kim alexander

Over the last decade, California became a national leader in voter accessibility and security, expanding options for when and how ballots can be cast while also strengthening election safeguards.

But those reforms came at a cost: speed. And in a political climate where unsupported conspiracies about election fraud can run rampant on social media — pushed, at times, by top political leaders — some fear the slow vote count is becoming a liability.

Election outcomes in recent years have become more drawn out in California, most recently taking about a week to determine the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral candidates advancing to November’s runoff after hotly contested primaries. And in prior years, it’s taken even longer to determine tight U.S. House or state Senate seats.

That trade-off — election accessibility and security over quick results — has long been defended as a byproduct of California’s desire to make it as easy as possible to cast a ballot while ensuring accuracy and integrity, something backers say remains vital to a thriving democracy.

But some experts say the increasing backlash over the slow vote count sows distrust.

“We’ve allowed the long count to be normalized, … but that doesn’t mean it’s normal,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, who has become an advocate for accelerating the state’s vote count. “There’s no question that voter confidence is eroding.”

A slower vote count does not signal any indication of fraud, despite unfounded claims over the last week by President Trump and others. Election officials and nonpartisan groups make clear that voter fraud remains extremely rare in the U.S., and there’s been no evidence of any such issues in California’s latest primary count.

But studies have found that voter trust slides as results lag, and this primary made clear that disinformation gains more traction the longer contests drag on, especially with lead changes.

That came to pass this primary, particularly as reality TV personality Spencer Pratt slowly lost his initial second-place ranking in the L.A. mayor’s race, before later batches of votes bumped him from the runoff — fueling an onslaught of social media hysteria: claims of so-called corruption and vote dumping, misinformed examples of alleged fraud and right-wing disinformation campaigns.

But making any substantive changes — particularly before November’s general election — would be an uphill battle, especially in deep-blue California, where Democrats tend to resist limits to voter access. And some are urging restraint.

“We should never drive policy based on conspiracy theories and lies,” said David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. “That said, are there things California can do?”

Some suggestions, such as increased funding for county election offices and more education about early voting, would probably make some difference.

But the crux of the slow count comes from a flood of last-minute mail-in ballots — in a state with about one-eighth of the U.S. population. When a large percentage of California’s voters mail or drop off these ballots on or just before election day — as they tend to — it creates what Alexander calls the “pig in the python” effect: a major backlog of labor-intensive ballots to process, in a state that already handles the largest-volume ballot counts.

While verification occurs simultaneously during in-person voting, election officials in California are required to confirm a voter’s registration status, verify each voter’s signature and ensure each person did not vote elsewhere for each vote-by-mail ballot. Becker called it an “intensively human process” that cannot be sped through — but could be spread out by more early voting.

“It is a lot easier to report results out faster when ballots come in sooner,” Becker said.

Altering that process significantly enough to ease that bottleneck would likely come with other trade-offs, experts said, such as earlier deadlines to turn in certain ballots or more time-consuming ballot drop-offs — either of which might dissuade some voters from showing up. Mail-in ballots have overwhelmingly become Californians favorite way to vote, with more than 80% of voters using that method in every election since 2020.

But California didn’t become known for slow ballot counting overnight. Since the turn of the millennium, the state has taken several steps to increase voter access by expanding options for how, when and where voters can cast their ballot, while also strengthening its processes to become what the secretary of state’s office calls “the strongest voting security standards in the country.”

Those changes have included same-day voter registration, more early voting options, replacing neighborhood-specific polling places with vote centers, and most notably, universal vote-by-mail, which in 2021 required that all registered voters be mailed their ballot, which can be mailed back, returned to a secure drop box or vote center or ignored if the voter opts to vote in person.

Many Democratic voters this year waited to turn in their ballots due to the crowded pool of gubernatorial candidates, which probably exacerbated the already-slow process.

Still, that was expected. Election watchdogs and party officials from both parties tried to temper Californians’ expectations about the timing of results from the primary, reminding voters that it would likely take days if not weeks to call close races.

But when that exact process began to play out — particularly in the extremely tight contests for California governor and Los Angeles mayor — it almost immediately brought criticism and concern.

“None of the optics are good,” complained Roxanne Hoge, chair of the Los Angeles County Republican Party. “None of this is designed to inspire confidence.”

As Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office tried to dispel misinformation about California’s ballot tabulation process, the statement also said, “For the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too.”

Not only would a speedier election count improve voter trust, which can often increase participation, Alexander said, it would also decrease harassment of election workers and help newly elected candidates step into their new roles faster — and eliminate a long limbo period for the losing candidate.

“We can get it right and do it faster, and we should,” Alexander said.

