Ballots Are all in, but California Election Results Could Take Weeks to Settle. Why?

But those registrars and experts argue that without more resources, California will continue to endure days or weeks of uncertainty in the closest contests on the ballot as long as it relies so heavily on voting-by-mail.

“The two biggest variables of how long it takes a state actually to count ballots aren’t so much the policies. It is, one, the margin of victory, and two, the number of mail ballots that are cast at the last minute,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, which works to ensure elections are trustworthy.

He said there’s an important distinction between how long it takes for election watchers like the AP to call winners in a race and how long it takes for local officials to count all the ballots. Many races are called days or weeks before the votes are finished being tabulated.

“The quicker the call is, the wider the margins are,” he said. “Californians know that on election night in a presidential election at 8:01 Pacific time, the media is going to call California already, right? That’s not because they’re counting ballots that fast. It’s because the margins were big. In different statewide races, particularly in primaries and in district races, margins can often be very, very narrow.”

That’s true this year in the top-two primaries for several congressional races around the state, as well as the much-watched contests for governor and Los Angeles mayor.

Who votes when also matters in those races, Political Data Inc. Vice President Paul Mitchell, whose firm crunches voter data, said. This election cycle, Republicans seemed more eager to turn in their ballots early, he said, while Democrats waited — meaning the early returns may overrepresent more conservative voters.

In addition to providing more funding for county election offices, Becker said one thing California could do to speed up its count is “encourage those who are willing and able to go vote in person, to vote in person, particularly early.”

California began sending every registered voter a mail ballot by default during the pandemic, in an effort to make voting as easy as possible. In California’s 2024 general election, more than 80% of voters cast a vote-by-mail ballot.

The trade-off: processing time. With traditional in-person voting, voters’ signatures are reviewed before they cast a ballot.

With vote-by-mail, the verification and processing happens after election officials receive a ballot. Every signature on every envelope is reviewed to match the voter’s signature on file, a check meant to prevent voter fraud.

“Everybody wants efficient and fast counting, but let’s be clear, efficient and accurate is way more important than fast,” said Darius Kemp, executive director of California Common Cause, a nonpartisan political watchdog organization.

When voters wait until close to Election Day to return their ballots, as many Democrats did in this race, those ballots can pile up in election offices — only to be processed and added to the count days later, especially in large counties with millions of votes to tally.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, claimed earlier this year that Republican leads in California have “magically whittled away” during the vote-counting process. But that’s false, Kemp said.

“There’s no mystery there; it’s simple to understand, and it’s simple to digest,” Kemp said. “It just takes someone who cares about honesty and truth to actually do the proper research and understand what’s going on, instead of — excuse me for this colloquialism, I’m originally from Alabama — just talking out the side of their necks.”

Still, even some Democrats acknowledge the slow count has frustrated members of the public and opened the door to disinformation.

In a letter last month calling on county election officials to speed up their counts, Newsom pointed to legislation he signed last year that requires counties to report results by the 13th day after the election.

“We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads,” Newsom wrote. “That means we must do all that we can to tabulate votes quickly and accurately. Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold.”

Yet the new policies have not been paired with new money for counting the ballots.

“If I had more space, if I had more staff and had more equipment to scan, I could pick up some of the speed,” said Jesse Salinas, registrar of voters in Yolo County and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

Salinas said only about 30% of ballots received by his office can be signature-verified by a machine; the rest require an election worker to visually validate the signatures. After verification, election workers open the envelopes and prepare the ballots to be scanned and read by the machine.

While that process slowly plays out, Salinas acknowledged that he prefers to release the returns in large batches. As a result, Yolo County — like Alameda and Contra Costa counties in the Bay Area — will not have its next update until Friday.

“If I do 1,000 a day or 2,000 a day, that’s not going to move as much of a needle as if I used a little longer window of two and a half days … almost three,” Salinas said. “Then I can have a 3,000 or 4,000, or maybe even a 5,000 [vote] needle swing.”

Becker, the elections expert, said he’s not sure why county officials would wait that long, noting that some states, such as Florida, have laws dictating regular updates — whether or not there’s anything new to report.

Still, Becker said election officials are doing their best under difficult circumstances — and cautioned that no changes to the process will satisfy election conspiracy theorists, who he said, “very conveniently try to latch onto anything to delegitimize results that aren’t in their favor.”

“The reality is that we’ve seen those same conspiracy theorists who say it takes too long to count ballots in California say ballot counting was too fast when they didn’t like the results if those results were early on against them,” he said.