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.
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
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?
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?
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?
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.
24000 votes drop. Not a single vote for Pratt. Zero. I Grok'd it to verify because it seems like that would be misinformation. But its true. There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn about the practices of the ballot harvesters.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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!
It's a cultural problem. California was the last state to implement a HAVA-compliant statewide electronic voter registration database, 10 years after the federal government's (extended) deadline. Florida and Texas met the deadline, and New York only missed it by 2 years.
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 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/
It is more accurate to call the USPS a failed letter delivery service.
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
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?
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?
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?
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.
24000 votes drop. Not a single vote for Pratt. Zero. I Grok'd it to verify because it seems like that would be misinformation. But its true. There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn about the practices of the ballot harvesters.
Or perhaps there is an obvious conclusion about the accuracy of preliminary data, or your information source.
Where did you find the 24,000 vote drop information and distribution?
Grok is not a primary source.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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!
It's a cultural problem. California was the last state to implement a HAVA-compliant statewide electronic voter registration database, 10 years after the federal government's (extended) deadline. Florida and Texas met the deadline, and New York only missed it by 2 years.
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.