Three days after Election Day in California, the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral races have yet to be called, and it could still be a while before voters get answers.
Steve Hilton, a Republican and former Fox News host who currently leads the gubernatorial race by 1.2 percentage points with 60% of votes counted, stated on Friday that “California Democrats have turned our state into a global laughing stock.”
“India counts 600 million-plus ballots in a day,” he wrote. “California counts less than 10 million in a month.”
Hilton has released a proposal to speed up the vote count.
Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told JNS that one of the reasons why it takes so long to count votes in California is because “the vast majority of its votes are cast by mail and in order to verify the ballots, you have to look at each signature and compare it to a signature on file.”
“When you’re talking about millions of ballots, that simply takes a lot of time,” he said.
Many voters in the state tend to wait until the final weekend before Election Day to send in their ballots, meaning that about two million ballots arrive at election offices on or near Election Day, according to Olsen.
People are needed to staff in-person voting centers, so “there simply isn’t time to process as many ballots per day as they would have had the ballots arrived earlier,” he told JNS.
California also allows mail-in ballots to be counted if they arrive at election centers up to seven days after Election Day if those ballots have been postmarked by Election Day, according to Olsen.
“Other states have similar laws and they process their ballots faster,” he told JNS. “Arizona or Utah or Washington usually will get through their mail ballots within four to seven days, whereas California seems to like to take three weeks.”
It’s not uncommon for states with such laws to have delays in vote counting, but “California just happens to be uncommonly slow even within that group,” Olsen said.
Dan Schnur, a political-science lecturer at Pepperdine University, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, told JNS that California also allows voting officials to have “a full 30 days to review the ballots.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, “signed a bill to speed up the process last year,” but “it probably won’t make much difference,” according to Schnur. The state “intentionally set up a process that takes much longer for finalizing election results than most states,” he said.
Olsen told JNS that California should reform its election process. One possible solution would be to emulate Florida, which requires mail-in ballots to be “in hand by Election Day so that they can be processed and reported on Election Day,” he said.
“Because of that, their ballots arrive earlier and they process them faster, and you have 95% of ballots in Florida counted within a couple hours on Election Day,” Olsen told JNS.
California could also change its deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive from seven days to 48 hours or increase the number of election workers counting ballots, according to Olsen.
“It’s extremely easy to at least get California to count quicker,” he told JNS.
Schnur told JNS that “there’s no reason that the process can’t be dramatically accelerated.”
“It’s important for voters to have confidence in the system, and the long delays undermine that confidence,” he said. “There’s no reason that ballots should not be received by Election Day. If someone wants to vote a day or two before the election, they can always drop off their mail ballot in person.”
“It’s probably not necessary to mail a ballot to every voter, but just those who request one,” he told JNS. “The process for review could be shortened even further.”
‘Difficult’ to make up the gap
The gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral race results have tightened somewhat over the past few days, as millions of ballots have yet to be counted.
With 60% of the vote in, Hilton is leading at almost 1.54 million votes (27.2%), according to the Associated Press. Xavier Becerra, a Democrat and former U.S. secretary of health and human services, is second at more than 1.47 million votes (26%), and Tom Steyer, a businessman, is in third place at more than 1.14 million votes (20.2%).
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, with 64% of the vote, Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, has secured 195,449 votes (35.1%) and will advance to the general election, according to the AP. Spencer Pratt, a former reality television star and Republican, is currently ahead to face the mayor in a runoff, with almost 164,000 votes (29.4%) and Nithya Raman, a Los Angeles City Council member and a Democrat, is in third with almost 130,500 votes (23.4%), per the AP.
Both Raman and Steyer have narrowed the gap for second place in their respective races. Steyer has stated that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a “dark money organization that should have no place in our politics.” Raman appeared on anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker’s May 15 show and agreed with some anti-Israel statements.
In California’s primary system, the top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, a candidate that receives more than 50% of the vote wins outright.
Olsen told JNS that late-arriving ballots in California lean Democrat, because younger voters, who typically vote Democrat, mail their ballots later. But “the leads that Pratt and Hilton had were quite large, and given the amount of votes that are said to be out, it is difficult for either Raman or Steyer to make the gap up,” he said.
“I think it’s easier for Raman to make it up, because her gap is proportionally a little bit smaller than Steyer’s, and she is in a very Democratic area,” Olsen told JNS.
“For Steyer, he’ll gain votes on Hilton in Democratic areas, but some of that will be counterbalanced by Republican areas,” he said. “Even a Democratic lean in Republican counties means Hilton will still gain votes, just at a slower rate in which he was gaining votes on Election Day.”
Schnur thinks that it’s possible Raman and Steyer could still finish in second place in their respective races, but it’s not likely that either will. He believes Raman has better odds than Steyer.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Raman pulled it out,” he told JNS. “I would be astounded if Steyer did.”
