Sacramento – Every two years, elite athletes compete in the Olympics, biennial plants like carrots and onions produce seeds and people across America watch with trepidation and growing impatience as California counts its election ballots.
has long become as much a part of election campaigning in the Golden State as wall-to-wall advertising, lofty promises and overflowing mailboxes groaning under the weight of endless campaign fliers.
Tabulation – which can last for several weeks before Election Day – is, in large part, the product of an admirable purpose: encouraging more people to vote.
California, which mails ballots to every eligible voter, ranks near the top among states in the ease of casting its elections. This is something worth celebrating. Voting is a way to help decide the direction of our state and nation and to be an active participant in investing in its future.
Wow, participatory democracy!
Unfortunately, the lag between Election Day and the final results has given rise to all kinds of wild, unfounded claims, primarily by Republicans trying to curry favor with the badly losing President Trump by repeating his conspiratorial babble.
House Speaker Mike Johnson recently said, “They keep the polls open for weeks after Election Day,” falsely suggesting it cost the GOP three House seats in California in 2024.
This is very, umm, hooey.
There is no widespread fraud or election fraud in California. Duration. Full stop.
Yet, these types of false statements have greatly undermined confidence in our elections and our increasingly fragile democracy.
So – what if it were possible to preserve California’s friendly voting system, while, at the same time, speed up the tabulation of its millions of ballots?
Kim Alexander believes it’s possible to do both.
“We need to stop explaining why it’s taking so long and start figuring out how to (produce election results) in a more satisfactory way,” he said. “There are a lot of things we can do better and do differently. It just takes some creative thinking and some willpower.”
Simply put, “the longer it takes to count ballots, the less voter confidence will be.”
Alexander, head of nonpartisan California Voter Foundationhas spent more than three decades working to make state elections more efficient, more transparent, and more accountable.
His interest in politics and the electoral process arose while growing up in Culver City, where his father served as a councilman and mayor.
As a 7-year-old stationed in the garage, Alexander’s job was to track returns in her father’s first campaign, crunching the numbers at an election night party, while her mother, stationed in the kitchen, called the city clerk for updates. Even at that young age, Alexander learned the importance of a fair and efficient tabulation process.
Over the years, he watched as his father’s political career was disrupted by a Democratic gerrymander that blocked any hopes he had of being elected to Congress or the Legislature as a moderate Republican. He saw firsthand the influence of money in politics. (His father had taught him about rejecting donations that came with the rules.) This helped him become a political reformer.
After working as a legislative staffer and at the good government lobbying group Common Cause, Alexander took charge of the California Voter Foundation in 1994.
As a political non-combatant, Alexander won’t say how he feels, and whether he’s more or less optimistic these days, given that our elections are under reckless attack from inside the White House. “I like to describe myself as a realist with high goals,” is all she would allow.
There are good reasons why California takes so long to count its ballots.
First of all, there are lots of them; More than 16 million residents voted in the last presidential election, greater than the population of all but 10 states. Voting by mail has exploded in popularity and those ballots take longer to count, because many ballots don’t arrive until Election Day. Additionally, there are several security measures in place to prevent fraud and ensure accurate counting. “We’re checking all the signatures,” Alexander said. “We are making sure no one votes twice.”
Simply explaining those facts can help build trust, he said. However, this will not speed up the counting of votes in the state. Here, Alexander suggested, are some things that can do:
– Increase funding for California’s 58 counties to expand the equipment, staffing and space needed to process ballots. In recent years, the state has been asking local election officials to do more and more work without reimbursing them for their costs.
– Educate voters and encourage them to cast their ballots early. Along those lines, a system called “Sign, Scan and Go” allows voters to return their mail ballots in person at a designated polling place. A pilot program in Placer County found that it reduced processing times by three to four days. This system can be implemented in the entire state.
– Better manage California’s voter database, doing so from top to bottom in Sacramento, rather than having counties monitor their own data and feed it into the system. That bottom-up approach creates lag and delays in processing ballots.
– Create “ballot exchange” days for quicker delivery of ballots outside the county, which will also save time. (Under California law, voters can return their ballot anywhere in the state, but it must be sent to their home county to be tabulated. This process can now take more than a week.)
The problem, apart from perennial budget pressures, is that interest in election mechanics – a technical and arcane subject if ever there was one – is episodic and fleeting. It’s like worrying about a leaky roof when it’s 95 degrees outside and the sun is blazing.
But even without voters complaining about California’s slow vote counting, lawmakers must act.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently rose up to defend the state’s “safe and secure elections” against one of Trump’s many unfair attacks. If he wants to burnish his credentials for the 2028 presidency — which Newsom indeed does — one way to do that would be to speed up the delivery of his election results.
That way in November the rest of the country won’t have to ask again: What exactly is wrong with California?
