Are these California election workers stuffing ballot boxes or just doing a difficult job?
Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Now we know why so many leading California Democratic elected officials — notably Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta — made such a big deal out of the need for Golden State voters to fill out and send in their mail ballots as early as possible this year. In a letter to state election officials at around the time all of California’s registered voters received mail ballots, Newsom accurately predicted the political consequences of a slow vote count, exacerbated by a logjam of late-arriving ballots:
Sure enough, on Thursday, as overwhelmed California election officials were still working to tabulate California primary ballots, the president of the United States raised his familiar cry of “vote fraud!” in two posts on Truth Social:
The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS
And:
There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY??? President DJT
Since Trump has been demagoguing California voting procedures for many years, you have to suspect that he knows the answer to his questions. There are “massive numbers” of mail ballots because this is the principal way that voters in California — and also in Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia — vote. There is vote-counting “DELAY” because it takes longer to process and count mail ballots, which have to be opened, signature-verified, examined for improper marking, then scanned. The very measures necessary to avoid “fraud” slow down the process.
Many “votes are all tied up” because of a phenomenon known as “the pig in the python,” as the San Francisco Chronicle explained at about the same time Trump was disingenuously freaking out:
[T]he pig is the quarter of voters who hang onto their mail-in ballots until the very end, dropping their sealed and signed envelope off to election offices or drop boxes on, or just before, Election Day. … The election workers, who only have so much time, space and hands, are the snake. They swallow the surge in ballots whole, creating an immediate chokepoint.Mail-in ballots are more work to count thanks to a mix of logistical steps and state law. Workers verify signatures, separate ballots from envelopes, and if stray marks or other odd hand-filled ballots prompt an adjudication, that process is run by a jury of two people to determine a voter’s intent. The tasks stack up fast.
To hear some Republicans, the big problem is California’s practice (along with 13 other states and the District of Columbia) of allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if received later (up until June 9 in this case). Indeed, the RNC has sued to ban this procedure in a case that is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. But according to the Public Policy Institute of California, only about 5 percent of the ballots cast in 2024 were received after Election Day; this grace period simply expands the size of the python in the pig.
So why do Trump and other Republicans so often allege fraud in California without a shred of specific evidence? It’s simple, and simple-minded: Because the full count takes days and even weeks, it can change who’s ahead or behind over time. And because of a much-noted “blue shift” phenomenon in states with long periods for voting by mail, Republicans tend to do better in early returns and then lose ground later on. There’s no reason to assume anything sinister is going on; it’s mostly a matter of younger voters who skew Democratic often being the last to turn in their ballots, which are then the last counted. This year in California the “blue shift” was definitely accentuated by Democratic voters who held on to their mail ballots for strategic reasons because they feared the large and diffuse Democratic gubernatorial field might produce a GOP lockout (i.e., Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco finishing first and second and excluding Democrats from the general election).
So nobody should be surprised at the relatively strong performances in early vote counting by Republican candidates like Hilton and Los Angeles mayoral aspirant Spencer Pratt or by the gradual erosion of their numbers as later-cast ballots are counted. It’s just logical. But it’s easy for Republican politicians to ascribe evil motives without a shred of evidence:
And now, CNN reports, allegedly suspicious prosecutors are looking into this inexplicable fading away of the enormous GOP election night victory:
The Justice Department sent one of its attorneys to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles Friday morning, the county’s elections office told CNN, after President Donald Trump claimed earlier this week the US Attorney’s office there was investigating the vote counting. …
“The individual arrived this morning, was provided an overview of the public observation program, and participated in a walkthrough of the ballot processing operations,” the spokesperson, Mike Sanchez said in an email, noting that ballot processing in the county is open to public observation.
There’s no mystery involved in the process, other than why these claims of voter fraud pop up every time Republicans lose an election in California, which is every time there’s an election. If wily Democratic election officials wanted to rob Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt of a victory, surely they would steal votes from them on Primary Night instead of waiting around for prosecutors to show up to catch them in the act!
This sort of calumny has become regular for Republicans who somehow believe Election Night counts are sacrosanct; it was the foundation, in fact, of Trump’s fateful challenge to his defeat in 2020 after he “won” the election in early vote counting. So GOP voices will be uninhibited in alleging fraud, particularly if Hilton and Pratt fail to finish first and second and don’t make the general-election ballot (unlikely, but not impossible).
Is there something California (and other all-mail-ballot states) can do in the future to accelerate vote counting and put the lie to all the conspiracy theories? It could, of course, spend a lot more money on election-office staffing at the state and local effort to basically build a bigger python that the pig of late mail ballots cannot choke. Part of the problem now is that county personnel who are processing incoming mail ballots can’t be deployed to count the ones already received, which requires a “pause” in ballot counting the very day after the election. So campaign operatives and political junkies with their tongues lolling out for quick and definitive results are sitting on the sidelines frustrated as vote totals stay frozen awaiting “updates” from the counties and the state. To outsiders, it looks like election officials are taking hours and whole days off when it’s really anything but that. A lot more staff could help solve the problem and keep conspiracy theorists at bay.
California could also make it less of a priority to give last-minute voters a ton of options (putting ballots in the mail, placing them in drop boxes, or going to a voting center to have them scanned) and lots of time to “cure” inadvertent errors like stray marks on ballots. But “convenience voting” and measures to promote ballot security (allegedly a big concern of Republican critics) aren’t entirely compatible with a fast count.
What is very clear is that the president himself will be satisfied only with a system that guarantees that he and his party’s candidates never lose. Any victory by “Dumocrats” has to be the product of fraud or disinformation from the “radical left” media. Unfortunately, that means slow vote counts will be grist for the mill of his incessant innuendos and slurs. Jurisdictions controlled by Democrats should probably make speeding up these counts an urgent priority, lest MAGA folk convince themselves and others that voting itself is an unnecessary scam that should just be discarded.