A 2023 law allowed counties to provide voters an opportunity to cast their vote-by-mail ballot as an in-person ballot, by submitting it sans envelope and signing for it at a vote center, which reduces the verification process required by election workers. About half of California counties have adopted some option of this expedited process, according to the California Voter Foundation, some calling it “Sign, scan and go!” or the “naked ballot” option, but more widespread implementation of this could help speed up the count, Alexander said. Los Angeles County, which processes more ballots than many states, has not yet implemented this time-saving option.

California also allows ballots, if postmarked by election day, to be accepted up to a week after polls close — though that policy may soon be forced to change depending how the Supreme Court rules on a case challenging ballots arriving after election day. Still, these late-arriving ballots don’t account for a large share of the delays in California: in 2024, only about 2.5% of all ballots arrived in the mail after election day.

But some election observers point out that even when compared with states with similarly run elections, California still lags behind.

“California simply counts the ballots it has too slowly and its elections offices are underfunded,” election analysts Eli McKown-Dawson and Nate Silver recently wrote in a Substack piece. “If you want people to be confident in your electoral system, a good first step is to build one that works properly.”

And while seven other states also automatically mail voters ballots, experts say it’s hard to make direct comparisons with California. Some critics often point to Colorado as an example of a state with similarly ubiquitous mail-in voting, yet a much faster count than California. But the scale of states’ elections are so different: In 2024, California processed about 13 million vote-by-mail ballots; not even 3 million were counted in Colorado.

Some have also pointed out that despite all the ways California has worked to expand voter accessibility, turnout hasn’t dramatically changed. California remains relatively in the middle of the pack when it comes to voter turnout across the U.S., and while the state has seen some spikes in turnout during certain election years, there’s been no noticeable uptick over the last 15 years, according to a review of data from 2008 to 2024.

But Becker contended that there are many factors that can influence voter turnout, in particular, California’s strong blue tilt.

“Perceived competitiveness” — or lack thereof — often keeps voters from the polls, as can uninspiring campaigns or even the weather, Becker said, but he was adamant that shouldn’t be a reason to make it harder for people to vote.

“Accessibility is always worth it,” Becker said.

Hoge, the GOP chair, had a different take, highlighting concerns about the voter registration process as well as the slow count — though she has been clear that the latter doesn’t necessarily signal fraud.

She has continued to push a more tempered narrative to many Republican leaders, including from the White House. On X, she shared a post that fact-checked a photo of vote tabulations from L.A. County, which appeared to — erroneously — show reality TV personality Spencer Pratt receiving no new votes in a daily vote count. And she boosted a video that dispelled rumors about Democrats stealing votes and ones about widespread fraud in California’s process.

“It’s a horrible roller coaster,” Hoge said about California’s election results. “It doesn’t make sense, and the fact that you’re just noticing it today doesn’t mean that it’s newly not making sense. … But until we win, we can’t change it.”

No matter what California might change or improve, Becker said he is confident it won’t stop the criticism or campaigns of misinformation. He also said that most elections in California are called relatively quickly — take the state’s pick for president, which is usually confirmed on election night — but it’s a small share of extremely tight races that take longer, because they require a more complete count to call a winner.

“It doesn’t matter how fast California counts its ballots, … we would be seeing similar conspiracy theories, maybe just with a different framing,” Becker said. “California ends up being a very effective bogeyman.”

Staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.

California’s slow vote counting process — still underway and causing friction after last week’s primary — may be forced to change before November’s midterm elections, as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether mail ballots must be received by election day to count.

Whether those changes will speed things up — and help tamp down baseless claims from President Trump and others that the slow count is evidence of fraud — will depend on a variety of factors, election experts said, including how the high court rules, how state lawmakers and local elections officials respond, and whether they push any additional steps to quicken the count.

“We’re all on the edge of our seats, waiting to see what the Supreme Court does,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation.

“We’re certainly planning for a bad Supreme Court decision in this case, but we don’t really know all of our options for how to respond until we see the court’s decision,” said Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), chair of the Assembly Elections Committee and a former top elections official in Santa Cruz County.

Pellerin said she has been working on contingency plans with other state officials — including some from the offices of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta — and has requested $35 million in state funds to educate voters on any new midterm deadlines, though that funding has not been appropriated.

Federal law has, since 1872, set “election day” as the first Tuesday following a Monday in November, and gives Congress oversight over elections for the president and members of Congress. However, most authority for running elections falls to the states.

California currently provides a grace period for ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by and received within seven days of election day. More than a dozen states have similar laws that allow for counting late-arriving ballots, and most states accept such mail ballots from members of the military who are stationed overseas.

