Why does California take so long to count votes? I wanted to find out once and for all, so I started to dig. And I got nowhere. The universal answer was always something like California is a big, complex state that wants everyone to vote. That takes a while.
Please. Voting is complex everywhere; there are other big states; and being big also means you have more ballot counters. What's the real reason?
Well, California is an all-mail ballot state, and ballots can be received up to seven days after Election Day (as long as they're postmarked by Election Day). So things take a while.
Fine. That's progress. But how long does it take in practice to receive the bulk of the ballots? Here's the best I could discover:
Apparently the Secretary of State doesn't tell us how many ballots are received on Election Day. Or the day after. Or the day after that. But on Friday we were told that 16.2 million ballots had been received. That's almost certainly 95%+ of the eventual total, and I'm willing to bet that most of them were received by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest.
So, once again, what's going on? Why have we counted only 63% of the vote? Once the ballots are received—and nearly all of them have been—why does it take more than a few hours to process them? We use the same optical scanners as everyone else, so it's not that. Oregon and Washington both vote exclusively by mail, and they have the same 7-day rule as California and the same signature verification process, but they've both counted more than 85% of the vote. That's slow, but nowhere near the molasses-slow rate of California.
So what's the real real deal? Why do we seem able to count less than a million ballots per day? I still don't know.
Isn't it obvious?
They need time to exhaust the Republican poll watchers so they can rig the count.
MoFo gets "Honorable Mention" for Most Ridiculous Claim!
I notice you have no rebuttal argument.
I, for one, thought you were joking and finally showing you had a sense of humor. Please tell me I was right.
nope. If you want to rig an election you want to make sure your count is slow so you know how many votes to "find".
Sometimes I forget people can actually BE this stupid......
I feel like I must be as stupid as him because I was stupid enough to think he wasn’t that stupid. It really is breathtaking.
Not a nice comment, but totally correct.
I suggest that everyone who imagines various kinds of voter fraud conspiracies should (like me) get a job as a poll worker. Then explain how your particular conspiracy is supposed to work given what you now actually know about the actual voting system.
"I suggest ..... get a job as a poll worker."
That is a rational behavior. The whole point of conspiracy is to be irrational.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2020/11/06/tcf-center-detroit-ballot-counting/6173577002/
"That led to more chaos as officials then put cardboard over the windows, saying challengers were videotaping and photographing the counting process, which intimidated the counters."
Why would videotaping and photographing the counting process intimidate anyone who was doing a fair count and not cheating?
When you have to hide the election count from the people it strongly suggests what you are doing is a miscount.
In 2020 Trump's loss was by enough that this did not matter. But imagine if 2020 had ended up like 2000 with Michigan playing the role of Florida. That is why parties cheat - to win on the margins if the election ends up being marginal.
How does someone rebutt an argument with no logic behind it?
California. Can't build a railroad, can't run an election. The weather's nice, but the government sucks.
Go away, newbie.
I have been reading Kevin, and commenting very occasionally, since 2002 and the Calpundit days. When did you come in?
Not that long ago. When he was at MoJo. "Occasionally" must be an enormous understatement, but we are grateful for it.
They run a perfectly fine election. There is a reason no state expects vote counting to be done before the 2nd half of November.
“California is an all-mail ballot state, and ballots can be received up to seven days after Election Day (as long as they're postmarked by Election Day).”
Your answer is right here Kevin. Seven days after Election Day, the count can be finalized. How are they supposed to know how many ballots they’ll get 7 days after Election Day, especially since California doesn’t run the post office? Maybe a post office somewhere had its only employee off on religious duties - SCOTUS did rule that postal workers can blow off work if it’s “religious” - and they’ll drop a thousand ballots off on Monday morning.
Christ, show some patience… at least wait until the 8th day to bitch about counts when you live in a state that accepts ballots up to seven days later. It’s not like the offices get filled until January anyway.
Could be the morons on the right fell for the mind boggling stupid lies of national review writers like Jonah goldberg and their specious arguments that it's somehow improper to voter before election day. I expect California has a higher percentage of the morally bankrupt and fundamentally evil maggots than Oregon and Washington.
They together have less population than we've counted votes.
