The polls closed days ago. The results are still trickling in. And Donald Trump is already crying foul.
“Steal,” the former president posted on social media, accusing Democrats of manipulating the vote count in California’s primary election for governor and mayor of Los Angeles. The Justice Department sent a federal prosecutor to observe the ballot-counting process in Los Angeles this week.
But election experts have a different explanation for California’s tortoise-like pace: the system is working exactly as designed. The delays are not evidence of fraud. They are evidence of verification.
“Corrective messages don’t tend to go viral,” said Lisa Bryant, a political scientist at California State University, Fresno. “It’s like hiking the Grand Canyon. They tell you to account for twice as much time going up as going down. It’s at least that much time trying to combat misinformation.”
Why California Counts So Slowly
Every voter in California receives a mail-in ballot, and a vast majority vote that way. The signatures on those ballots are verified electronically and by human observers. When a ballot contains errors, the state gives voters 22 days to “cure” it.
The result is a system that is highly accurate and resistant to letting small oversights devolve into discarded ballots. But in the state with the most registered voters by far, accuracy comes at the cost of speed.
“There’s not a lot of people I know who would say: ‘Nah, I would rather have known who won the race faster than have my vote count,'” said Paul Mitchell, vice-president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc. “So what’s the rush? The focus should be making voting as easy as possible.”
Election day itself creates the biggest bottleneck. A majority of the state’s voters use mail-in ballots for convenience, and they have until election day to post them. But many voters still feel more secure depositing ballots at a polling site, so a large segment walk them in on election day instead of mailing them. Those votes cannot be counted until after election day, and they are routed through a more time-consuming process.
The election day bottleneck was exacerbated this year by a uniquely tight gubernatorial race, in which many voters waited as long as possible to cast their ballots.
Who Complains About the Delay?
“The only people who complain about it are the people who lose,” Mitchell said. “The conspiracy around it is really a conservative thing.”
Republicans have lobbed allegations of fraud against California for years, pointing to the state’s slowness in tallying ballots and the shifting results over the course of the counting as evidence of vote manipulation.
Prominent Democrats, including outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom, are increasingly fretting that the state’s tortoise-like pace is becoming a liability for public confidence in elections — especially in an era where conspiracy theories spread quickly through social media and can emanate straight from the White House.
But experts say the system is protecting democracy, not undermining it.
Can California Count Faster?
Experts see obvious ways the system could improve. The legislature could invest money that counties need to pay for staff, equipment, and space to process ballots faster. The state assembly reduced the number of days a voter has to “cure” ballot errors from 26 to 22 last year. Cutting it further could substantially shorten wait times without severely inconveniencing voters, Bryant said.
“California is very liberal on how much time they give people to cure those ballots,” Bryant said. “I think California could tighten up those timelines. That could help speed up the timelines without losing a lot.”
Dozens of counties have implemented a system in which voters open their walk-in ballots and cast them at the site, speeding up the process.
“It’s a great benefit for voters because they know their ballot has been counted,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. “They can walk away with confidence.”
Alexander said California should pursue changes like those to preserve voter confidence. Waiting around for weeks to find out who won an election can erode trust in government, even if the delays have a clear explanation.
The Bottom Line
Is California’s slow vote count a sign of fraud? No, experts say. The state’s tortoise-like pace is a byproduct of a system of redundant verifications and opportunities for voters to fix errors. Every voter receives a mail-in ballot. Signatures are verified electronically and by humans. Voters have 22 days to “cure” ballot errors. Election day itself creates a bottleneck when many voters walk in their ballots instead of mailing them.
Trump has cried “steal.” The Justice Department sent an observer. But experts say the only people who complain about the delay are the people who lose. The system is working as designed: to protect against fraud and assure that every vote is counted.
