distance had widened<\/a>.<\/p>\nCalifornia sends every regular voter a mail ballot that can be returned at their convenience. It gives a weeklong grace period for ballots to arrive as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. The state allows voters registered at old addresses or those not registered at all to fill out provisional ballots that become valid if election officials verify their information and deem them eligible. And it allows voters with mismatched signatures on file to resolve discrepancies once they are detected.<\/p>\n
All of those provisions make voting easier for residents in California than in many other states, but they add various checkpoints in the system to ensure security, each of which costs time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn California and Los Angeles, we have our election laws written in a way that maximizes participation,\u201d said Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County registrar of voters.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mitchell, who is a Democratic consultant, said that, paradoxically, the most effective way to speed up California\u2019s count would be to eliminate security protocols, like cutting ballot signature verification or checks on voter registration for provisional voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think Republicans would want that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Other election experts said that California suffered from logistical problems. Each of California\u2019s 58 counties is responsible for running its own election, and many lack sufficient resources to verify mail ballots and count votes quickly. They may not have enough workers, space or machines to process ballots in quick order.<\/p>\n
State lawmakers passed at least three bills last year designed to speed up the count, but the changes seemed to have marginal effect, given where things stood on Monday, with only about three-quarters of the ballots counted six days after the election.<\/p>\n
The bills shortened the deadline to finish counting most ballots, to 13 days from 30 days. They also allowed election officials to begin processing ballots earlier than before and required slightly more frequent updates of results.<\/p>\n
But elections are largely county-funded, and most of California\u2019s counties lack the resources to keep staff on constant rotation, said Kim Alexander, who runs the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect our counties to provide all these services to facilitate elections, and the state and federal governments aren\u2019t paying their fair share of the cost,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Nick Corasaniti, Christine Zhang, Luke Vrotsos, Jill Cowan and Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For President Trump, any Democratic election victory is suspicious on its face. Even, apparently, in one of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12858,7,9,8,1525,120632,8642,135420,86842,36877,143996,15180,37232,128092,1519,4510,143995],"class_list":["post-352430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-bass","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-democratic-party","tag-donald-j","tag-hilton","tag-karen-ruth","tag-midterm-elections-2026","tag-pratt","tag-presidential-election-of-2020","tag-republican-party","tag-spencer","tag-steve-1969","tag-trump","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-voter-fraud-election-fraud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352430","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=352430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}