So, California, a state described as having something like the 5th (or 4th or 6th, depending on who and when) largest economy in the world, has not sized its vote-counting infrastructure to be proportional to its population??
No, we have not. Each person is also more expensive because they could be doing something else more profitable for them in the meanwhile.
That's what being the fifth highest gdp will do.
"How are they supposed to know how many ballots they’ll get 7 days after Election Day, especially since California doesn’t run the post office?"
Every voter in California gets a mail-in ballot. Every step of the process is tracked. If you sign up for California's Ballottrax app, you get notifications. This year, here are the texts I got from the CA Sect'y of State's office:
Oct 4: my ballot was mailed to me
Oct 24: USPS collected the ballot I had mailed the previous day & would be delivered to LA County Registrar of Voters
Oct 25: my ballot was received by LA County and counted
Within a day or two of Election Day, the state knows how many ballots are in the mail and yet to be received.
All the ballots first must tan in the Southern California sunshine, then inhale deeply in Humboldt county, and finally age in oak barrels in Napa. Only then are they ready to be counted…
We will count no vote…before its time.
I love this...the Master at work.
https://youtu.be/VFevH5vP32s
Whenever I watch that I’m just amazed at the other actors being able to keep straight faces.
After a quick repast at the French Laundry?
(｡•̀ᴗ-)
Bien sur.
This didn’t seem to be a problem when we all went to a neighbor’s garage to vote in person on Election Day…
You're deeply mistaken.
It always was a problem. We just count our votes slowly. It's never mattered because our presidential preference has never mattered.
Geez, Mr. Grumpy Bear today Kevin?
You'll have to wait seven days before you have all the eligible ballots, and a final count, regardless. What would be the pressing need to do it any faster?
Appearances matter and the appearance of incompetency in election administration makes it much easier for the conspiracy theorists to sell their horseshit.
I think that's a 'pressing need'.
So they'e selling fake horseshit. There you go.
I like! We'll get there when we get there as opposed to the usual peddle to the metal on green then slam on the brakes at the next light.
Arizona seems to have the same problem
They have a single county whose election office processes what, 60% of the state's ballots, and the rest are much smaller? There are three other counties in the US that are bigger and two of them manage to count their ballots quicker. Maybe AZ could rethink their administrative subdivisions or finance special provisions for Maricopa or something? They seem honest, just a lot slower than they need to be.
They had a two-page ballot and massive numbers of late-arriving mail ballots.
According to NBC, Utah has a counted a lower share (70%) than California.
It looks like Trump is at best going to come out about two points higher than Harris. It may end up being the smallest popular vote margin since the election of 2000. There's an outside chance he may even fall below a popular vote majority (still millions of votes to be reported). He's also going to lose House seats, I think.
This is far from mandate, never mind a landslide, provided Democrats fight MAGA and not amongst themselves.
Also, despite the hyperventilating to the contrary, it doesn't look like the loss of the Electoral College was primarily about poor turnout: Harris's vote totals beat Biden's in the majority of swing states (Trump's totals just rose more). If turnout was a factor, it looks to my eyes like it mainly manifested itself in "safe" blue states or out of reach red states. That's why we're seeing some gaudy Trump numbers in places like New Jersey. A lot of Dems thought it was in the bag (and in their blue states, it was) and so stayed home. Ditto Ohio. To the extent that turnout hurt Dems it's in downticket races, I'm pretty sure.
I think you're right that the vote margin will shrink as the counts straggle in, and I hope the change is that dramatic (a couple days ago CA was running 57/40 statewide and the number uncounted implied about another million votes for her on net there).
Also, a couple of days ago a poli sci guy said that the PA/MI/WI trio flipped red by a total of about 123,000 votes combined-- in other words, a few tens of thousands in each state. So it may end up looking a whole lot more like 2016 than it feels. Right now Dems and never-trumpers are still reeling, mainly because of how early the loss was known, and how bad the senate was looking even early on. That makes it feel like a bigger defeat than it actually will turn out to be.
The really bedeviling thing for me is the way trump's people have found and tapped new reservoirs of low-turnout votes every time. This is where I'd suspect his offshore assistance, in identifying and micro-targeting these groups, and also that the polling has been off because they have no way to anticipate or deal with the micro-targeting.
