I don't disagree with the premise here, but I wish it included more analysis of what the specific failings of California in particular are and how they could be fixed.
I see a lot of people complain about this, but I don't get a lot of substance. Is this purely a function of the late ballot mailing deadline? Are you suggesting that be changed? If not, what are the counting barriers? Is it technology? Do they not start counting early enough? Is it purely a matter of resources and personnel?
All of that would be more useful than just calling California a failed State.
There are plenty of detailed analysis online. Here is a sampling of ways California has systematically chosen to be slow:
1) late mail ballots are accepted until the Tuesday a week after election day if postmarked by election day
2) mis-matched signatures trigger a letter to the voter, and the voter has until close to the end of November to confirm the ballot is theirs. In part because California auto-registers everyone who gets a drivers license, there are LOTS of mis-matched signatures.
3) Some counties are "vote centers" (one can vote in person anywhere in the county, or in advance), but many are not. And in those other counties there are lots of "provisional ballots" that take a long time to validate because the voter showed up at the wrong precinct
4) California has a requirement that a ballot sent to or dropped off in the wrong county has to be sent to the correct county where the voter resides, where it is then validated and counted. Transporting those takes days, and validating takes longer.
None of this really explains it though. According to the California SOS, as of noon today, there were more than 3 million ballots received *on or before election day* that had still not been processed. Why is that?!
DJ gave the explanation--they don't give a shit and they don't see why we do.
> And, since there's no sense of urgency (we have to wait for those "cured" ballots until the end of November anyways), some Registrars' decisions reflect that feeling of no rush:
It takes them a really long time to count the ballots once received though. I mean, as Nate shows there is evidence that states with higher % mail-in and/or similar or even later deadlines still get most of their votes counted much faster. Is there evidence that USPS is significantly worse in Cali than those other states? And even if it were, that still doesn’t account for the fact that they’re taking longer to count even once received.
This is just a shot in the dark, but I think just making it so mail-in ballots received before Election Day can be prepped for counting in advance, so they can be counted immediately once polls close, would probably go a long way here.
Even if it takes the same amount of time to get every last vote counted in the end, getting to the crucial 95% counted threshold days earlier could make all the difference in giving those seeking to undermine faith in our elections much less ammunition. Realistically, there’s no way more than 5% of total ballots are still lost in the mail 4-5 days after Election Day. They probably have at least 95% in hand by the day after, they’re just taking way too long to count them.
Yeah - poking at the USPS is mostly snark, although delivery time is part of the issue.
Realistically, the wait time for postmarked letters isn't the issue. There are lots of states that have similar delays for mail delivery, and some with even longer acceptance for ballots from overseas military.
The problem for the instant gratification crowd is that they don't notice these states because the number of outstanding ballots is rarely enough to sway the election, so they get to enjoy the modern sports-like counting climax on election night.
And for places (like Oregon) with a large number of mail-in ballots, the total counting load per county is less, so the per county overhead is less. (The largest county in Oregon would be the 15th in California).
And of course the "top two advance" means that it is more likely that there will be a tight race. Eg. if the top slot gets 30%, #2 and #3 are fighting over the remaining 70%, which makes the distribution tighter.
Consider Alaska, with a top 4 primary and a 10 day delivery deadline for ballots postmarked on election day. The difference between the #4 and #5 slot in the primary was 21 votes when the dust settled. There appear to be about 2k Alaska residents who are stationed overseas in the military, so their ballots could easily have been significant.
But the real issue in California isn't the postage lag. It is the signature verification and checking, including time for rejected signatures to be "cured". Count every ballot includes a check back in certain circumstances that adds delay.
If you want some statistics and background, here is a good description :
The law says every mail in ballot must be verified by hand, and that they can received as late as seven days after Election Day. This puts the count out to two weeks, with the extra week to verify all provisional ballots. Normal is 14 days post election. The only solution I see is to allow voting at polling places on Election Day and make the mail in ballots must be received as of Election Day. That would move the vote count up to only two weeks out etc. Or if you want it to be Election Day only, change mail in due date a week earlier… personally I think that would eliminate this angst that Republican have created. Or fund the registrar of voters so they have trained temporary workers to verify ballots quicker. But this is all ridiculous nonsense to distract from the fact republicans want to make it harder to vote so they can reduce eligibile voters whom they know will vote against them
The last of that comment has nothing at all to do with California's pathologically slow count. But it is true that when it rained, fewer Dems bothered to vote ---- I've known about Democrat weather (the sun is shining) and Republican weather (rain, hail, tornadoes ---- we don't care, we just vote) all my life. However, with all the easy voting now, early and by mail, I doubt there is much difference between the parties anymore in likelihood of voting.
An ID isn’t strictly required to register to vote. Those who don’t furnish one to register are supposed to present one when they vote for the first time in a federal election, though this requirement isn’t strictly enforced.
The state lists a gym card, drug prescription and even a sample ballot as acceptable forms of ID. Federal prosecutors last month indicted a California woman for paying homeless people on Skid Row to register using her former address, meaning ballots would be sent there. She agreed to plead guilty.
County election officials aren’t required to check whether a voter is a citizen or, well, even a person. A woman from Orange County, Calif., was charged last fall with illegally registering her dog to vote and submitting ballots on the canine’s behalf. One ballot was counted, the other was tossed. The fraud was caught because the woman reported herself.
State regulations also allow late-arriving ballots to be counted even if they lack a post-mark as long as they include a handwritten date on the envelope. The state even instructs county officials to accept sample ballots. Because election officials often don’t remove inactive voters until after several election cycles, ballots may be sent to people who have died or moved.
Setting aside the bluntly, absolute bullshit excuse that California counts slowly "to ensure accuracy", what is the excuse for such a high tax state that doesn't fund it's elections well. They can wax poetic about having a big enough GDP and population to be a country, but that just means you have the tax base to do better.
I genuinely do not get the appeal of living in California unless you are rich. While I personally would not want to live in a high tax blue state, I can concede that states like Massachusetts have fantastic education, healthcare, and infrastructure. But California has stupidly high taxes, yet it counts votes literally weeks after everyone else, it can't finish it's famous high speed rail project, and it's schools are middle of the pack compared to the other states. What the hell are you people paying for?
When the other 49 states all do noticeably better, what's the excuse? It's not a blue or red state problem, a rural or urban state problem, rich or poor state problem, it's JUST California.
We donate over $83B to the rest of the country above what we get in Federal spending. And this understates the actual results because the Federal deficit gets spread over the rest of the country. Compared to the rest of the country we are effectively out over $100M
(For comparison, the Israeli military budget is under $50B, and the UK is under $100B. If we were a country we could fund a world class military and still be ahead on the deal.)
So yes our state taxes are high, but much less than it seems when you realize how much other states are subsidized.
(It appears you are in Georgia. If that is accurate, you are getting $2,100 from the US Gov per resident. You are paying no Federal tax since your state gets more money back than you send to the IRS. Must be nice to live so well on other people's efforts)
HSR was a mess by design. Jerry Brown wanted to invest in the Central Valley, and needed the support of SoCal and the Bay Area to fund it. Too ambitious, difficult route, lack of US HSR expertise, and lawsuits galore from the Central Valley Republicans who weren't interested.
K-12 issues in California were bad before Prop 13 (see Serrano v. Priest), then got worse. Of course schools are run by the local school districts, and we have a much more diverse population than most states, so there are education challenges here that aren't captured in simple metrics.
You may have heard that we have a pretty good college system, and that is indeed run by the state.
I appreciate your concern about our elections, but it isn't even a rounding error on the quality of life here.
Californian's love to put themselves on that particular cross of "Funding everyone else at our own expense" but you are not the only state that puts more into the federal government then they get out, per capita, you aren't even the worst off, you just have the highest net paid because you have the most people.
I also can't help that notice that all of your follow up excuses for high speed rail and the K-12, but those issues are all products of your political culture in one way or the other.
And to go back to the "We pay more then we get out" argument, most of your congressional delegation are from the party that supports the various social programs and other federal spending in those "net-taker" states, so California can't really complain too much about that, because your congressional delegation is the bulwark that keeps those programs being slashed.
Also, if so much of your federal taxes are getting "wasted" that should make you more picky about your return on investment at the state level.
California isn't the only diverse state, nor is it the only state that pays more federal taxes than it uses. It's not a problem foisted on California, it the states own fault. I'm glad you seem to like the quality of life, but you guys are paying Massachusetts level taxes for Georgia level education and poverty rates. (And that is without taking into account the insane cost of living.) If the QOL is so great, California wouldn't be a net loser of population.
