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… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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