As several states prepare to tabulate primary ballots after polls close Tuesday, California is still counting ballots cast two weeks ago during the state’s March 5 elections.
As of this article’s publication, unofficial election results show that 95 percent of votes have been tabulated in California’s Democrat presidential primary, versus 93 percent in the Republican contest. In the state’s Senate primary, 92 percent of votes have been finalized, with many ballots in several congressional races also still awaiting tabulation.
While it’s clear presidential candidates like Joe Biden and Donald Trump won their respective primaries, the failure to provide California voters completed results by election night shines a light on the state’s chaotic election system. Results like these discourage voters’s trust in U.S. elections.
Like many states, California used the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak as an excuse to expand the use of unsupervised mail-in voting. In September 2021, Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation making permanent the state’s policy of mailing a ballot to every entry on California’s voter registration lists. The law also mandated localities make ballot drop boxes available “up to 28 days before election day,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
A Public Interest Legal Foundation report released after the 2022 midterms discovered that, as Victoria Marshall wrote in these pages, election officials rejected 226,250 mailed ballots. At the time of the report’s publication, more than 10 million mail-in ballots were “unaccounted for.”
Delayed election results also stem from California’s embrace of same-day voter registration. Those