As for the elections, as long as California elects federal representatives, it is absolutely a valid interest for the other 49.
The reason HSR has been as bad as it is comes down to California's political culture and government, which is it's own fault. As for the "similar problems" literally no other state is remotely as bad at tallying votes as California.
Californians have a tendency to react to others pointing out metrics where your state is below average, or near the problem, and just brush it off like the rest of the country "just can't get it because California is so special".
But its really not. Government and administration practices don't magically change based on which state they are in, it's a result of the people who vote and the people who are elected and appointed. California isn't an untamed beast that can never be controlled, it's just a dysfunctional political entity with a shrinking population.
I mean, have you been here? You can't beat the weather. I'd never live in most states because I don't want to deal with snow, humidity, excessive heat, or rain during most of the year, which is kind of what the options are in every other state. Our food is also basically impossible to beat in other states because most types of produce are grown here. Frankly, our state government gets away with being so bad because people are too busy enjoying living here to care what the government is doing.
What percentage of votes actually arrive more than 24 after Election Day anyway? It seems like that is likely a cheap excuse for the fact they still have like 30% to count 3 days later
Is this this just another example of how bad CA is at state capacity…on controlling and preventing wildfires, building permitting/regulations, etc.. How can CA be so innovative and so inept at the same time?
California's mostly suffering from the problem that it's too built out. Everyone decades ago cut a rule for something, and no one ever bothered to go back and pick up the pieces.
You have rules from the era of Red California dealing with permits and regulations that were then partially built over (but not completely) with Blue California laws and patches designed to fix red line era abuses.
The voting rules are pretty much the same. Laws on laws on laws, no one bothered to take care of them.
Let's start with one of the examples:
Voters misfiled the vote in the wrong location, so send it to the right one? Sure, reasonable idea. Prevents either party from trying to get a advantage by sending misleading fliers in the mail.
Do we have to do the fixes by hand, shipped slowly a week later?
Can't we run it through a separate process that confirms the resident in a few days?
Or just form a few centralized locations to sort this stuff out. Clearing house this shit.
That would be - HIGHLY ILLEGAL BASED ON THE LAWS AS WRITTEN FOR CALIFORNIA.
Some would violate Newson's rules. Most of those would violate rules from Regan's time leading California.
Now, for the second part of the question, why is it innovative?
Innovation does not really comes from the government or from the state. It comes from the people.
Nasa, in it's prime, was a clearing house of practical innovation because after we fucked up our first launch we decided to gather every single brilliant person we could find in the same rooms, told them to get the job done, and we looked the other way towards their personal lives. Velcro, rockets, satellites, the internet, transformative modelling (aka AI) they made it on the government's dime and it was given away for free.
The innovation wasn't because it was the government, it was because the people who could make the magic were brought together and left alone. The magic started to die in the 80s when the government stopped letting them work and started to meddle.
California has always had shitty government. Dem, Republican, doesn't matter. But it's got the most perfect weather, a long coast, and enough resources that any industry could start in it's borders.
It's far enough away from 'the rest' of the country that it can do it's own thing without really having to fight or argue, save with Oregon. Nevada and Arizona are blocked by the mountains.
And if you have a business idea, there are people with the Money and the Resources and the Trade routes to get you started...
But the taxes, you say? Show me a business that actually pays the taxes as written, and I'll show you a accountant you need to fire. Musk certainly didn't have an issue for a great many years there, until they stopped giving him freebies.
Oh yes, the freebies! The Welfare state isn't just for poor people, it's mostly for the rich. No one seizes open stretches of land like California. Why, just remember how old George let the Community Redevelopment Law to just seize chunks of the countryside if you needed it. Or how Silicon Valley got all of it's infrastructure thanks to the Republicans in the statehouse.
The reality is, people can work around a bad government under the right conditions.
California is 'the right conditions'.
The capture of California by the Democrats was, make no mistake, a victory for them. But the Republicans abandoning it as unwinnable in the 2000s for the strategically/politically more complex Texas and the ticking time bomb that is Florida is still something I cannot fathom.
I have argued upon occasion that a bit of genius in the US system of government is that they designed in gridlock from the start.
The two houses with variable election terms, independent executive and judiciary essentially means that it is very hard to accumulate the levels of power that are common for governments in other systems.
That means that a person who actually wants to accomplish things is almost always better off in the private sector than government. More control, better return on time.
Sure there are counter examples, but it is rare for government in the US to be competent or astoundingly incompetent.
Some modest Californian government items had major benefits - the public college system, strong restrictions on anti-compete clauses, the water delivery systems (for all their many issues), the anti-slavery foundations.
But in general, California benefits from people doing well in spite of the government. And we have more natural advantages than most places in the world, so that helps a lot.
A good chunk of the major fire problems are on Federal land,
Permitting is a city or county issue, except for implications of Reagan's CEQA bill that cast a statewide shadow that Democrats have finally managed to address slightly.
That doesn't mean you are wrong, but it is more complicated than most coverage seems to imply.
It is also off topic, so I won't get into more details than that here.
> California also sends a mail ballot to every registered voter and most voters — about 80 percent in 2024 — do choose to vote by mail. Those ballots take more time to tabulate, in part because election workers need to verify that the signature on each mail ballot matches the signature on file for that voter.
Election workers need to verify that the signature on each mail ballot matches 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙪𝙨𝙚 𝘾𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙖 𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙨𝙚𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙧𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙤𝙣 𝙢𝙖𝙞𝙡 𝙗𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙤𝙩𝙨.
In Wisconsin, the ballot envelope is signed by the voter, along with the signature and address of another registered voter who attests they saw them do it all themselves, etc. etc. At counting time, a poll worker will go to the poll book with a half-dozen unopened envelopes, then go through the poll book to mark off ballots as having been received. Once you're so marked in the poll book, that's it, and your ballot will be fed into the scantron in the next few minutes.
edit to add: if you get to the poll book and your box IS already marked as having been voted, this triggers a few things: go find the envelope that contained that ballot, make sure it wasn't an error in the poll book (you marked Jeff Lastname instead of Jedd Lastname, we all make mistakes), and start relentlessly pursuing that witness, wrath of God style. In practice, I have never an in-person voter incorrectly/fraudulently marked as already having voted absentee.
No, all of this isn't perfect, but the idea that a signature is any kind of valid proof of identification is also kind of laughable. Go back and look through your mortgage papers sometime. Certainly a photo ID is INIFINITELY better proof of voter ID than a scrawled signature, although proponents of the latter are usually oddly hostile about the former.
That's fair ... but can you imagine what the folks who are interested in complaining would say if California did nothing to verify them? Especially if we went from doing something to doing nothing?
Yours and other states do faster counting. California does more convenient access to voting. Which is "better" is a matter of opinion. Californians are generally very happy with our system. Why should we care if y'all complain?
The late ballot counting around the country made it much easier for Trump to falsely convince his followers that the election was stolen. They went to bed election night believing Trump had won by a fairly substantial margin. Then, as the other ballots were counted, they said wait a minute what’s going on? In the past if there was a substantial lead on election night the remaining ballots wouldn’t amount to enough to change the election. By having ballots trickling in for days and weeks going mostly for democrats It made it much easier for Trump to promote his ridiculous claims about the election.
Another note: I have a Dutch friend who says in the Netherlands everybody gets up on election day and goes to the polls and votes, and the results are all counted that night. I think that’s the way it was done in this country for the first 200 years or more. Too bad we can’t do it that way anymore.
Here in the UK, a country with a population bigger than California, we count 650 different seats overnight and by the next afternoon the new government is in place! If your mailed ballot doesn't arrive by the time polls close it doesn't count, not least because even the very next days post is after the count has been completed!
Honest question, Nate. Do you really think that the conspiracy theorists won't just find another excuse to fuel their theories?
Also, worth noting, the issue isn't late arriving ballots. That's a trivial share of the vote. The issue is that CA stops processing mail ballots while in-person voting is happening to ensure no one votes twice. The most popular way to vote is to drop-off your mail ballot during that period, creating the huge backlog.
The upshot is that California almost never has significant lines at polling places. We Californians really like that fact.
It takes more than a day to validate those millions of ballots. That gets to the (legitimate) point Nate makes that we could spend more on counting quickly, having more space, machines, people, etc. but most of the folks complaining are also against increasing government spending.
