update vote totals<\/a> this weekend. Most offices lack the resources to keep staff members on constant rotation, Ms. Alexander said.<\/p>\nIn California, each of those counties decides how much to spend on election operations, creating major differences in their capacity to count ballots, said Ben Gips, who works on state voting policy for Protect Democracy.<\/p>\n
Large counties such as Los Angeles and Orange have invested in equipment and staffing that typically allow them to finish counting more than 90 percent of ballots within a week of an election. Other counties can take three or four weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically, the counties have been trying to fill in for the sort of absent role of the state,\u201d Mr. Gips said, \u201cand some counties are more able to do that than others.\u201d<\/p>\n
The key areas that require funding are not only staffing and equipment but space to accommodate the workers and observers and to securely store ballots. In Yolo County, Calif., west of Sacramento, election officials knocked out a wall in their building a few years ago to make space to process the growing number of ballots, said Jesse Salinas, the county\u2019s registrar of voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are at capacity,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t have any empty space.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Salinas, who is also the president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said that more than 50 percent of the ballots in his county were either postmarked or dropped off in person on Election Day this year. He described a whirring processing center operated by 25 to 30 staff members, all of them scanning, opening and sorting ballots as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
The office has two envelope-sorting machines that cost a quarter of a million dollars each.<\/p>\n
\u201cLocal elected officials are doing everything they can,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I had more space and more equipment and more staffing \u2014 it\u2019s a resource issue \u2014 if I had all that stuff, then it could happen faster,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In Maricopa County, Ariz., one of the nation\u2019s largest voting jurisdictions, roughly 762,000 mail-in ballots were returned in the August 2022 primary, according to Stephen Richer, who was the top elections official there at the time.<\/p>\n
By 12:40 a.m. on election night, his office had counted about 82 percent of the votes. And as a rule, he said, the office tried to have counted 95 percent of the ballots within 72 hours after polls closed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThrowing money and space at it does help the problem, but it doesn\u2019t solve all the problems,\u201d Mr. Richer said.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest factor, he suggested, is a lack of will among leaders in states like California to sacrifice accessibility for speed. He empathized with election officials who could face allegations of cutting corners if they counted too fast but suspicions of fraud if they counted too slowly.<\/p>\n
California\u2019s top elections official, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, has made it clear at each election that she wants counties to take the time to get it right.<\/p>\n
\u201cAccuracy comes before speed,\u201d she said in a statement. \u201cCalifornia is the nation\u2019s largest voting state, with millions of ballots to process and count. Taking the time to do this work correctly protects voters\u2019 rights and ensures the integrity of our elections.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Richer, now a legal scholar with the Cato Institute and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that California\u2019s commitment to making it easy and painless for Californians to vote was laudable. But in an environment where President Trump and his supporters are questioning election integrity, state leaders should have better prepared to face questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw this train barreling down on us for a while now, and the governor and the State Legislature did nothing about it,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the only thing you care about is having 22 days to cure a signature on a mail-in ballot, these are the consequences you live with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump, who has a history of stoking unfounded election conspiracy theories, said this week that the prolonged vote-counting in California was proof that \u201cthey\u2019re rigging the election.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey still aren\u2019t even close to telling you who won,\u201d he said Friday while speaking at an event in Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
The federal Department of Justice sent an assistant U.S. attorney to a ballot processing center in Los Angeles on Friday to observe the counting. And Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said on X that his office \u201chas multiple election fraud investigations underway,\u201d though he did not provide specifics.<\/p>\n
Gov. Gavin Newsom anticipated the criticism, sending a letter<\/a> to election officials last month urging them to tabulate ballots quickly because \u201cthe longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cTime is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Mr. Richer warned that the primary election was merely a preview of what was to come. It is not clear that much would change in California before the general election.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you think this is bad, just wait until control of the United States House is in play in November,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it comes down to a number of competitive jurisdictions in California.\u201d<\/p>\n
Orlando Mayorqu\u00edn contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four days after the primary election in California, officials have tallied only about two-thirds of the votes cast,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[142935,7,9,8,120632,12137,4384,142937,86842,3290,142936,1519,4510,4483],"class_list":["post-349342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-absentee-voting","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-donald-j","tag-gavin","tag-los-angeles-calif","tag-maricopa-county-ariz","tag-midterm-elections-2026","tag-newsom","tag-shirley-1948","tag-trump","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-weber"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}