👍👍👍👍👍
A late thought: maybe we've been looking at the polling errors from the wrong end? If they started going off in 2016-- which is something I don't know but somebody does-- and have been serially off in one direction, maybe it isn't the polling methodology that's deficient? Maybe instead it could be an indication of something affecting the vote that well-established methodology suggests shouldn't be happening?
IOW, what do things look like if instead of questioning the polling every time, we start by assuming that it's as accurate as it had been before 2016?
what do things look like if instead of questioning the polling every time, we start by assuming that it's as accurate as it had been before 2016?
Per Nate Silver the final polls have tended to be at odds with the actual popular vote by about three points on average, going all the way back to the sixties. And that looks like it's going to hold yet again this cycle. So, I don't think there was a golden age of polling before 2016.
The polls over estmated repubican strength in 2022. So it's not off always in the same direction. I expect pollsters, much like republicans, haven't fully internalized that marginal voters are now overwhelmingly republican instead of overwhelmingly democrat. That' democrats are now going to do better in off year elections and republicans better in presdiential election years. (Harris won the senior citizen vote this year. I believe the last year the democrats won the senior citizen vote was 2000.)
The really bedeviling thing for me is the way trump's people have found and tapped new reservoirs of low-turnout votes every time.
Well, for sure, it's not all "new voters" that Trump gained. Without a doubt there are a large number (easily in the hundreds of thousands, I'd guess) of swing state voters who voted for Biden in 2000 but for Trump in 2024. We saw the same thing with Obama=>Trump voters in 2012/2016 (and yes, we also saw Trump=>Biden voters in 2020). Remember, the electorate isn't static. There's plenty of churn. People move out of state. People move in state. People turn eighteen. People die. And yes, some people* decide to vote for the other party. And so on. In the Swing states—where's it's decided—Harris will certainly have lost some Biden 2020 voters to Trump. And Trump will have lost some to her (just not as many, giving him the net advantage on this score).
Anyway, TLDR: it's no mystery to me Trump attracted additional voters compared to 2020 in light of the cost of living rise since 2020.
*A very modest percentage, to be sure. The "no persuadable voters" thing was always way overdone. But that said, they are a much smaller share of the electorate than 40 years ago.
There are more people who didn't vote than voted for each candidate, so, heck, most could have switched from t to h and the slosh could've overwhelmed that.
"Also, a couple of days ago a poli sci guy said that the PA/MI/WI trio flipped red by a total of about 123,000 votes combined ..."
As of Sunday (11/10) morning AP has Trump ahead by about 30,000 votes in Wisconsin, 80,000 votes in Michigan and 145,000 votes in Pennsylvania. That adds up to 255,000.
I’ve been watching this closely because, as I had indicated before, I thought Trump winning the popular vote was nearly impossible due to the wide margin I expected from California. But it also occurs to me that the late count in California will just be another reason for Trump to tell his minions that it’s proof that California cheats and give him more reason to take revenge.
But no matter what it seems sure to me that Harris will do significantly less well in California than Biden did. Here’s a map comparison:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/calfornia-counties-flip-to-trump-19897509.php
The places that turned from blue to red are much smaller, population wise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/11/09/california-vote-count/
Why would I want to read a paper whose owner put his thumb on the scale for Trump?
Full-on Grumpy Old Man posting today.
I'm not that great with numbers but it appears Oregon has counted a little over 2.1 million ballots and California has counted a little more than 16.4 million ballots with almost 5 million still to count. I'm impressed and I don't see the problem
I think your count is a bit off:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-california.html
This is a better view: https://electionresults.sos.ca.gov/unprocessed-ballots-status
142K should be finished tomorrow. And that is seven days after the election, so they are right on schedule.
It makes California, reportedly the most progressive / liberal state in the nation, our vanguard, look dilapidated and inefficient. All that money and smarts in CA and they can't count their votes on time? Or worse: must be all those commie liberals out there figuring out how to cook their books. CA should lead the way to vote counting in real time, posted loud and proud, and finished by midnight on election day.
How would you be “finished by midnight on Election Day” if millions of ballots are cast by mail on Election Day?
How would you be “finished by midnight on Election Day” if millions of ballots are cast by mail on Election Day?
You can't, save by disenfranchising people who need to vote by mail.