There's a kind of learned helplessness that I see in California, that believes the only way to solve a problem is by throwing money at it, and because we can't afford to throw more money at it, let's give up, despite the fact that others have solved the same problem for less money that we already spend.
At its last election, in 2024, India is estimated to have spent $1.25 billion. They have about 980 million registered voters, so they paid about $1.25 per registered voter. They counted 640 million votes in a day.
At its last election, also in 2024, California spent $250 million (not even counting the additional $50 million in Federal funds California spent on that election) and has about 22.5 million registered voters. Thats more than $11 per voter. For this 11x cost, they processed 0.54 million votes in a day. So India counted ballots 1200x faster for 1/11th the cost. And yeah sure, purchasing power parity and all that. California is not 13,000x more expensive than India.
If we wanted to abandon our system, we could do it faster without spending more.
But we like our system. It makes it really convenient to vote, even if it's not convenient for professional political prognosticators (or enthusiastic amateurs). Do you complain when other states have hours long lines that actually stop people from voting? That's not a thing in California.
The only way to do it faster is to spend more to validate late arriving ballots more quickly (or, I guess, limit validations so we're more open to fraud ... I don't think anyone really wants that, though)
Dude, I also live in California. I live in Berkeley. Californians don't have a univocal monolithic view of just about anything, let alone this. Assuming that things should stay a certain way just because they've been that way for a long time is a fine conservative view to hold, just not one I hold. And assuming that people support a certain policy just because it has not been modified vastly overestimates voter engagement and underestimates policy inertia.
Most people aren't charged up about this issue not because they wouldn't prefer their State to wake up from its state of learned helplessness, but because they have more pressing concerns; like how they're going to pay their kid's tuition, or the fact that their partner recently lost a job, or, you know, a hundred other things, before wasting their time raging against a State apparatus they don't believe they can meaningfully affect. You don't get to just assume support from their silence.
And re. "Do you complain when other states have hours long lines that actually stop people from voting?", yes, pretty fervently actually. It's kinda sad that you'd assume just because I want California to do better, I don't want other states to as well. I just happen to think California can substantively improve its counting speed without leading to impossibly long lines.
> The only way to do it faster is to spend more to validate late arriving ballots more quickly (or, I guess, limit validations so we're more open to fraud ... I don't think anyone really wants that, though)
Now there's a false dichotomy. You know what else might allow us to do it faster without compromising security? Using a form of technology invented... idk, how about any time in the last century.
I based the statement on numerous polls that say California is happy with out election system. We only (fully) implemented this system in 2020, so it's not at all just a matter of inertia.
I'm glad you're not one of the numerous folks out there who are only complaining about California. I agree we should spend more time talking about the issues people care most about.
> Do you complain when other states have hours long lines that actually stop people from voting? That's not a thing in California.
In the last six years, we have had a line longer than 15 minutes one (1) time, when we ran out of ballots (!!!) and I had to drive over to another ward to get some of their spares.
Longer than five minutes is very rare, and unheard of outside of the 5:15 just-got-off-work cohort.
This column does not even attempt to address the title question. It merely documents the problem in detail and knocks away some excuses. Moreover it strawmans Shirley Weber and Tom Steyer's point. Both claimed that counting every legitimate ballot was more important for public trust than producing a quick result. Quoting statistics about rejected ballots or counting errors misses their point.
In fact the answer is not hard to find. Start with the immediate causes: universal-vote-by-mail, seven-day postmark grace period, signature verification with a cure process, same day registration, generous provisional rules, 58 quasi-independent county election organizations with no statewide CEO who could impose Florida-style mandates. Every one was adopted for a reason with a winning coalition behind it. The countervailing speed coalition doesn't vote in California and the "public trust" externality is diffuse and nationwide. The opposition Republican party that attacks the state for inefficiency is too weak to matter. Moreover any efficiency rule with the slightest hint of disenfranchisement is on the third rail of politics in a heavily progressive state.
This kind of dysfunction is as classically Californian as giant sequoias and Venice Beach. Proposition 13, environmental reviews, public-sector pensions, single-family zoning, rooftop-solar net metering; even the sequoias themselves (damaged for 35 years by preventing the fires necessary for their lifecycles, then 20% destroyed in uncontrolled wildfires in four years) and Venice (highest ratio of homeless in the country, with the encampments bordering some of the most expensive mansions in the world).
Of course California is not unique, only extreme. Public choice doesn't stop at the Sierra Nevadas. New York's rent stabilization, Texas' deregulated utility grid have the same earmarks. The common denominators are single-party control, direct democracy, size allowing the state to externalize costs and prosperity that buys the slack to ignore problems. These are the reasons California's counts are slow, and that no one fixes the problem.
None of these are actually reasons California's counts are slow. Why can't California count every ballot it has on hand by election day on election day? The postmark grace period has nothing to do with that.
I think all of my points are reasons California's counts are slow.
The postmark grace period is one reason for a slow count. You're right that it's not the only reason, it applies only to the ballots received after Election Day.
I also gave the reasons why the count is slow even for ballots received by Election Day. One is the glut of ballots received within 72 hours of Election Day create a signature verification/cure procedure glut. Those ballots received earlier are counted well before Election Day, but the rush at the end overwhelms the machinery due to the complexities of verification and cure. On top of that, election-management fragmentation means 27 of the 58 counties don't use state of the art AB626 sign/scan/go systems.
Another bottleneck is same-day registration and provisional registration. A registration and a ballot submitted at the same time require more processing than simply counting the vote of someone already registered.
Finally there is the issue that the late and difficult to count ballots are compositionally different from the rest. If you had a random sample of even 10% of the votes counted, you could declare a winner with high confidence except in the closest (2000 Florida Presidential election) races. But you have to wait to learn many results if there are 10% uncounted ballots that skew heavily progressive.
All of the reasons I gave apply to some other states, but all of them apply in California, and to a greater extent than in most other states. It's not that California is fundamentally different from other states, it's that the four drivers: single-party control, direct democracy, size allowing the state to externalize costs and prosperity that buys the slack to ignore problems are all present in high degree in California. I did note that you can find similar dysfunction in New York and Texas, and to lesser extent in other states.
Similarly many of the immediate causes--universal-vote-by-mail, seven-day postmark grace period, signature verification with a cure process, same day registration, generous provisional rules, 58 quasi-independent county election organizations with no statewide CEO who could impose Florida-style mandates--exist in other states, but all of them exist in California.
California has some truly crazy laws, some of which get out of state boundaries and run wild. I have gotten from Amazon both an expensive tea and a soup mix with wild rice, both of which came with a sticker marking them poison. The tea was supposed to have arsenic and I forget what the soup mix claimed to be poisoned with. I raised holy hell and rejected both. People tried to explain (excuse) to me that this was just "California Crazy," first time I've heard that phrase, but I wasn't going to buy poisoned food! The soup had ingredients from Minnesota, packaged at the company in Michigan, and sent to me in Maryland: no California in the whole transaction, but there was that nutso California label spoiling everything.
That sticker captures my whole comment. There was no California anywhere in your supply chain, yet its rules rode along from Minnesota to Maryland anyway, because it's cheaper for a national company to put the warning on every box than to run a separate California-free line. A state big enough to be unignorable ends up writing the label for the other 49.
Those are Proposition 65 warnings, and Prop 65 is so trigger-happy it shows up on coffee, parking garages, and the entrance to Disneyland. The "poison" is almost always a trace of something that occurs naturally in food grown in actual soil — arsenic and similar metals turn up in tiny quantities everywhere.
I grew up in 1960s Seattle, where a California plate was taken as proof you were a fast-buck developer come to fleece the locals and pave the town into a strip mall with borrowed money — so I come by my prejudice honestly. But the traits that make California maddening — one-party rule, the size to push its costs onto everyone else, government by ballot initiative, and enough prosperity to survive its own bad ideas — aren't a California monopoly. They just rarely gather in such concentrated form. Texas, California's one-party mirror image, has long had a heavy hand in what ends up in the nation's schoolbooks; New York's financial regulators reach into firms in all fifty states because Wall Street happens to sit there. California is the type specimen, not the only one.
And since I don't like to criticize without a positive example, there's Pennsylvania. You'll notice the "Reg. Penna. Dept. of Agr." on most of the packaged food you buy. That's not PA pushing its wacky ideology on the nation's food supply, it's PA inspectors doing the legwork of actual inspections to ensure the food meets the federal rules. And unlike most protectionist state measures, PA built a way for home-based producers to sell across state lines. And it's not just food--every pillow and mattress sold in the country carries a tag from the PA Department of Labor and Industry--one tag, sales allowed in every state.