In March, the nation’s high court heard arguments about a five-day grace period in Mississippi, with the court’s conservative majority appearing skeptical. Many observers expect from those arguments that the high court will rule, by the end of this month, that ballots — at least for federal races — must be received by election day to count.

That outcome — in the case Watson vs. Republican National Committee — is considered likely but not assured, and some elections experts believe the high court has little legal precedent to support such a conclusion.

“That is a bogus interpretation of the statute,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law. “It violates what the statute says as a matter of text and history, and just how it’s been understood since the Civil War basically.”

Hasen and others also doubt that such a change would have much impact on the speed of California’s vote counting process, given that huge volumes of mail ballots that are placed in ballot drop boxes or arrive at processing facilities on or just before election day would still count — and would still drag the counting process out for days after the election.

In 2024, California counted more than 406,000 late-arriving mail ballots, but they represented only about 2.5% of the statewide total.

“The main bottleneck is really not ballots that arrive after election day. The bottleneck is ballots arriving before or on election day,” Hasen said. “So I don’t think the Watson case — however it comes out — is going to appreciably change California’s timing on when they’ll get enough ballots counted in a close race for it to be able to be called by news organizations.”

Nonetheless, state and local elections officials are preparing for changes — and looking for other ways to speed up the vote count, which, as of Monday, had resulted in more than 7.7 million ballots counted from last week’s primary, but more than 1.7 million left to process.

State plans unclear

If the Supreme Court were to rule that votes cast in federal elections must be received by election day, California would need to respond quickly.

It would need to craft a messaging campaign to inform millions of voters of the new rules, and determine when to tell voters they must mail their ballots by in order for their votes to count, experts said. That calculation may be shaped in part by efforts by the Trump administration to assert federal control over the mail ballot process through the U.S. Postal Service, which California and other states are fighting in court.

California officials may also need to determine whether they will create a “bifurcated counting process” with different rules for primary and general elections and different rules for federal races and state and local races on the same ballots, Alexander said, as a narrow Supreme Court ruling may not apply to them all equally.

“That’s a big policy decision that lawmakers will need to make, and I’m not sure how that would go,” Alexander said, citing a lack of detailed public plans from state and local elections officials.

Weber — who urged voters to cast ballots early in last week’s election — did not respond to a request for comment.

Brandon Richards, a spokesperson for Newsom, said the governor’s office doesn’t comment on “hypotheticals,” but that Newsom “is planning for all eventualities, including but not limited to attacks on our democracy and disruptions in our elections.”

Bonta’s office said it is “in communication with election officials and actively preparing for the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court could require changes to California’s election procedures,” but that it could not provide details.

Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, said he was “not in a position to discuss specific contingency planning details” given the high court has yet to rule, but that his office “is closely monitoring the case and has begun evaluating potential impacts to election administration.”

If changes are required by the court, Logan said his office “is prepared to undertake a comprehensive voter education and outreach effort to ensure voters understand any new requirements, deadlines, or voting options,” which would be “multilingual, multi-channel, and designed to reach voters directly across Los Angeles County, particularly in communities that rely heavily on voting by mail and those that have historically done so.”

Funds needed for faster count

Alexander’s group has backed Pellerin’s request for $35 million for a marketing campaign to encourage voters to send midterm ballots in early, and advocated for another $55 million in state funding to support county efforts to build up their vote processing capabilities.

H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the California Department of Finance, said it would be “premature” to comment on those requests, but “discussions have been underway and are continuing.”

Both Alexander and Hasen said California should be investing more in its ballot processing capabilities even if the current process is fair and secure and the claims of fraud are baseless, because those claims have succeeded in diminishing trust.

“On the one hand, this is a manufactured crisis. There is nothing that is intrinsically bad about a slow count for a race,” Hasen said. “On the other hand, we live in an era of profound distrust in institutions and in the integrity of elections, in no small part because of Donald Trump.”

In 2012, slightly over half of all California votes were cast via mail ballots. However, that number has increased dramatically since, thanks in part to an expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic, and nearly 89% of ballots were cast by mail in last year’s special election.

Alexander said that throughout that same period, California lawmakers have passed new laws to expand access to the ballot but have not provided counties with the necessary funding to keep up with the volume — meaning “counties are left holding the bag.”

Alexander said California should fix that by providing consistent state funding for new ballot counting machines, more modern and efficient county processing facilities, and an expansion of a program backed by Pellerin and available in some counties already that allows voters dropping off ballot envelopes in person to essentially convert those ballots into in-person votes on the spot — which Alexander called a “hybrid” option that saves counties a huge amount of processing time.

She said the state spent millions to educate voters on new COVID-related vote-by-mail protocols and deadlines in 2020, and it led to both record turnout and a faster count — proving access and speed are not mutually exclusive.

