Rich’s piece today about the unnecessarily slow vote-counting of some states is spot-on. He writes about the worst culprit, California:
The Golden State has made a practice of overwhelming itself with mail-in ballots. It still hadn’t counted a third of its ballots after Election Day in 2020, and kept counting for weeks. This year, ballots arriving up to a week after the election will be considered valid. A Democratic assemblyman told the AP that the state doesn’t need to please “a society that wants immediate gratification,” as if there’s something wrong with expecting expeditious, reliable election results.
His piece focuses on the presidential election, but California’s vote-counting lethargy matters more for the House of Representatives. Whichever party wins the House majority, it is likely to be slim, and there are only so many competitive House races to begin with. Of the 27 House races currently rated as toss-ups by Cook Political Report, five are in California, the most of any single state.
This year’s primary election in California’s 16th district took two months to count. The winner of the 2022 general election in California’s 13th district held on November 8 of that year was not determined until December 2.
As if it weren’t bad enough that the presidential results might be delayed by slow vote-counting, control of the House might be unknown as well.
Florida became a national embarrassment in 2000 for its terrible vote-counting, and it responded by cleaning up its act. Ryan Mills explained exactly how Florida did it in a 2022 piece for NR. Any state can repeat this, if it wants to. If California doesn’t want to, it’s reasonable to wonder why.