SACRAMENTO — Every two years, elite athletes compete in the Olympics, biennial plants — like carrots and onions — produce seeds and people across America look on with consternation and mounting impatience as California counts its election ballots.
The prolonged tally has become as much a part of electioneering in the Golden State as wall-to-wall advertising, high-flown promises and overstuffed mailboxes groaning beneath the weight of endless campaign fliers.
The tabulation — which can last weeks past election day — is the product, in large part, of a commendable objective: Encouraging as many people as possible to vote.
California, which mails a ballot to every eligible voter, ranks near the top of states in the ease of its elections. That’s something to be celebrated. Voting is a way to help steer the direction of our state and nation and invest, as an active participant, in its future.
Yay, participatory democracy!
Unfortunately, the lag time between election day and the final results has led to all sorts of wild, unfounded claims, peddled mainly by Republicans seeking to curry favor with the sore-losing President Trump by parroting his conspiratorial gabbling.
“They hold the elections open for weeks after election day,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said recently, falsely suggesting that chicanery cost the GOP three House seats in California in 2024. “It looks on its face to be fraudulent.”
That’s a lot of, um, hooey.
There is no rampant cheating or election fraud in California. Period. Full stop.
Still, those sorts of phony statements have deeply diminished faith in our elections and our increasingly rickety democracy.
So — what if it were possible to preserve California’s friendly voting system while, at the same time, speeding up the tabulation of its many 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 satisfying way,” she said. “There are a lot of things that we could do better and do differently. It just takes some creative thinking and some will.”
Simply put, “The longer it takes to count ballots, the more voter confidence erodes.”
Alexander, head of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, has spent more than three decades working to make the state’s elections more efficient, more transparent and more accountable.
Her interest in politics and election mechanics came about while growing up in Culver City, where her father served as a councilman and mayor.
As a 7-year-old, stationed in the garage, it was Alexander’s job to track the returns in her dad’s first campaign, toting up the numbers at an election night party while her mom, posted 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, she watched as her father’s political career was stymied by a Democratic gerrymander, which blocked any hopes he had of being elected to Congress or the Legislature as a moderate Republican. She saw firsthand the influence of money in politics. (Her father told her of turning away donations that came with strings attached.) That helped turn her into a political reformer.
After working as a legislative staffer and serving a stint at Common Cause, the good-government lobbying group, Alexander took over the California Voter Foundation in 1994.
As a political noncombatant, Alexander won’t say how it feels, and whether these days she’s more or less optimistic, watching as reckless attacks on our elections come from inside the White House. “I like to describe myself as a realist with high goals,” is all she’d allow.
There are good reasons why it takes California so long to count its ballots.
First off, there are a lot of them; more than 16 million residents voted in the last presidential election, more than the population of all but 10 states. Voting by mail has exploded in popularity and it takes longer to count those ballots, as many don’t arrive until after election day. Also, there are a number of safeguards to prevent fraud and ensure an accurate count. “We’re checking all the signatures,” Alexander said. “We’re making sure nobody votes twice.”
Simply explaining those facts can help build trust, she said. However, that won’t speed up the state’s vote counting. Here, Alexander suggested, are some things that can:
— Increase funding for California’s 58 counties to expand equipment, staff and the space needed to process ballots. In recent years, the state has been asking local election officials to do more and more without reimbursing their costs.
— Educate voters and encourage them to turn their ballots in earlier. 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 that shaved three to four days off processing time. The system could be implemented statewide.
— Better manage California’s voter database, doing so from the top down in Sacramento, rather than having counties oversee their data and feed it into the system. That bottom-up approach creates delays and a lag time in processing ballots.
— Create “ballot swap” days to speed delivery of out-of-county ballots where they belong, also saving time. (Under California law, voters can return their ballot anywhere in the state, but it must be routed to their home county to be tabulated. That 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 the temperature is 95 degrees outside and the sun is blazing.
But even without voters clamoring to address California’s slow-poke vote count, lawmakers should act.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently rose to defend the state’s “safe and secure elections” against one of Trump’s many unwarranted attacks. If he wants to burnish his credentials for a 2028 presidential run — which Newsom very much does — one way would be to speed up delivery of its election results.
That way the rest of the country won’t be asking again in November: What the heck’s with California?