[Answered ]-How to raise a ValidationError AND return a response?

You need to override the is_valid() method, call the super is_valid() first ( return false if it returns false ), and then handle your error case.

If you use clean() instead you won’t benefit for things such as “required=True” in your other fields and will need to check everything manually.
super().clean() just … does not check for it afaik, and it could give you KeyError when accessing cleaned_data[‘passwd1’] unless checking it yourself.

class MyResetPasswdForm(forms.Form):
    passwd1 = forms.CharField(widget=forms.PasswordInput, required=True)
    passwd2 = forms.CharField(widget=forms.PasswordInput, required=True)

def is_valid(self):
    valid = super(MyResetPasswdForm).is_valid()
    if not valid:
        return valid
    if self.cleaned_data.get("passwd1") != self.cleaned_data.get("passwd2"):
        # You cannot raise a ValidationError because you are not in the clean() method, so you need to add the error through the add_error method.
        self.add_error("passwd2", ValidationError('passwords are not the same', 'passwd_mismatch')
        # You could also use None instead of "passwd2" if you do not want the error message to be linked to the field.
    if not self.errors:
        return True
    return False

This way, you get the pre-set error messages, django handles the fields requirements when you call the super().is_valid().