism and the Early Solar System

The story of the Solar System’s birth is a familiar one: a giant cloud of gas and dust that existed more than 4.6 billion years ago began to coalesce into regions of higher density. Eventually the cloud collapsed into a protoplanetary disk, with the infant Sun at the center. “This transition, from a spherical cloud to a protoplanetary disk, is one of the most significant events in all of solar system history,” said Weiss. “It has long been theorized that gravity caused this, but our measurements show magnetism likely played a role.”

What caused that collapse has always been something of a mystery. Gravity is the usual suspect, since it is capable of pulling material together. But was that the only thing to influence the birth of the Sun, its planets, moons, asteroids, and comets? Is it a constant force shaping planetary systems throughout the Universe?

Bits of dust in the protosolar nebula eventually coalesced to form larger asteroids and meteoroids. As they did, they received an imprint from the magnetic field generated by the motions of charged materials in the cloud. Credit: MIT/Hernán Cañellas

It turns out that magnetic fields played a role. In star-forming nebulae, they arise as a result of the motion of charged particles in the cloud’s gas and dust. Like gravity, the resulting fields form an invisible force that was at work in the earliest stages of the disk evolution. For the early Solar System, the magnetic field in the disk was stronger than Earth’s field is today. And, just as on Earth, when magnetic fields are involved in the formation of rocks, traces of those early fields were imprinted onto the bits of solar system rocky material that eventually formed asteroids, planetesimals, and meteoroids that eventually fell to Earth.

Models of magnetic fields in protoplanetary disks show that such fields can have an influence on the structure of the disk, as well as on the smaller bits and pieces floating around in the disk. Scientists suggest that they stir up turbulence and outflows in the disk, as well. So, they appeared to be a part of the Solar System’s formative epoch by driving magnetized winds.

The MIT study focused on the CAIs and how their magnetic field traces formed. The team came up with two hypotheses. One is that CAIs retained magnetism when they first formed during an early epoch of disk formation or during short-lived heating events shortly after formation. The second scenario suggests that CAIs were magnetized during heating events later in the protoplanetary disk’s evolution. They were still small bits and pieces at that time, so it occurred before they got swept up into a larger body.

Where did the Magnetic Fields Originate?

The earliest magnetic fields caused by the actions of charged particles in the nebula eventually became a stronger, system-wide magnetic field. That stronger field is what got imprinted on the rocks. “We think these kinds of magnetic fields were helping to move gas from the protoplanetary disk in toward this central star, the sun,” Borlina said. “Gravity is also playing a role. But we are now showing that, if you want to fully understand how the Sun and planets formed, you should include magnetic fields in the ingredients that make them.”

Previous studies of magnetic fields in the early Solar System uncovered one that existed at 2 million years after the Sun formed. At that time, everyone assumed that the Sun was already in place, with the formation of the planets just beginning. It’s clear that the early magnetic field played an important role in the formation of the planetesimals, some of which eventually coalesced to form the planets we know today.

“Nowadays people don’t debate whether magnetism is present when planets are forming. But the debate is around the very early solar system, before planets are forming, when there’s just a disk,” said Cauê Borlina, who led the new study as an MIT graduate student and is now an assistant professor at Purdue University. “That’s where the debate still resides, and that’s where we’re operating now.”

For More Information

Meteorite Dust Holds Records of Magnetism that may Have Helped Form the Sun

Paleomagnetic Evidence for a Nebular Magnetic Field from Calcium-aluminum-Rich Inclusions

Magnetic Fields of Protoplanetary Disks

Davidson, Jemma, Alexander, Conel, M.O’D, Stroud Rhonda M., Busemann, Henner, Nittler, Larry R. (2019), Mineralogy and Petrology of Dominion Range 08006: a Very Primitive CO3 Carbonaceous Chondrite.