“We’re being asked to make a false choice,” Alexander said. “It is possible to have accessible, secure, reliable and verified elections, and also an accelerated vote count.”

Times staff writer David G. Savage in Washington contributed to this report.

For the next week or so, in homes all over California, ballots will be arriving for the June 2 primary.

Since 2020, a ballot has been mailed to every active registered voter in the state — more than 23 million, by last count. The time to choose is drawing nigh.

In addition to the race for governor, Californians will vote in contests for seven other statewide offices, the Board of Equalization — which oversees the property tax system — and a great many congressional, legislative and local races, including the primary for Los Angeles mayor.

What’s a voter to do?

If you’ve waited your entire life for a candidate like Republican Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff running for governor, or you’ve been jonesing to cast a gubernatorial ballot for Democrat Katie Porter from the moment she whipped out her famous whiteboard, the choice is easy. Fill out that ballot and toss it in the mail, stat! No postage needed.

“Don’t mess around,” said Paul Maslin, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. (His candidate for governor, Betty Yee, quit the race late last month, so he’s a neutral observer at this point.)

“If you have pretty good inkling what you want to do,” Maslin urged, “vote.”

But if, like many, you’re not wed to a particular candidate, what then? If you’re worried about mailing in your ballot and then having some awful, Eric Swalwell-like revelations surface, or if you fret about wasting your vote by supporting someone who drops out before June 2, then what?

There are no do-overs in a California election. Once you’ve cast your ballot, you’ve made your choice. That’s it, however sorry you may be.

Which is why Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, who’s worked in California politics for decades, urged voters not to mail their ballot too soon. Like Maslin, he’s unaffiliated with any of the gubernatorial campaigns.

“It’s a slow-developing race,” Stutzman said of the contest for governor, the marquee attraction on the June ballot. “These are still relatively little-known candidates. There’s going to be a lot more campaigning to go in the weeks ahead. [So] unless you feel really strongly about somebody, I’d hang on to that ballot and see what happens over the next several weeks.”

Then again, with all the talk of clamping down on mail-in ballots and concerns about processing delays by a stretched-thin Postal Service, is there a danger of waiting too long to vote? What if your ballot arrives past the deadline to be tallied?

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court strongly signaled a likelihood it would require mail ballots to be received by election day if they are to be counted as legal. As it stands, California accepts mail-in ballots that were cast before the end of election day, so long as they arrive no later than seven days after.

The court seems unlikely to issue its ruling before the June primary — but that’s not guaranteed.

So is there a sweet spot, somewhere between voting in haste and having your ballot go to waste?

The Official Voter Information Guide, produced by California’s secretary of state, urges those voting by mail to “return your ballot … as soon as you receive it.”

But Kim Alexander, head of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, falls into the wait-a-bit camp. “Don’t vote too early,” she counseled, “because this is a very dynamic election.”

Once you’ve made up your mind, her best advice is to mail your ballot at least a full week before election day, which is May 26, to ensure it arrives on time to be processed and counted. If someone wants to drop their ballot off in person, either at a vote center or secure drop box, Alexander suggests doing so by May 30, which is three days before the election.

“The good news,” she said, “is that under a new state law … all county election offices will be open at least six hours on Saturday, May 30, for voters to come vote in person or to turn in their vote-by-mail ballots.”

Voting in person is an option right up until 8 p.m. on election day, even if you received a ballot in the mail. That applies everywhere in California, save for three sparsely populated, rural counties — Alpine, Plumas and Sierra — which conduct their elections entirely by mail. Bring your unused vote-by-mail ballot to your local polling place and swap it for a polling-place ballot you can use instead.

For procrastinators or those wanting to wait until election day to mail their ballot, they run the risk that it won’t be postmarked until after June 2. That means it won’t be counted, regardless of when it arrives at their county elections office.

“Voters who want to hold out as long as possible … ought to be planning to turn their ballot into a drop box or a voting site and not use the mail at all,” Alexander said.

Having spent decades working to make voting easier and elections safer and smoother, Alexander knows that voting by mail has made many people miss “the election day experience.” (Things like bringing the kiddos into the voting booth, or posing for selfies with an “I Voted” sticker.)

Her suggestion is to find other ways to mark the occasion.

“Help somebody else go and vote,” Alexander suggested, “or volunteer to help with an organization” running a get-out-the-vote operation.

“If you want to help election officials get ahead on the vote count” — a source of repeated upset as the country awaits California’s lagging results — “you can be part of the solution by getting your own ballot in just a little bit earlier.”

All of which sound like fine ideas. That way you can celebrate election day and make sure your ballot isn’t cast for naught.