It's a little too easy to pass a badly written ballot measure in California. The warning in question happens when any level of toxin or carcinogen has been detected in the product. Nevermind that many of these toxins/carcinogens are not present in anything near a dangerous level- the tea might have had lower arsenic than an apple seed, for all you know. But because it was passed as a ballot measure, the only way to modify the law is via another ballot measure.
Not just a little too easy, a lot too easy. I'm a fan of direct democracy as a veto--the government should not be able to do things the majority opposes--but it's unworkable as a positive mechanism. Of course you can get a majority to vote to require warning labels on toxins sold as food, but it takes expertise and careful thought to write reasonable regulations about food safety regulations. And even more important, someone should be thinking about how all the regulations interact, not just choosing them one at a time.
I struggle with the premise, as "into the 21st century" feels like ballots through physical mail should be relegated to exception volume in an exception process.
We can execute highly sophisticated financial transactions with a fingerprint or face id on a smart phone. Public key - private key cryptography is fairly well demonstrated at this point. And it may not cost any more to execute a liveness check with any one of many SaaS identity providers that it would to send physical mail.
This isn't a process improvement opportunity. This is a start over opportunity.
Oh good jesus god almighty no. The ONLY thing California and I can agree on is a checkable, immutable, paper trail generated by a process that does not scale computationally.
There are important differences between financial transactions and voting.
Financial transactions are not anonymous, are ledgered, and can be backed out if a problem is detected. There is a reason there is a clearing time for the availability of funds after a deposit. A large deposit can be held 10 days.
In contrast, after a voter is proven to be authorized to vote, the connection to the actual ballot is broken.
Can we agree that anonymity is a good thing for elections?
It turns out that it is very difficult to design an electronic system that provides secure anonymous voting and eliminates the risk of hacking.
Ultimate anonymity is good, I agree. However, if California is using some semi or pseudo-human process to verify signatures (as described in this article) then mechanically the transaction is the same as any other legacy identity-verfiied instance (not significantly different then checking against voter rolls at polling or the in-person machines).
…and mechanically, we have advanced a lot further than those legacy financial transaction (which yes, are still hanging around by choice). Immutabliliy and instant settlement is kinda par now.
I will grant, when comparing old tech against old tech the positioning makes sense. I attempted to suggest that new tech should change our outlook.
Prompt counting mania is 100% a side effect of the short attention span generation.
Before the news agencies got people addicted to "calling" the result based on exit polls before everyone had voted, it was common for tabulation, verification, and publication to take weeks.
I'm sorry your state is a failed state with failed processes. I wish it didn't rub off on us other blue states, most of whom have their shit more together.
Ballots postmarked on election day and which do not arrive on election day are not valid ballots and are not counted, just as ballots that are postmarked after election day are not valid ballots and are also not counted. The details of our process are not secret, and voters know how to cast votes, presumably just as yours do. If they're terribly worried about it, they'll mail in their vote a week before Election Day, or they'll drop it off at the Clerk's Office day-of, or drop it off at their polling site (I know you all think those are icky). Just like you'd do with your mortgage or your utility bill or any other piece of important mail. You know, like adults do.
Why are Californians so uniquely unqualified to read dates on a calendar?
It used to be common for people to come to vote by carriage and horseback and the vote count to be correspondingly clunky. That doesn't mean it's fine for outmoded systems to persist indefinitely.
Of course there was more slack in the system then also.
Presidents used to get inaugurated in March.
I would be happy to see the current 7 day mail delivery system, but improvements in the counting and validation system that gave results as quickly as possible after that.
Instant gratification is not a compelling reason to make it harder to vote.
I actually thought that the point was most interesting about the complaints about California coming from our modern desire for 24/7 speedy news coverage, and that this is not really anything urgent, just --- as you say, desire for instant gratification. So this is a topic I hadn't thought about; I don't care that California is slow. However, I suppose it should match all the other states and even nations that do better just for everyone's convenience.
Lots of diversity nationwide. It isn't even a Red/Blue thing - Alaska is 10 days, Mississippi is 5 days, New York is 7 days, etc.
For military overseas voters Florida is 10 days, Texas is 6 days.
Where is Nate's complaint about New York, his own state?
The issue in California is that enough people vote by mail that is is frequently statistically significant, especially in the Top 2 advance situation where the #2 vs #3 distance is likely to be closer than #1 in two separate primaries. (#2 vs #3 is a portion of the remaining vote after #1 is subtracted, so a smaller pool).
Florida 2000 was within the margin of military ballots. It can happen anywhere.
And of course mandating a strict national policy would almost certainly require a Constitutional amendment to change Article I, Section 4, Clause 1.
It is obvious to the casual observer that the process of voting in California is being led by a committee that worries about getting everyone to vote and not about counting their vote's safely. So you develop rules that are not very friendly to the process being run smoothly. If they had a rule that no rule should get in the way of every vote being counted in 3 days, life would be a lot easier for everyone. And yes, a military vote from the middle east submitted on Monday might not make it but that's the breaks of Navy Air.
I was disappointed to see omitted from the comparison a discussion of how many questions are counted in India, Japan, and the UK. If it's only a single person, an MP or a single referendum question, that simplifies the counting logistics considerably.
The fact that a typical California ballot has so many propositions and minor officials that it takes at least 8 hours if not more to properly research makes voting in-person practically difficult. It must also raise the complexity of counting, and even more so if there are instant runoff municipal elections.
If I could vote in-person at any precinct in California, rendering my local ballot of my residence in real-time, it would make in-person voting during a work break more practical.
This is especially true because our ballots are so specific that if you work in the neighboring county to where you reside, you can't vote on a work break. It's why the mail-in process is easier.
Handwriting so called experts have a difficult challenge in being qualified to testify in court. I have always thought ballot procedures to validate ballots is suspect . I really doubt the people reviewing the so called verification are up to the task.
I would like to see data about how many ballots are received each day after Election Day! I suspect that VERY few are received more than four days (Saturday) after election. So I think the seven day window “solves” a problem that doesn’t exist! I agree that CA vote counting is inexecusably slow. Dems are slow to fix these types of problems!
Reinforcing the point that CA's slow count does not make things any better. Kern County reported on the 3rd that it had counted a total of 150,000 ballots. Then it reported on the 4th that it had counted a cumulative total of 78,000 ballots. Somehow the number of ballots counted went DOWN? The system is deeply flawed and problematic.
I don't disagree with the premise here, but I wish it included more analysis of what the specific failings of California in particular are and how they could be fixed.
I see a lot of people complain about this, but I don't get a lot of substance. Is this purely a function of the late ballot mailing deadline? Are you suggesting that be changed? If not, what are the counting barriers? Is it technology? Do they not start counting early enough? Is it purely a matter of resources and personnel?
All of that would be more useful than just calling California a failed State.
There are plenty of detailed analysis online. Here is a sampling of ways California has systematically chosen to be slow:
1) late mail ballots are accepted until the Tuesday a week after election day if postmarked by election day
2) mis-matched signatures trigger a letter to the voter, and the voter has until close to the end of November to confirm the ballot is theirs. In part because California auto-registers everyone who gets a drivers license, there are LOTS of mis-matched signatures.
3) Some counties are "vote centers" (one can vote in person anywhere in the county, or in advance), but many are not. And in those other counties there are lots of "provisional ballots" that take a long time to validate because the voter showed up at the wrong precinct
4) California has a requirement that a ballot sent to or dropped off in the wrong county has to be sent to the correct county where the voter resides, where it is then validated and counted. Transporting those takes days, and validating takes longer.
All of these rules slowing the count lead to a pervasive acceptance among elections officials that there is no rush. That leads to to situations like this one: https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/us-news/inside-la-county-election-vote-counting-facility-with-rows-of-empty-desks-despite-336-million-budget/
None of this really explains it though. According to the California SOS, as of noon today, there were more than 3 million ballots received *on or before election day* that had still not been processed. Why is that?!
Mail ballots that arrive on Monday and Tuesday are often put aside for verification post-election day. And they have to go through the signature verification process before being counted. And, since there's no sense of urgency (we have to wait for those "cured" ballots until the end of November anyways), some Registrars' decisions reflect that feeling of no rush: https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/us-news/inside-la-county-election-vote-counting-facility-with-rows-of-empty-desks-despite-336-million-budget/
This still doesn’t explain why those ballots haven’t yet been counted.
