This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Everyone agrees it would be nice to know the outcomes of California elections sooner.
What they can’t agree upon is whether and how to make that happen.
The state’s glacial pace of counting primary votes — it took a week before enough ballots were counted to call the marquee governor’s race — has once again captured national attention and sparked a new round of conspiracy theories, as well as serious calls for reform.
“It’s hard to overstate how much of an outlier California is for its slow vote-counting relative to literally any other state or almost any other industrialized democracy,” wrote Nate Silver, the popular election data analyst, on social media three days after polls closed. One of the most liked responses to Silver claimed the delay is an intentional effort to rig the outcome.
Even The New York Times editorial board got in on the criticism, declaring that California’s delayed results were “damaging faith in government” and priming voters to believe election skeptics such as President Donald Trump and his allies. Gov. Gavin Newsom has urged counties to produce results faster, arguing that delays erode trust in the results and provide fertile ground for misinformation.
But state Democratic leaders, along with some advocates, argue that speeding up the count would mean disenfranchising voters. Most still refuse to consider any changes that would make voting harder, even if they would only affect a small fraction of voters.
“If you want results election night, you’re going to have to go back to in-person voting, way earlier deadlines for returning by mail, and you’re going to end up disenfranchising voters,” said Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, chair of her chamber’s election committee and the former Santa Cruz County registrar.
In a reality seemingly isolated from the public outcry, Pellerin says the count is going as smoothly as ever.
“It’s actually going really well, and elections officials are working around the clock, and we’re getting results,” she said.
Several of Pellerin’s Democratic colleagues who have championed election reform bills, including Assemblymember Marc Berman of Palo Alto and Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana, said they wouldn’t support restricting access in favor of quicker results.
“As a candidate, believe me, I would love for the counting to happen faster,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat and chair of his chamber’s elections committee who is running for Congress. “I don’t think the right answer is disenfranchising people.”
California’s secretary of state, Shirley Weber, also sees no urgency in counting faster. She has dismissed concerns about slow returns as a Trump talking point. She’s expected to easily win another four-year term this fall.
“I know the value of being fast for some folks,” Weber told CalMatters in April. “For me, accuracy is far more important.”
While The Times editorial took aim at California’s seven-day grace period for late-arriving ballots — a policy that’s on thin ice as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether to invalidate a similar law in Mississippi — most of the delay stems from the sheer volume of mail-in ballots that counties receive on Election Day or the day before.
Who should pay for speedier results?
During the pandemic, California implemented a universal vote-by-mail system in which every registered voter gets a ballot in the mail.
And Californians love it: Nearly 90% of votes in last year’s statewide special election were mail-in ballots. In contrast, 10 years ago, fewer than 60% of general election voters cast ballots by mail.
But mail-in ballots require far more time and energy to process compared to in-person ballots that are fed through a machine onsite. They require more money, too, but California counties have not received funding to compensate them, said Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
“They’re kind of managing the best they can with the budget that they have,” McGhee said, referring to county registrars. “But it’s a lot to handle.”
California also does not contribute ongoing funds to counties for elections as some other states do.
In Colorado, which also has a universal mail-in system and which the Times praised for its faster results, the state pays for 45% of the cost if there is a statewide decision on the ballot. Hawaii splits the cost with counties for statewide or federal elections. And Arizona reimburses its counties $1.25 per active registered voter for presidential primaries.
More than half the primary ballots that arrived in Yolo County this month were vote-by-mail ballots returned on Election Day, said Registrar Jesse Salinas. County officials must ensure voters are registered, and only voting once, and carry an authentic signature.
The counties’ scanners can only detect an exact match for a fraction of the ballots — about 30% for Yolo County, Salinas estimates. The other 70% must be hand-checked by humans.
“When people ask, ‘Well, why aren’t you working harder?’” Salinas said, he tells people, “Those of us that work at the vote centers, we work 19 days straight,” including up to 15 days of early voting.
On Election Day, every square inch of the cramped Yolo County elections office is taken up by boxes packed full of mail-in ballots. There’s simply no room for more machines, or workers, even if the state supplied them. They would need a whole new building.
“When you have that large volume hitting you at the 11th hour, there’s no way you can go through all of that in one night,” Salinas said.
Things moved significantly faster than in past years in Orange County, which made a $4 million investment in new mail-in ballot processing equipment. It took Registrar Bob Page and his staff a little over a week to process the more than 807,000 ballots, with staff working from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays as well as a shift on Saturday.
Any financial help from the state would be extremely helpful, Salinas said. California covered the cost of Newsom’s 2021 recall election and the 2025 statewide special election on redistricting, which Salinas said allowed him to upgrade his equipment.
But counties face other financial pressures. They are coping with the loss of federal and state Medi-Cal dollars along with structural deficits that have forced departments to trim their budgets. Even in this election year, Salinas was told to cut $1.1 million.
