When it comes to counting votes, there’s no rushing California. America’s most populous state is also home to the nation’s most frustrating political tradition—a lengthy wait to find out the winners of key elections. Californians only learned yesterday evening—a full week after they finished casting ballots in the state’s primaries—which candidates had been nominated for governor. The state also took several days to determine who will advance in U.S. House races that could play a decisive role in which party controls Congress next year. And the counting is far from done.
California’s glacial vote-count is a function of its enormous size and generous ballot-access laws; most people vote by mail, and the state will accept ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive up to a week after. For years, Democratic state officials saw little urgency in hurrying the process, prioritizing accuracy and voter participation over speed in determining results. But this conspiracist political era, when the country’s loudest election denier happens to be its president, has started to change that mindset.
[Read: The election deniers are winning]
“We want to maximize participation and protect the fundamental right to vote. That being said, can California counties count more quickly? Sure,” Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California’s secretary of state and top elections official, told us.
President Trump has made baseless claims of fraud in California’s vote for nearly a decade; over the weekend, he became so agitated as he raged about California’s “rigged” primary that he stormed out of an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. The biggest difference between Trump’s rantings now and in 2017 is that top Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have joined the president in sowing doubts about the accuracy and legitimacy of California’s elections. In each of the past two congressional elections, the nation has had to wait more than a week to find out which party would control the House while California and other western states finished counting mail ballots. One tight race in California remained uncalled for nearly a month.
In this month’s closely watched primary for governor, in which the top two vote-getters advance, Californians waited a week to learn that the Trump-backed conservative Steve Hilton edged out the progressive billionaire Tom Steyer for second place. He will face Xavier Becerra, a former Biden-administration Cabinet secretary and California attorney general, who came in first. Becerra is now the heavy favorite in November, but the stakes of a drawn-out vote-count could be much higher in the battle for power in Congress. As in previous elections, the first ballots counted in many areas of the state tended to favor Republicans, and when candidates including Spencer Pratt, the former reality-TV star running for mayor in Los Angeles, fell short in subsequent tallies, their supporters cried foul.
Democrats in California and elsewhere worry that Trump and his allies might be claiming fraud in the primaries now to lay the groundwork for federal interference with the state’s vote-counting in November, when a predictable flurry of last-minute Democratic mail-in ballots could tip the House majority. After the president began attacking California’s elections anew last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California dispatched an official to observe Los Angeles County’s ballot processing. “The kind of questions he was asking, quite frankly, were questions coming from theories that are being spread on social media,” Dean Logan, the top elections official in the county, told us. (The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment about the observer’s work.)
Even as they dismiss the GOP’s unsubstantiated claims, some Democrats have become fed up with California, arguing that the state should have long since figured out a way to determine the winners of its elections more efficiently. “It should be embarrassing to California Democrats,” Tré Easton, the vice president of public affairs at the Searchlight Institute, a center-left think tank, told us. “It should be embarrassing that Democrats at the national level have just sort of gotten used to this kind of thing. It’s absurd.”
“Before you even get to Republicans being bad actors in all of this,” Easton added, “it’s a small-d democratic failure that California can’t get this right.” Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat considering a run for president in 2028, said Tuesday that a close friend of his had canceled his voter registration because he had become convinced that Pratt “was robbed of the election.” While acknowledging California’s desire to maximize participation, Khanna said the state needed to move faster. “It is worth spending the resources to get the vast majority of the vote counted within 48 hours,” he posted on X. “Right now the system is eroding trust and spawning conspiracy theories.” After working through the weekend at Los Angeles County’s cavernous ballot-processing center, Logan seemed to have come to the same conclusion about California’s system. “Sadly, I do think it doesn’t meet the moment,” he said, citing the toll that rampant conspiracy theories have taken. “That has crossed the line where it is now impacting public trust and confidence, because it is being repeated so much.”
California is not alone in its struggle to quickly tabulate the deluge of mail ballots that come in on or shortly after Election Day. Arizona and Nevada have taken several days to determine election winners in recent years as the popularity of voting by mail has surged and certain races have grown more competitive. The relentless attacks on voting systems have sent civil servants and political operatives from both parties scrambling to avert electoral damage. A GOP-led governing board in Cochise County, Arizona, threatened to withhold certification of the 2022 election results there because of suspicion about vote-counting machines and ballot printers’ failures on Election Day in another part of the state. Staff at the National Republican Congressional Committee became so concerned that they considered asking then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, to call local officials to urge them to sign off on the results so that the Republican winner of a House race —Juan Ciscomani—could be seated, a Republican familiar with the private deliberations who is not authorized to talk about them publicly told us. (The county officials certified the results after a court order compelled them to do so.)
[Read: Arizona is now the center of election investigations]
Earlier this spring, we sat down with Nevada’s secretary of state, Cisco Aguilar, who cautioned us not to “judge Nevada on its past” and described his efforts to speed up its vote-count. In 2024, the state was able to process 90 percent of its ballots on Election Night—a significant improvement from two years earlier, he said. Aguilar was hesitant to talk about California: “I don’t know California’s system.” But he also chairs the national Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, and in that capacity, we asked him what message he would send to his neighbor to the West. “Get your shit together,” he replied.