DJ gave the explanation--they don't give a shit and they don't see why we do.
> And, since there's no sense of urgency (we have to wait for those "cured" ballots until the end of November anyways), some Registrars' decisions reflect that feeling of no rush:
Why do we care? Is there harm caused by waiting a week or so for the outcome?
It is more accurate to call the USPS a failed letter delivery service.
It takes them a really long time to count the ballots once received though. I mean, as Nate shows there is evidence that states with higher % mail-in and/or similar or even later deadlines still get most of their votes counted much faster. Is there evidence that USPS is significantly worse in Cali than those other states? And even if it were, that still doesn’t account for the fact that they’re taking longer to count even once received.
This is just a shot in the dark, but I think just making it so mail-in ballots received before Election Day can be prepped for counting in advance, so they can be counted immediately once polls close, would probably go a long way here.
Even if it takes the same amount of time to get every last vote counted in the end, getting to the crucial 95% counted threshold days earlier could make all the difference in giving those seeking to undermine faith in our elections much less ammunition. Realistically, there’s no way more than 5% of total ballots are still lost in the mail 4-5 days after Election Day. They probably have at least 95% in hand by the day after, they’re just taking way too long to count them.
Yeah - poking at the USPS is mostly snark, although delivery time is part of the issue.
Realistically, the wait time for postmarked letters isn't the issue. There are lots of states that have similar delays for mail delivery, and some with even longer acceptance for ballots from overseas military.
The problem for the instant gratification crowd is that they don't notice these states because the number of outstanding ballots is rarely enough to sway the election, so they get to enjoy the modern sports-like counting climax on election night.
And for places (like Oregon) with a large number of mail-in ballots, the total counting load per county is less, so the per county overhead is less. (The largest county in Oregon would be the 15th in California).
And of course the "top two advance" means that it is more likely that there will be a tight race. Eg. if the top slot gets 30%, #2 and #3 are fighting over the remaining 70%, which makes the distribution tighter.
Consider Alaska, with a top 4 primary and a 10 day delivery deadline for ballots postmarked on election day. The difference between the #4 and #5 slot in the primary was 21 votes when the dust settled. There appear to be about 2k Alaska residents who are stationed overseas in the military, so their ballots could easily have been significant.
But the real issue in California isn't the postage lag. It is the signature verification and checking, including time for rejected signatures to be "cured". Count every ballot includes a check back in certain circumstances that adds delay.
If you want some statistics and background, here is a good description :
https://www.calvoter.org/sites/default/files/ballot_curing_hearing_march_2025_kim_alexander_testimony.pdf
The law says every mail in ballot must be verified by hand, and that they can received as late as seven days after Election Day. This puts the count out to two weeks, with the extra week to verify all provisional ballots. Normal is 14 days post election. The only solution I see is to allow voting at polling places on Election Day and make the mail in ballots must be received as of Election Day. That would move the vote count up to only two weeks out etc. Or if you want it to be Election Day only, change mail in due date a week earlier… personally I think that would eliminate this angst that Republican have created. Or fund the registrar of voters so they have trained temporary workers to verify ballots quicker. But this is all ridiculous nonsense to distract from the fact republicans want to make it harder to vote so they can reduce eligibile voters whom they know will vote against them
The last of that comment has nothing at all to do with California's pathologically slow count. But it is true that when it rained, fewer Dems bothered to vote ---- I've known about Democrat weather (the sun is shining) and Republican weather (rain, hail, tornadoes ---- we don't care, we just vote) all my life. However, with all the easy voting now, early and by mail, I doubt there is much difference between the parties anymore in likelihood of voting.
That's sort of the point? There literally aren't reasons for it to take this long. Surely we can agree that's not an argument in California's defense?
California Election Laws:
An ID isn’t strictly required to register to vote. Those who don’t furnish one to register are supposed to present one when they vote for the first time in a federal election, though this requirement isn’t strictly enforced.
The state lists a gym card, drug prescription and even a sample ballot as acceptable forms of ID. Federal prosecutors last month indicted a California woman for paying homeless people on Skid Row to register using her former address, meaning ballots would be sent there. She agreed to plead guilty.
County election officials aren’t required to check whether a voter is a citizen or, well, even a person. A woman from Orange County, Calif., was charged last fall with illegally registering her dog to vote and submitting ballots on the canine’s behalf. One ballot was counted, the other was tossed. The fraud was caught because the woman reported herself.
State regulations also allow late-arriving ballots to be counted even if they lack a post-mark as long as they include a handwritten date on the envelope. The state even instructs county officials to accept sample ballots. Because election officials often don’t remove inactive voters until after several election cycles, ballots may be sent to people who have died or moved.
Setting aside the bluntly, absolute bullshit excuse that California counts slowly "to ensure accuracy", what is the excuse for such a high tax state that doesn't fund it's elections well. They can wax poetic about having a big enough GDP and population to be a country, but that just means you have the tax base to do better.
I genuinely do not get the appeal of living in California unless you are rich. While I personally would not want to live in a high tax blue state, I can concede that states like Massachusetts have fantastic education, healthcare, and infrastructure. But California has stupidly high taxes, yet it counts votes literally weeks after everyone else, it can't finish it's famous high speed rail project, and it's schools are middle of the pack compared to the other states. What the hell are you people paying for?
When the other 49 states all do noticeably better, what's the excuse? It's not a blue or red state problem, a rural or urban state problem, rich or poor state problem, it's JUST California.
Sigh.
We donate over $83B to the rest of the country above what we get in Federal spending. And this understates the actual results because the Federal deficit gets spread over the rest of the country. Compared to the rest of the country we are effectively out over $100M
(For comparison, the Israeli military budget is under $50B, and the UK is under $100B. If we were a country we could fund a world class military and still be ahead on the deal.)
So yes our state taxes are high, but much less than it seems when you realize how much other states are subsidized.
(It appears you are in Georgia. If that is accurate, you are getting $2,100 from the US Gov per resident. You are paying no Federal tax since your state gets more money back than you send to the IRS. Must be nice to live so well on other people's efforts)
HSR was a mess by design. Jerry Brown wanted to invest in the Central Valley, and needed the support of SoCal and the Bay Area to fund it. Too ambitious, difficult route, lack of US HSR expertise, and lawsuits galore from the Central Valley Republicans who weren't interested.
K-12 issues in California were bad before Prop 13 (see Serrano v. Priest), then got worse. Of course schools are run by the local school districts, and we have a much more diverse population than most states, so there are education challenges here that aren't captured in simple metrics.
You may have heard that we have a pretty good college system, and that is indeed run by the state.
I appreciate your concern about our elections, but it isn't even a rounding error on the quality of life here.
Californian's love to put themselves on that particular cross of "Funding everyone else at our own expense" but you are not the only state that puts more into the federal government then they get out, per capita, you aren't even the worst off, you just have the highest net paid because you have the most people.
I also can't help that notice that all of your follow up excuses for high speed rail and the K-12, but those issues are all products of your political culture in one way or the other.
And to go back to the "We pay more then we get out" argument, most of your congressional delegation are from the party that supports the various social programs and other federal spending in those "net-taker" states, so California can't really complain too much about that, because your congressional delegation is the bulwark that keeps those programs being slashed.
Also, if so much of your federal taxes are getting "wasted" that should make you more picky about your return on investment at the state level.
California isn't the only diverse state, nor is it the only state that pays more federal taxes than it uses. It's not a problem foisted on California, it the states own fault. I'm glad you seem to like the quality of life, but you guys are paying Massachusetts level taxes for Georgia level education and poverty rates. (And that is without taking into account the insane cost of living.) If the QOL is so great, California wouldn't be a net loser of population.
As for the elections, as long as California elects federal representatives, it is absolutely a valid interest for the other 49.
Good job agreeing with me that other states have similar problems, and that there are actual reasons Cal HSR has proven to be expensive.
And while we may be down about a percent off our peak population, we are up 3% in households. If that confuses you, but look at actual ACS data.
Again, thanks for your concerns, but our winning representatives will be in office long before the deadline to seat them.
The reason HSR has been as bad as it is comes down to California's political culture and government, which is it's own fault. As for the "similar problems" literally no other state is remotely as bad at tallying votes as California.
Californians have a tendency to react to others pointing out metrics where your state is below average, or near the problem, and just brush it off like the rest of the country "just can't get it because California is so special".
