President Donald Trump claimed on Thursday, without proof, that Democrats were attempting to steal elections in California. The president railed against mail-in ballots, which are still being accepted in the state.
California is notoriously slow to post election numbers, and these latest primary races are no different.
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So why does it take the state a long time to get results?
Results delay
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Golden State attempted to make it easier for everyone to vote, especially by mail.
As long as those mail-in ballots are postmarked by Election Day and reach the registrar’s office within seven days of the election, they are valid.
The delay is not from counting those ballots, but rather from verifying signatures.
“Registrars have literally millions of ballots up and down the state,” Thad Kousser, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, told Straight Arrow. “They have to check their signatures against voter registration forms in California, and that is part of the reason why it takes several days for California to report enough votes to make close calls.”
The state has had a lot of very close races.
The top two candidates in the governor’s race are currently separated by just about one million votes.
Increasingly, more people are using the vote by mail option as well.
Nearly 90% of Californians voted by mail in the previous election.
Despite being critical of mail-in voting, even Trump voted that way.
“If you really are at a place where you have almost all ballots cast by mail and allow a lot of them to come in later, or to be processed later, or even some extra time for people to cure their ballots, sometimes to get them to the right place too, all those things kind of build together to make it so that it can take longer on certain races,” John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Straight Arrow.
That long window for people to fix their ballots also contributes to the delay. It can be up to four weeks.
For this latest election, if a ballot has a signature issue, that voter would likely have until June 24 to resolve it.
California is also the most populous state in the country, which means it has the most voters.
Impact of delay
“The one question is, when it takes a long time for people to count ballots, do voters lose faith in elections, lose trust in elections?” Kousser said. “And, in fact, there is.”
While there’s no evidence of voter fraud, state leaders have acknowledged that the slowness of this process can leave voters feeling unsteady.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom sent a letter last month to election officials in all 58 counties urging them to count as quickly as possible.
“The longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads,” Newsom wrote.
Newsom’s office also pushed back against Trump’s claims that the elections were being stolen.
Right now, it’s mostly just people within the state watching what’s going on.
However, the entire nation will be watching the general election because it could determine who controls the House of Representatives.
What can be done?
Following the debacle that was the 2000 presidential election, the state of Florida made significant changes to how votes are counted to speed up the process.
It worked. During the last midterm elections, it took only 113 minutes to call all the U.S. House seats in the state.
“They’re actually one of the quicker states,” Fortier said.
California has attempted to speed things up, including passing Assembly Bill 5 last year.
That bill gives counties 13 days to finish counting most ballots, down from 30 days. However, those counties still have 30 days to finalize the results.
Another way to potentially speed up this process is technology.
“Can there be bigger investments in vote counting and signature verification equipment, and the kind of surge staff that you need to do these in the last few days,” Kousser said.
Another way to get things done quicker is for voters to simply submit their votes sooner.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta urged voters to vote early before the election.
Another change could be to stop accepting mail-in ballots that come in after Election Day.
That one could end up being decided outside of the state.
In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Supreme Court will soon decide if there are federal laws establishing a uniform Election Day that preempt state laws.
A decision is expected this month.
“It’s actually a case out of Mississippi,” Fortier said. “Mississippi doesn’t do a lot of voting by mail, but Mississippi is one of the states, like California, which allows the ballots to come in after Election Day.”
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