California Counts Votes In Its Own Good Time. Understanding Why Declaring Winners May Take A Minute

Primary Election Day is here, but now comes the waiting.

Do you have something to watch on Netflix? Maybe you've been meaning to pick up a hobby — how about crochet? Whatever you do, take a deep breath and keep busy because it could be days (or weeks) before we get some California election results.

The state is often knocked by the rest of the country as being "slow" to count votes. But here's the deal: That's a feature, not a bug, of the election system.

Things take a while here largely because California works so hard to expand the ways people can vote. For example:

• Californians overwhelmingly vote by mail — more than 87% of votes cast in the 2022 general election were mail-in ballots. Those ballots can be postmarked up to and including Election Day. They're counted as long as the ballot arrives within seven days (for the primary, that's Tuesday, March 12).
• California offers same-day voter registration at any voting center. These new voters must cast a provisional ballot, which is counted once election officials confirm their eligibility (they are overwhelmingly accepted — for example, nearly 95% in Los Angeles County were counted in 2018; in Orange County it was closer to 90%).
• Voters also have the right to cast provisional ballots if there's any problem on election day — like if poll workers aren't able to void an outstanding mail-in ballot, or if there’s any issues calling up voter information from e-pollbooks. Again (see above), provisionals take longer to process because eligibility has to be confirmed.
• Vote-by-mail ballots require signature matching. When the one received doesn't match the one on file, county registrars must contact that voter to let them know — and give them the chance to correct it.
• And, with over 22 million registered voters, we're really, really big. In the 2022 primary nearly 7.3 million Californians voted — that’s more people than the populations of 35 U.S. states. 

But things have sped up considerably in the 26 counties that have adopted a 2016 law called the Voter's Choice Act, including L.A., Orange, and Riverside counties. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, the changes associated with that law — like voters not being locked into a designated polling location — drastically cut down the number of provisional ballots cast, which helped move things along faster than they had before.

Still, accuracy and a commitment to "expanding the franchise" — translation: allowing more people to vote — means the process is not designed to produce instantaneous results.

You'll have to get that endorphin hit elsewhere on election night. You may recall that during the 2018 midterms, several key races were too close to call for many days after voting ended, and party control of a couple Orange County congressional seats slowly flipped with each daily report from the county registrar. In 2020, the race for the 25th congressional district in Ventura County took four weeks to declare a winner, with a margin of just over 333 votes.

It's fair to expect some of the same this year, depending on how close some of these races end up being.

TL;DR: The state officially has until April 4 to certify election results — including a mandatory audit that requires hand-counting all of the ballots at 1% of precincts. Nevertheless, you're going to see a lot of national media headlines about California's relative "slowness." Brush it off. We have sunshine, beaches, and a highly enfranchised population.

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