But its really not. Government and administration practices don't magically change based on which state they are in, it's a result of the people who vote and the people who are elected and appointed. California isn't an untamed beast that can never be controlled, it's just a dysfunctional political entity with a shrinking population.
Again, we disagree about the vote counting being a big deal.
Things are expensive here because of supply and demand.
Things are cheaper elsewhere because of supply and demand.
You seem to be one of these people who see minor issues on the news about California and leap to conclusions about what it is like here.
You need to find some reality based talking points.
It is nice that you are happier where you are. Turns out that other people are happy other places.
I mean, have you been here? You can't beat the weather. I'd never live in most states because I don't want to deal with snow, humidity, excessive heat, or rain during most of the year, which is kind of what the options are in every other state. Our food is also basically impossible to beat in other states because most types of produce are grown here. Frankly, our state government gets away with being so bad because people are too busy enjoying living here to care what the government is doing.
What percentage of votes actually arrive more than 24 after Election Day anyway? It seems like that is likely a cheap excuse for the fact they still have like 30% to count 3 days later
It isn't about votes arriving 24 days late. There is a 7 day delivery window after the election day.
Then there is verification and other overhead after that.
That doesn't excuse not having counted the ballots already received, though.
Different states have different rules about counting in advance.
I still haven't heard a compelling reason why it matters.
Because it’s not reasonable to wait a month to know who won an election?
To the extent California has restrictive rules about counting in advance, what is its justification for having those rules?
Count every vote reasonably submitted by election day is a pretty good argument for me.
Don't do that because some people complain about waiting is not a good reason for me.
Is this this just another example of how bad CA is at state capacity…on controlling and preventing wildfires, building permitting/regulations, etc.. How can CA be so innovative and so inept at the same time?
You want the real answer?
Fine. Libertarian Screed incoming.
California's mostly suffering from the problem that it's too built out. Everyone decades ago cut a rule for something, and no one ever bothered to go back and pick up the pieces.
You have rules from the era of Red California dealing with permits and regulations that were then partially built over (but not completely) with Blue California laws and patches designed to fix red line era abuses.
The voting rules are pretty much the same. Laws on laws on laws, no one bothered to take care of them.
Let's start with one of the examples:
Voters misfiled the vote in the wrong location, so send it to the right one? Sure, reasonable idea. Prevents either party from trying to get a advantage by sending misleading fliers in the mail.
Do we have to do the fixes by hand, shipped slowly a week later?
Can't we run it through a separate process that confirms the resident in a few days?
Or just form a few centralized locations to sort this stuff out. Clearing house this shit.
That would be - HIGHLY ILLEGAL BASED ON THE LAWS AS WRITTEN FOR CALIFORNIA.
Some would violate Newson's rules. Most of those would violate rules from Regan's time leading California.
Now, for the second part of the question, why is it innovative?
Innovation does not really comes from the government or from the state. It comes from the people.
Nasa, in it's prime, was a clearing house of practical innovation because after we fucked up our first launch we decided to gather every single brilliant person we could find in the same rooms, told them to get the job done, and we looked the other way towards their personal lives. Velcro, rockets, satellites, the internet, transformative modelling (aka AI) they made it on the government's dime and it was given away for free.
The innovation wasn't because it was the government, it was because the people who could make the magic were brought together and left alone. The magic started to die in the 80s when the government stopped letting them work and started to meddle.
California has always had shitty government. Dem, Republican, doesn't matter. But it's got the most perfect weather, a long coast, and enough resources that any industry could start in it's borders.
It's far enough away from 'the rest' of the country that it can do it's own thing without really having to fight or argue, save with Oregon. Nevada and Arizona are blocked by the mountains.
And if you have a business idea, there are people with the Money and the Resources and the Trade routes to get you started...
But the taxes, you say? Show me a business that actually pays the taxes as written, and I'll show you a accountant you need to fire. Musk certainly didn't have an issue for a great many years there, until they stopped giving him freebies.
Oh yes, the freebies! The Welfare state isn't just for poor people, it's mostly for the rich. No one seizes open stretches of land like California. Why, just remember how old George let the Community Redevelopment Law to just seize chunks of the countryside if you needed it. Or how Silicon Valley got all of it's infrastructure thanks to the Republicans in the statehouse.
The reality is, people can work around a bad government under the right conditions.
California is 'the right conditions'.
The capture of California by the Democrats was, make no mistake, a victory for them. But the Republicans abandoning it as unwinnable in the 2000s for the strategically/politically more complex Texas and the ticking time bomb that is Florida is still something I cannot fathom.
I have argued upon occasion that a bit of genius in the US system of government is that they designed in gridlock from the start.
The two houses with variable election terms, independent executive and judiciary essentially means that it is very hard to accumulate the levels of power that are common for governments in other systems.
That means that a person who actually wants to accomplish things is almost always better off in the private sector than government. More control, better return on time.
Sure there are counter examples, but it is rare for government in the US to be competent or astoundingly incompetent.
Some modest Californian government items had major benefits - the public college system, strong restrictions on anti-compete clauses, the water delivery systems (for all their many issues), the anti-slavery foundations.
But in general, California benefits from people doing well in spite of the government. And we have more natural advantages than most places in the world, so that helps a lot.
A good chunk of the major fire problems are on Federal land,
Permitting is a city or county issue, except for implications of Reagan's CEQA bill that cast a statewide shadow that Democrats have finally managed to address slightly.
That doesn't mean you are wrong, but it is more complicated than most coverage seems to imply.
It is also off topic, so I won't get into more details than that here.
> California also sends a mail ballot to every registered voter and most voters — about 80 percent in 2024 — do choose to vote by mail. Those ballots take more time to tabulate, in part because election workers need to verify that the signature on each mail ballot matches the signature on file for that voter.
Election workers need to verify that the signature on each mail ballot matches 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙪𝙨𝙚 𝘾𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙖 𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙨𝙚𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙧𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙤𝙣 𝙢𝙖𝙞𝙡 𝙗𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙤𝙩𝙨.
Many states do not. My state does not.
How does your state verify that the ballots were actually submitted by the right person?
In Wisconsin, the ballot envelope is signed by the voter, along with the signature and address of another registered voter who attests they saw them do it all themselves, etc. etc. At counting time, a poll worker will go to the poll book with a half-dozen unopened envelopes, then go through the poll book to mark off ballots as having been received. Once you're so marked in the poll book, that's it, and your ballot will be fed into the scantron in the next few minutes.
edit to add: if you get to the poll book and your box IS already marked as having been voted, this triggers a few things: go find the envelope that contained that ballot, make sure it wasn't an error in the poll book (you marked Jeff Lastname instead of Jedd Lastname, we all make mistakes), and start relentlessly pursuing that witness, wrath of God style. In practice, I have never an in-person voter incorrectly/fraudulently marked as already having voted absentee.
No, all of this isn't perfect, but the idea that a signature is any kind of valid proof of identification is also kind of laughable. Go back and look through your mortgage papers sometime. Certainly a photo ID is INIFINITELY better proof of voter ID than a scrawled signature, although proponents of the latter are usually oddly hostile about the former.
That's fair ... but can you imagine what the folks who are interested in complaining would say if California did nothing to verify them? Especially if we went from doing something to doing nothing?
I only know how my state does better than California. I don't know how literally other state also does better than California.
Yours and other states do faster counting. California does more convenient access to voting. Which is "better" is a matter of opinion. Californians are generally very happy with our system. Why should we care if y'all complain?
An entire section of the article you are commenting under is dedicated to why California should care if the rest of us complain.
I'm not ignoring the sleight-of-hand that takes it on faith that the system is universally popular 𝘪𝘯 𝘊𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘢--Newsom's comments suggest otherwise.
The late ballot counting around the country made it much easier for Trump to falsely convince his followers that the election was stolen. They went to bed election night believing Trump had won by a fairly substantial margin. Then, as the other ballots were counted, they said wait a minute what’s going on? In the past if there was a substantial lead on election night the remaining ballots wouldn’t amount to enough to change the election. By having ballots trickling in for days and weeks going mostly for democrats It made it much easier for Trump to promote his ridiculous claims about the election.
Another note: I have a Dutch friend who says in the Netherlands everybody gets up on election day and goes to the polls and votes, and the results are all counted that night. I think that’s the way it was done in this country for the first 200 years or more. Too bad we can’t do it that way anymore.
Here in the UK, a country with a population bigger than California, we count 650 different seats overnight and by the next afternoon the new government is in place! If your mailed ballot doesn't arrive by the time polls close it doesn't count, not least because even the very next days post is after the count has been completed!
