California has the most sophisticated technology economy in the world. It can process billions of financial transactions, track packages across continents, and identify your face in a crowd of strangers.
Yet, somehow, it routinely takes weeks – and sometimes nearly a month – to count an election.
We’re told this is perfectly normal. We’re told it’s the price of democracy. We’re told anyone who finds it odd simply doesn’t understand how modern elections work. Maybe. Still, when a system repeatedly produces outcomes that look suspicious to ordinary people, it’s worth asking whether the problem is the people – or the system.
Which brings us to California’s curious habit of counting votes long after Election Day and watching the results drift in one remarkably consistent direction. While California spent the spring insisting there is nothing remotely strange about taking a month to count an election, nine people in Washington were preparing to tell the state it may have been doing it wrong. On March 23, the Supreme Court heard Watson v. RNC, the Mississippi case asking whether “Election Day” means ballots must actually be received by that day. A ruling is expected by late June.
California’s long count has a tell. The candidate ahead on election night has a worrying habit of losing by Thanksgiving.
In 2018, Central Valley Republican David Valadao led for weeks. The Associated Press called the race for him. NBC called the race for him. Then late mail ballots arrived and broke so heavily for his Democratic opponent that the networks performed the near-unheard-of act of un-calling the race. Valadao conceded nearly a month later. And he wasn’t alone. Seven California Republicans led their races on election night that year. Three weeks later, every one of them had lost.
The remarkable thing isn’t that late ballots sometimes help Democrats. The remarkable thing is that it has almost never gone the other way. (Once, in the 1982 gubernatorial race.) Political scientists gave this curious phenomenon a friendly name: the “blue shift.” Like explaining to K that the pint of ice cream that keeps disappearing in the middle of the night is “dairy displacement syndrome.”
That late-game political turnaround was strange enough that Paul Ryan – a man not generally mistaken for a conspiracy theorist – said so publicly. “It defies logic to me,” he remarked. “We had a lot of wins that night, and three weeks later we lost basically every contested California race.”
California’s Secretary of State responded, in all caps, that this wasn’t “bizarre,” it was “DEMOCRACY.” Because nothing reassures quite like shouting the word at a man for noticing your math.
How does the month-long count work?
Every state requires some sort of proof that a mailed-in ballot arrived on time. Most require a postmark, but there are a handful that allow for reasonable alternatives, such as intelligent mail barcodes or validated UPS tracking methods. California decided that was asking too much.
Under California rules, a ballot with no postmark, an illegible postmark, or no readable postmark date can still be counted, provided the voter wrote a date on the envelope indicating that it was completed by Election Day, and the ballot arrives within seven days. We are assured this is perfectly secure. That’s comforting. I confess I had always assumed a timestamp from the US Postal Service might be useful in determining when something was mailed.
Think about the logic. We cannot trust a neutral machine to date an envelope, but we can trust a handwritten date supplied by the one person on earth with a direct stake in the outcome. The disinterested timestamp is questionable; the interested party’s pencil is gospel. Imagine a red state trying that. The same people defending the practice today would likely be on cable news by lunchtime calling it voter suppression, election tampering, or both.
Perhaps every one of these rules was adopted for entirely innocent reasons. Perhaps everyone was motivated by a sincere desire to increase voter participation. And perhaps it’s simply a coincidence that in California they invariably benefit one political party. Perhaps. California seems to have assembled one of the most impressive collections of politically beneficial coincidences in modern American history.
Don’t let anyone tell you mail voting is inherently safer than showing up in person.
When you vote in person, a poll worker verifies your eligibility at the moment you arrive. Your participation is recorded immediately. You receive one ballot. A neutral official oversees the process. Mail voting removes each of those protections and relocates them to your kitchen table, where the primary safeguard becomes a signature comparison conducted later by a clerk.
There is also an auditability problem that many election-reform advocates prefer not to discuss. A voting machine can be tested, audited, recounted, and challenged. It produces a paper trail. There is a thread to pull. A harvested ballot, once separated from its envelope to preserve secrecy, is anonymous forever. When activists collect thousands of ballots door to door – as the Los Angeles Democratic Socialists of America’s own ballot-delivery materials openly encourage – there is no meaningful audit of what occurred on the front porch. Once the ballot enters the system, its journey effectively disappears.
Now it’s time to say what defenders of the California Voting System always say: No large-scale California election fraud scheme has been proven in court. These late swings towards the blue are real. And happen with nearly every important, closely contested election. And furthermore, they are legal. The whole idiotic program from conception to counting ballots is law.
But that doesn’t make them fair. Or honest.
I am not claiming the vault has been cracked. I’m just saying that half the bags of money have disappeared.
Grant California every favorable assumption. Assume there are no forged ballots, no secret rooms, and no criminal conspiracy. You’re still left with a system that routinely produces results many citizens find difficult to trust: a postmark you may ignore, a date you may write yourself, a count that runs for weeks, and a ballot that may be carried by a political activist. As I said, every piece is legal, but legal and trustworthy are not synonyms.
Which is why the Supreme Court matters. California built a system so pleased with its own cleverness that it never imagined anyone might simply point to the calendar. If the Court decides that Election Day means the day the election occurs, California’s month-long counting ritual may finally come to an end.
Maybe California’s election system is every bit as honest as its defenders claim. Maybe it’s perfectly normal for ballots without postmarks to arrive days later and still count. Maybe it’s perfectly normal for elections to take weeks to finish. Maybe it’s perfectly normal for late ballots to break overwhelmingly in one direction year after year.
Maybe.
At some point, though, a reasonable person begins to marvel at the Democrats’ extraordinary good fortune. Every procedural innovation seems to help them. Every counting delay goes in their favor. Every reform seems to help them more.
I know that there are millions of voters – even California voters – that see nothing unusual in that pattern. And I suppose it’s possible that there isn’t anything fishy going on. It’s also possible my golden retriever understands quantum mechanics.