I think California standard is fine. Either vote in person or get it postmarked by election day. And if the cutoff for arrival of the ballot is only one week, that's actually a pretty tough standard (mail can be slow, and few expat Californians will be able to vote unless they do so at least a week+ before the election).
Not sure if California allows email of the ballot, or not, but it ought to. I've voted that way before (Massachusetts) and it's easy peasy: I just attach a PDF of my ballot. I get an electronic receipt in a short time.
That requires either mandating the mail-in votes arrive by Election Day or a return to in-person voting.
Exactly. Several states back East do that.
Yeah, and their elections are more of a mess, what with a bunch of random end dates instead of one.
It is not asking too much of people who use the convenience of mail-in voting to mail their ballots in time for delivery by election day. A friend of mine in Arizona mailed his ballot and was able to verify online that it arrived.
The endless counting does not assure the general population that the process is not being rigged.
Except the actual law in California says you can mail them on Election Day. I know we all just want to ignore laws as they are written, but it is also “not asking too much of people” to actually change laws they disagree with, rather than say things like “well the law is stupid and should just be ignored when a large enough mass of people (that apparently isn’t large enough to actually change the law) feel like it.”
If it’s a priority to have counts done by election night, then start a referendum to do so in California. (It’s not like it’s that hard to get an issue on the ballot there…) But again, it’s unclear to me - except to provide news media with the instant story they want to tell - why ballots all need to be counted on election day itself, when the victors won’t be taking office for another 2 months or so.
The “need” for instant and simple answers to every question is going to destroy this country.
“The endless counting does not assure the general population that the process is not being rigged.“
It would be just as easy to say that a quick count would make people suspicious the process is rigged. People who want to believe the election is rigged will find an excuse. Trump claimed it was rigged against him in 2020 even though assured by fellow vote counters who were his supporters that it wasn’t.
CA isn't remotely close to bein g the most progressive/liberal state in the nation. Stop getting your information from professional liars who target complete imbeciles. "finished by midnight on election day." that's just about the stupidest and most evil goal imaginable.
And which state(s) would you put forward and why?
It's because our state is so shiny that it's hard to do.
People can get paid more doing literally anything else because of how good our economy is.
germany has 60+ million voters. their voting polls close at 6pm. at 6:15 their results are for the most part in with no claims of fraud. just saying. german police also shoot and less than 20 people a year. just saying.
I think it’s pretty clear by now that America is not Germany. In many many many ways. But thanks for rubbing our faces in it. That’s very German.
Also, you’re welcome for stomping out your Nazi problem 80 years ago. Are you prepared to do the same for us? If not, shut the fuck up and mind your own business. I think you too have a government collapsing right now to tend to.
Kevin, PLEASE add a "Block" button. The botflies of the Right are invading.
Elections are the step-child of governments. Nobody wants to spend any money on the step-child, but everyone is first in line with the switch when the dinner dishes ain't picked up and washed pronto. It's also inconvenient that you only need the step-child every two years, but when you don't feed them, they're not there when you want them. They're worse than welfare mothers!
You can extend this to everything government does in the background to keep the country running at a high living standard. Nobody wants to fund anything government does, but everyone wants to crack the whip when some government function fails to meet their - possibly unrealistic - expectations in the slightest way.
In this specific situation, California just needs to have counts done in time for elected people to assume office in January. It’s really unclear to me why it’s a problem if this task is finished on November 5th, 12th or even December 31st, given modern technology allows Californians living anywhere in the state to physically report to orientation in Sacramento or Washington DC in less than 6 hours. The “need” here is purely one of instant gratification: many people can’t handle the suspense of not knowing something right now, even though their ancestors frequently went weeks or months without knowing the same info and they survived just fine.
I dropped mine off at 3pm on Tuesday. It wasn't marked received and counter until Thursday.
We just don't hire enough people to count them.
I expect a lot of election workers need to take Wednesday off after working greater than 16 hour days on Tuesday.
Looking at outstanding house seats to be counted I give Dems a legitimate shot at claiming the majority. Maybe 40%. Between the Az seat and the Colo seat, one of them could easily turn. And all Cal seats could go one way. As it stands, it looks like 219-216 R (one Cal, Az, Colo). (When the First Nation votes arrive, I imagine Peltola will prevail).