Honest question, Nate. Do you really think that the conspiracy theorists won't just find another excuse to fuel their theories?
Also, worth noting, the issue isn't late arriving ballots. That's a trivial share of the vote. The issue is that CA stops processing mail ballots while in-person voting is happening to ensure no one votes twice. The most popular way to vote is to drop-off your mail ballot during that period, creating the huge backlog.
The upshot is that California almost never has significant lines at polling places. We Californians really like that fact.
This would presumably justify a delay of exactly one day. And I'd be fine with that, if that's how they want to run things.
It takes more than a day to validate those millions of ballots. That gets to the (legitimate) point Nate makes that we could spend more on counting quickly, having more space, machines, people, etc. but most of the folks complaining are also against increasing government spending.
There's a kind of learned helplessness that I see in California, that believes the only way to solve a problem is by throwing money at it, and because we can't afford to throw more money at it, let's give up, despite the fact that others have solved the same problem for less money that we already spend.
At its last election, in 2024, India is estimated to have spent $1.25 billion. They have about 980 million registered voters, so they paid about $1.25 per registered voter. They counted 640 million votes in a day.
At its last election, also in 2024, California spent $250 million (not even counting the additional $50 million in Federal funds California spent on that election) and has about 22.5 million registered voters. Thats more than $11 per voter. For this 11x cost, they processed 0.54 million votes in a day. So India counted ballots 1200x faster for 1/11th the cost. And yeah sure, purchasing power parity and all that. California is not 13,000x more expensive than India.
If we wanted to abandon our system, we could do it faster without spending more.
But we like our system. It makes it really convenient to vote, even if it's not convenient for professional political prognosticators (or enthusiastic amateurs). Do you complain when other states have hours long lines that actually stop people from voting? That's not a thing in California.
The only way to do it faster is to spend more to validate late arriving ballots more quickly (or, I guess, limit validations so we're more open to fraud ... I don't think anyone really wants that, though)
Dude, I also live in California. I live in Berkeley. Californians don't have a univocal monolithic view of just about anything, let alone this. Assuming that things should stay a certain way just because they've been that way for a long time is a fine conservative view to hold, just not one I hold. And assuming that people support a certain policy just because it has not been modified vastly overestimates voter engagement and underestimates policy inertia.
Most people aren't charged up about this issue not because they wouldn't prefer their State to wake up from its state of learned helplessness, but because they have more pressing concerns; like how they're going to pay their kid's tuition, or the fact that their partner recently lost a job, or, you know, a hundred other things, before wasting their time raging against a State apparatus they don't believe they can meaningfully affect. You don't get to just assume support from their silence.
And re. "Do you complain when other states have hours long lines that actually stop people from voting?", yes, pretty fervently actually. It's kinda sad that you'd assume just because I want California to do better, I don't want other states to as well. I just happen to think California can substantively improve its counting speed without leading to impossibly long lines.
> The only way to do it faster is to spend more to validate late arriving ballots more quickly (or, I guess, limit validations so we're more open to fraud ... I don't think anyone really wants that, though)
Now there's a false dichotomy. You know what else might allow us to do it faster without compromising security? Using a form of technology invented... idk, how about any time in the last century.
I based the statement on numerous polls that say California is happy with out election system. We only (fully) implemented this system in 2020, so it's not at all just a matter of inertia.
I'm glad you're not one of the numerous folks out there who are only complaining about California. I agree we should spend more time talking about the issues people care most about.
> Do you complain when other states have hours long lines that actually stop people from voting? That's not a thing in California.
In the last six years, we have had a line longer than 15 minutes one (1) time, when we ran out of ballots (!!!) and I had to drive over to another ward to get some of their spares.
Longer than five minutes is very rare, and unheard of outside of the 5:15 just-got-off-work cohort.
It appears that purchasing power parity from India to California is about 4x.
For the record, normalized cost per ballot counted (11x) times normalized ballots counted per day (1200x) does not result in unit of cost.
It may be fair to say it is 13k times more ridiculous.
This column does not even attempt to address the title question. It merely documents the problem in detail and knocks away some excuses. Moreover it strawmans Shirley Weber and Tom Steyer's point. Both claimed that counting every legitimate ballot was more important for public trust than producing a quick result. Quoting statistics about rejected ballots or counting errors misses their point.
In fact the answer is not hard to find. Start with the immediate causes: universal-vote-by-mail, seven-day postmark grace period, signature verification with a cure process, same day registration, generous provisional rules, 58 quasi-independent county election organizations with no statewide CEO who could impose Florida-style mandates. Every one was adopted for a reason with a winning coalition behind it. The countervailing speed coalition doesn't vote in California and the "public trust" externality is diffuse and nationwide. The opposition Republican party that attacks the state for inefficiency is too weak to matter. Moreover any efficiency rule with the slightest hint of disenfranchisement is on the third rail of politics in a heavily progressive state.
This kind of dysfunction is as classically Californian as giant sequoias and Venice Beach. Proposition 13, environmental reviews, public-sector pensions, single-family zoning, rooftop-solar net metering; even the sequoias themselves (damaged for 35 years by preventing the fires necessary for their lifecycles, then 20% destroyed in uncontrolled wildfires in four years) and Venice (highest ratio of homeless in the country, with the encampments bordering some of the most expensive mansions in the world).
Of course California is not unique, only extreme. Public choice doesn't stop at the Sierra Nevadas. New York's rent stabilization, Texas' deregulated utility grid have the same earmarks. The common denominators are single-party control, direct democracy, size allowing the state to externalize costs and prosperity that buys the slack to ignore problems. These are the reasons California's counts are slow, and that no one fixes the problem.
None of these are actually reasons California's counts are slow. Why can't California count every ballot it has on hand by election day on election day? The postmark grace period has nothing to do with that.
I think all of my points are reasons California's counts are slow.
The postmark grace period is one reason for a slow count. You're right that it's not the only reason, it applies only to the ballots received after Election Day.
I also gave the reasons why the count is slow even for ballots received by Election Day. One is the glut of ballots received within 72 hours of Election Day create a signature verification/cure procedure glut. Those ballots received earlier are counted well before Election Day, but the rush at the end overwhelms the machinery due to the complexities of verification and cure. On top of that, election-management fragmentation means 27 of the 58 counties don't use state of the art AB626 sign/scan/go systems.
Another bottleneck is same-day registration and provisional registration. A registration and a ballot submitted at the same time require more processing than simply counting the vote of someone already registered.
Finally there is the issue that the late and difficult to count ballots are compositionally different from the rest. If you had a random sample of even 10% of the votes counted, you could declare a winner with high confidence except in the closest (2000 Florida Presidential election) races. But you have to wait to learn many results if there are 10% uncounted ballots that skew heavily progressive.
You are still not addressing that California is slow to count even relative to other vote by mail states.
All of the reasons I gave apply to some other states, but all of them apply in California, and to a greater extent than in most other states. It's not that California is fundamentally different from other states, it's that the four drivers: single-party control, direct democracy, size allowing the state to externalize costs and prosperity that buys the slack to ignore problems are all present in high degree in California. I did note that you can find similar dysfunction in New York and Texas, and to lesser extent in other states.
Similarly many of the immediate causes--universal-vote-by-mail, seven-day postmark grace period, signature verification with a cure process, same day registration, generous provisional rules, 58 quasi-independent county election organizations with no statewide CEO who could impose Florida-style mandates--exist in other states, but all of them exist in California.
California has some truly crazy laws, some of which get out of state boundaries and run wild. I have gotten from Amazon both an expensive tea and a soup mix with wild rice, both of which came with a sticker marking them poison. The tea was supposed to have arsenic and I forget what the soup mix claimed to be poisoned with. I raised holy hell and rejected both. People tried to explain (excuse) to me that this was just "California Crazy," first time I've heard that phrase, but I wasn't going to buy poisoned food! The soup had ingredients from Minnesota, packaged at the company in Michigan, and sent to me in Maryland: no California in the whole transaction, but there was that nutso California label spoiling everything.
That sticker captures my whole comment. There was no California anywhere in your supply chain, yet its rules rode along from Minnesota to Maryland anyway, because it's cheaper for a national company to put the warning on every box than to run a separate California-free line. A state big enough to be unignorable ends up writing the label for the other 49.
Those are Proposition 65 warnings, and Prop 65 is so trigger-happy it shows up on coffee, parking garages, and the entrance to Disneyland. The "poison" is almost always a trace of something that occurs naturally in food grown in actual soil — arsenic and similar metals turn up in tiny quantities everywhere.
