49 states manage to count their votes and return a result on Election Day. One takes weeks and the official explanation fails to inspire trust.

There are 50 states in this country. From Alabama to Utah, all somehow manage to give voters a reasonably clear picture of what happened on Election Day. Not necessarily a certified final result by midnight.

California, on the other hand, has turned election week into election month.

Every cycle, the same thing happens. Polls close. The rest of the country starts calling races. California announces that millions of ballots remain uncounted, that close contests may take days or weeks, and that voters should be patient while the process plays out. Then, when normal people ask why the most technologically advanced state in the country cannot count votes in a timely manner — like every other state in the union — they are treated like conspiracy theorists.

Voters are skeptical — with good reason.

California election officials do have an official explanation, because of course they do. The state mails ballots to every active registered voter. Mailed ballots can be postmarked by Election Day and still arrive days later. Signatures must be checked. Some voters are given time to “cure” missing or mismatched signatures. Provisional ballots must be reviewed. Same-day registrations must be verified. Counties also conduct audits and follow a lengthy canvass process before results are certified.

That explains the mechanics — if we accept this explanation. But it does not explain why California has chosen to build a system in which the mechanics routinely undermine public trust.

The state’s defenders like to say this is about counting every valid ballot. But timeliness is also part of election integrity. Transparency is part of election integrity. Public confidence is part of election integrity. A voting system that requires people to wait weeks while politically decisive ballots continue to appear in the count is not a triumph of democracy. 

It is a major vulnerability that causes more and more Americans to lose faith in the democratic process of voting.

And no, people are not crazy for noticing when late-counted ballots seem to move results in one direction — in favor of Democrats and progressives. That does not automatically prove fraud. But it does create deep suspicion, especially in a state completely dominated by one party and run by political leaders who show no inclination to fix the problem.

If California’s slow count routinely benefited Republicans, we would not be having a calm media conversation about patience and process. We would be having wall-to-wall coverage about “democracy in crisis.”

And California isn’t the only Democratic Party stronghold where ballot and vote counting shenanigans routinely takes place.

In 2021, the New York City Board of Elections “accidentally” included roughly 135,000 test ballots in the Democratic mayoral primary results. Those fake ballots were not supposed to be there. Yet somehow they were counted in the preliminary ranked-choice tally, changing the public picture of the race and forcing the board to pull back its own results. Eric Adams had to sue to force the error into the public eye.

The official explanation was basically that test data had not been cleared from the system. That is not reassuring. That is horrifying.

Nor does it explain why any election authority would need 135,000 fake ballots to test anything. A fraction of that number would have been more than sufficient.

If the explanation is fraud, we have a grave problem. If the explanation is incompetence, we still have a grave problem. Either way, voters were asked to believe that a major election system could be thrown into chaos because someone failed to clear test data before publishing results. No one should be expected to hear that and say, “Great, sounds secure.”

The same goes for California. Maybe every delayed ballot is legitimate. Maybe every signature cure is appropriate. Maybe every provisional ballot is properly handled. But a trustworthy system should not depend on voters accepting all of that on faith for weeks.

Election officials and media outlets love to say there is “no evidence” of fraud. Sometimes that is true. But there is plenty of evidence of something else: systems that are too slow, too opaque, too complicated, and too insulated from consequences.

That destroys trust and it creates smoke where there might be fire.

Americans are not unreasonable for wanting Election Day to mean something. They are not unreasonable for expecting ballots to be received by the time polls close, except perhaps for military and truly exceptional cases — which aren’t normally enough to sway results in any race. 

They are not unreasonable for wanting paper trails, clean voter rolls, public observation, fast reporting, and clear accountability when election offices make catastrophic mistakes.

California’s problem is not that voters are impatient. California’s problem is that its election system has made impatience and distrust rational.

A serious state would treat this as a legitimacy crisis. California treats it as a public-relations problem.

That is exactly why people do not trust it.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)