The thing about California is that it’s huge. As Padilla pointed out to us, Los Angeles County by itself has more residents than 40 different states do. California sends a ballot to more than 23 million registered voters, and about 80 percent of ballots come back through the mail—many arriving close to or on Election Day. “They just have a ton of mail to go through. That’s where the bottleneck is. There’s no mystery to it,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UCLA, told us.
This year, because of the close—and volatile—race for governor, many voters held on to their primary ballots until the last minute, creating a crushing pileup of ballots for election officials to process, signatures to verify, and votes to tabulate. On top of that, when election officials cannot match a voter’s signatures to those they have on file, those voters have a chance to fix the problem by proving their identity, adding time to the process.
“Voters want to wait until the last minute to vote—you know, they’re waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next big story,” Tricia Webber, the clerk in Santa Cruz County, told us. “Voter behavior is saying, ‘Hold it to the end.’” In her county of about 173,000 registered voters, the office received about 38,000 ballots in the mail or through voting locations and drop boxes on Election Day—more than it had received since the voting period started, she said. (Each ballot takes about 48 hours to be processed and tabulated, she added.)
The Supreme Court is currently weighing a challenge to late-arriving ballots, and it could force California and other states that accept ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward to move up their deadlines. (A decision is expected within the next few weeks.) Hasen said such a ruling, however, wouldn’t have a major impact on the pace of California’s vote-counting. “It’s not the late-arriving ballots that are the logjam,” he said. “It’s the stuff that comes in the days before Election Day.”
Election officials and experts have repeatedly sought to set the public’s expectations for a lengthy vote-count in competitive races, while urging voters to return their ballots sooner rather than later. Democratic leaders in the state have also found themselves in the uncomfortable position of defending the integrity of California’s election system while urging the state to count its votes as fast as possible, if only to preempt a Republican disinformation campaign. “We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads. That means we must do all that we can do to tabulate votes quickly and accurately,” Governor Gavin Newsom wrote in a letter to state election officials that his office made public last month. “Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold.”
California has taken some steps to speed up the counting. Newsom signed laws last year to require counties to finish their tallies within 13 days of Election Day (down from 30 days) while allowing them to begin counting early mail ballots before Election Day. Marc Berman, an author of one of those bills and a member of the state assembly’s elections committee (as well as its former chair), told us the goal was to get ahead of the attacks on California’s vote-count that he knew would be coming this year. He couldn’t yet say whether the laws were making a difference. “Clearly, the timelines that we have aren’t enough to satisfy President Trump,” Berman said.
[Read: “California is allowed to hit back”]
Elections officials and experts told us that California also needed to devote more money to vote-counting if it wanted faster results. “If you want something different, give us the resources and give us the authority to do it,” Juan Pablo Cervantes, the Humboldt County clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, told us. Kim Alexander, the president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said that Californians can have both speed and accuracy “if our lawmakers are willing to invest the money” to make it happen. (Her group is urging state officials to allocate $55 million for county election offices to buy equipment and space and pay staff to help speed up the count and $35 million for a campaign to raise public awareness about early and in-person voting and tabulation).
Cervantes also said state lawmakers had to reckon with the tradeoffs of the system they devised. “If you want things done faster, you need to understand it’s going to come at the cost of making things less flexible for voters,” he said. “I don’t think that’s anything that anyone wants to say.”
Republicans often contrast California with Florida, which endured the 36-day ballot-counting nightmare of the 2000 presidential election but now reports nearly all of its vote within a few hours of polls closing. The comparison exasperates California Democrats, who point out that Florida has stricter voter-access rules and requires ballots to be received by Election Day. “If your goal is voter participation, if your goal is counting the validly cast ballots of every voter possible, then I think California has a much better system,” Berman said. “If your goal is immediate gratification, then Florida has a better system.”
Indeed, California’s halting attempts to quicken its vote-count have been in large part because the system’s defenders believe it works pretty well as it is. “The only reason it’s problematic is because of Donald Trump,” Hasen said. The eventual winners of this month’s primaries will have months to campaign before the general election, and the winners of the November vote won’t take office until nearly two months later. “If we were a normal democracy, this would not be a very big deal.”
Yet California Democrats have come to realize, perhaps belatedly, that the attacks on their state’s election are quite a big deal. Berman said his fear about what might happen in November “is very real, and it is very high.” We asked him what more the state could do to prepare. He cited a law the legislature recently passed to safeguard ballots, including from the federal government’s interference, as well as efforts to increase transparency around the vote-counting process. But he said the state could only do so much. “If the president is hell-bent on creating a constitutional crisis in this country by having the federal government seize ballots and interfere in elections in a way that they don’t have the authority to do,” Berman conceded, “he can do that.”
The modest steps that California has taken might help speed up its vote-count a little bit. But the state has probably run out of time for major changes before the fall. And so the message its Democratic leaders have for the rest of the country remains the same as it’s been for years: If control of Congress comes down to California this November, you’re just going to have to settle in and wait.
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