I grew up in 1960s Seattle, where a California plate was taken as proof you were a fast-buck developer come to fleece the locals and pave the town into a strip mall with borrowed money — so I come by my prejudice honestly. But the traits that make California maddening — one-party rule, the size to push its costs onto everyone else, government by ballot initiative, and enough prosperity to survive its own bad ideas — aren't a California monopoly. They just rarely gather in such concentrated form. Texas, California's one-party mirror image, has long had a heavy hand in what ends up in the nation's schoolbooks; New York's financial regulators reach into firms in all fifty states because Wall Street happens to sit there. California is the type specimen, not the only one.
And since I don't like to criticize without a positive example, there's Pennsylvania. You'll notice the "Reg. Penna. Dept. of Agr." on most of the packaged food you buy. That's not PA pushing its wacky ideology on the nation's food supply, it's PA inspectors doing the legwork of actual inspections to ensure the food meets the federal rules. And unlike most protectionist state measures, PA built a way for home-based producers to sell across state lines. And it's not just food--every pillow and mattress sold in the country carries a tag from the PA Department of Labor and Industry--one tag, sales allowed in every state.
It's a little too easy to pass a badly written ballot measure in California. The warning in question happens when any level of toxin or carcinogen has been detected in the product. Nevermind that many of these toxins/carcinogens are not present in anything near a dangerous level- the tea might have had lower arsenic than an apple seed, for all you know. But because it was passed as a ballot measure, the only way to modify the law is via another ballot measure.
Not just a little too easy, a lot too easy. I'm a fan of direct democracy as a veto--the government should not be able to do things the majority opposes--but it's unworkable as a positive mechanism. Of course you can get a majority to vote to require warning labels on toxins sold as food, but it takes expertise and careful thought to write reasonable regulations about food safety regulations. And even more important, someone should be thinking about how all the regulations interact, not just choosing them one at a time.
I struggle with the premise, as "into the 21st century" feels like ballots through physical mail should be relegated to exception volume in an exception process.
We can execute highly sophisticated financial transactions with a fingerprint or face id on a smart phone. Public key - private key cryptography is fairly well demonstrated at this point. And it may not cost any more to execute a liveness check with any one of many SaaS identity providers that it would to send physical mail.
This isn't a process improvement opportunity. This is a start over opportunity.
Oh good jesus god almighty no. The ONLY thing California and I can agree on is a checkable, immutable, paper trail generated by a process that does not scale computationally.
There are important differences between financial transactions and voting.
Financial transactions are not anonymous, are ledgered, and can be backed out if a problem is detected. There is a reason there is a clearing time for the availability of funds after a deposit. A large deposit can be held 10 days.
In contrast, after a voter is proven to be authorized to vote, the connection to the actual ballot is broken.
Can we agree that anonymity is a good thing for elections?
It turns out that it is very difficult to design an electronic system that provides secure anonymous voting and eliminates the risk of hacking.
A lot of good information is available at https://verifiedvoting.org/
Ultimate anonymity is good, I agree. However, if California is using some semi or pseudo-human process to verify signatures (as described in this article) then mechanically the transaction is the same as any other legacy identity-verfiied instance (not significantly different then checking against voter rolls at polling or the in-person machines).
…and mechanically, we have advanced a lot further than those legacy financial transaction (which yes, are still hanging around by choice). Immutabliliy and instant settlement is kinda par now.
I will grant, when comparing old tech against old tech the positioning makes sense. I attempted to suggest that new tech should change our outlook.
I spent a huge chunk of time cleaning up a bank fraud mess for my parents last year. It is a $12B "industry".
Perhaps not the poster child for improving election systems.
Computer and network based voting is hard.
Really good post. Prompt counting is (like Nate said) good governance stuff that everyone East, West, and Central oughtta have down.
Also that initial thread of 3 tweets almost reads like Nate trying again and again to bait people into dogpiling him, lol.
Prompt counting mania is 100% a side effect of the short attention span generation.
Before the news agencies got people addicted to "calling" the result based on exit polls before everyone had voted, it was common for tabulation, verification, and publication to take weeks.
I'm sorry your state is a failed state with failed processes. I wish it didn't rub off on us other blue states, most of whom have their shit more together.
Oh - all sulky are we? Maybe you should look at first principles and think about why your state doesn't care so much about counting all the votes.
We do count all our votes. Did you read the article you're commenting on before pissing your britches about it? California sucks AND is slow.
Really? What is the mechanism to ensure that ballots postmarked on election day are counted?
Ballots postmarked on election day and which do not arrive on election day are not valid ballots and are not counted, just as ballots that are postmarked after election day are not valid ballots and are also not counted. The details of our process are not secret, and voters know how to cast votes, presumably just as yours do. If they're terribly worried about it, they'll mail in their vote a week before Election Day, or they'll drop it off at the Clerk's Office day-of, or drop it off at their polling site (I know you all think those are icky). Just like you'd do with your mortgage or your utility bill or any other piece of important mail. You know, like adults do.
Why are Californians so uniquely unqualified to read dates on a calendar?
It used to be common for people to come to vote by carriage and horseback and the vote count to be correspondingly clunky. That doesn't mean it's fine for outmoded systems to persist indefinitely.
Of course there was more slack in the system then also.
Presidents used to get inaugurated in March.
I would be happy to see the current 7 day mail delivery system, but improvements in the counting and validation system that gave results as quickly as possible after that.
Instant gratification is not a compelling reason to make it harder to vote.
I actually thought that the point was most interesting about the complaints about California coming from our modern desire for 24/7 speedy news coverage, and that this is not really anything urgent, just --- as you say, desire for instant gratification. So this is a topic I hadn't thought about; I don't care that California is slow. However, I suppose it should match all the other states and even nations that do better just for everyone's convenience.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-11-receipt-and-postmark-deadlines-for-absentee-mail-ballots
Lots of diversity nationwide. It isn't even a Red/Blue thing - Alaska is 10 days, Mississippi is 5 days, New York is 7 days, etc.
For military overseas voters Florida is 10 days, Texas is 6 days.
Where is Nate's complaint about New York, his own state?
The issue in California is that enough people vote by mail that is is frequently statistically significant, especially in the Top 2 advance situation where the #2 vs #3 distance is likely to be closer than #1 in two separate primaries. (#2 vs #3 is a portion of the remaining vote after #1 is subtracted, so a smaller pool).
Florida 2000 was within the margin of military ballots. It can happen anywhere.
And of course mandating a strict national policy would almost certainly require a Constitutional amendment to change Article I, Section 4, Clause 1.
It is obvious to the casual observer that the process of voting in California is being led by a committee that worries about getting everyone to vote and not about counting their vote's safely. So you develop rules that are not very friendly to the process being run smoothly. If they had a rule that no rule should get in the way of every vote being counted in 3 days, life would be a lot easier for everyone. And yes, a military vote from the middle east submitted on Monday might not make it but that's the breaks of Navy Air.
I was disappointed to see omitted from the comparison a discussion of how many questions are counted in India, Japan, and the UK. If it's only a single person, an MP or a single referendum question, that simplifies the counting logistics considerably.
The fact that a typical California ballot has so many propositions and minor officials that it takes at least 8 hours if not more to properly research makes voting in-person practically difficult. It must also raise the complexity of counting, and even more so if there are instant runoff municipal elections.
If I could vote in-person at any precinct in California, rendering my local ballot of my residence in real-time, it would make in-person voting during a work break more practical.
This is especially true because our ballots are so specific that if you work in the neighboring county to where you reside, you can't vote on a work break. It's why the mail-in process is easier.
Handwriting so called experts have a difficult challenge in being qualified to testify in court. I have always thought ballot procedures to validate ballots is suspect . I really doubt the people reviewing the so called verification are up to the task.
Probably not, so let's have photo-ID verified voting. A lot quicker and surely better identification than signatures.
I would like to see data about how many ballots are received each day after Election Day! I suspect that VERY few are received more than four days (Saturday) after election. So I think the seven day window “solves” a problem that doesn’t exist! I agree that CA vote counting is inexecusably slow. Dems are slow to fix these types of problems!
Reinforcing the point that CA's slow count does not make things any better. Kern County reported on the 3rd that it had counted a total of 150,000 ballots. Then it reported on the 4th that it had counted a cumulative total of 78,000 ballots. Somehow the number of ballots counted went DOWN? The system is deeply flawed and problematic.