California’s slow vote count is a feature, not a flaw

Donald Trump watched the results come in on election night June 2, and probably liked what he saw. His hand-picked candidate for Los Angeles mayor—former reality television personality Spencer Pratt—held a commanding lead over City Council member Nithya Raman for second place. Then, day by day, that lead evaporated. By Sunday, Raman had leapfrogged Pratt to earn a place in the November runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.

Trump’s response came quickly. “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” he wrote on Truth Social. On “Meet the Press,” he insisted California officials were “cheating” because they weren’t finished counting. When anchor Kristen Welker pressed him—”Do you have evidence to support that?”—Trump replied: “All I have to do is look.” Then he walked off the set. The next day, Trump doubled down: “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. run-offs after the big lead he had,” he wrote on Truth Social. “3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!”

Trump and his MAGA supporters have fueled skepticism about the honesty of American elections, claiming that mail-in ballots, in particular, are rife with fraud. He’s wrong.

California’s electoral system is built around a single, foundational premise: Democracy is healthier and more representative when more people vote. Over the past two decades, California officials have steadily made it easier to participate—through expanded vote centers, secure drop boxes near parks and libraries, and flexible options to vote by mail, in person, or a combination of both.

The central feature of the system is universal vote-by-mail. In 2021, California became the eighth state to send mail ballots to every registered voter. It is enormously popular: In the 2024 presidential election, 81% of California votes cast were mail-in ballots. In last year’s special statewide election, the number rose to 89%. And it is working: Voter turnout in the June primaries exceeded 40%, the highest for a gubernatorial election in decades.

Inside California’s ballot process

California law allows ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted if they arrive within seven days afterward, with up to 30 days total to certify results. Before a single ballot is tallied, election officials must receive and sort it, validate the voter’s signature against their registration record, confirm the voter is registered and hasn’t voted twice, and check that the ballot was mailed on time. Then—and only then—do they remove it from the envelope and prepare it for counting.

California also gives voters whose ballots have technical problems, like a missing signature, a few weeks to fix them through a process called ballot curing. This is not bureaucratic inefficiency. It is election integrity in action.

As more California voters cast ballots by mail, they take longer to count. In 2020, 72% were counted within two days. By 2022, a year after the state began sending mail-in ballots to all eligible voters, that figure had dropped to 50% as mail voting expanded dramatically. It recovered to 66% in November 2024 after the state invested more resources in election administration. None of this is free. A system built to maximize participation requires time to verify and count every vote. That is not a flaw—it is a feature.

It takes California longer than some states to finish counting because its voting population is the largest in the country—23 million registered voters, compared to Texas’ 18.7 million—and because it insists on getting it right.

The Democratic edge in mail voting

The most significant change in American elections in recent years has been the increase in voters casting ballots by mail. Every state allows some mail-in ballots, but rules differ. Eight states and the District of Columbia automatically send ballots to every registered voter. Twenty-eight states allow any voter to request a ballot without a reason, and 14 states require a qualifying excuse before they will send one. In 2024, one-third of all ballots cast used the mail-in system. The proportion is higher in states that make it easier. States where more than half of all voters cast mail ballots include Indiana (54%), Vermont (65%), Montana (70%), Arizona (75%), California (81%), Colorado (91%), Utah (92%), Hawaii (93%), and Oregon and Washington (both 99%).

Although Trump himself votes by mail, for years he has attacked mail-in voting, citing unsupported claims of widespread fraud and even encouraging his supporters to vote in person.

There is nothing inherently partisan about choosing to vote by mail. But Trump has consistently vilified mail-in voting. Relatedly, Republicans are more likely to vote in person—ballots that are counted first. Democrats disproportionately vote by mail. This year, many Californians mailed their ballots on or near Election Day, creating a bottleneck. In Los Angeles, many Democratic voters were still weighing their choices between Bass and Raman in the final days of the race. When those ballots arrived, they skewed Democratic—and Raman’s standing relative to Pratt improved accordingly. It’s simple arithmetic, not conspiracy.

The partisan breakdown makes clear why Pratt’s early lead was always fragile. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Los Angeles, 55% to under 15%. Pratt’s strong showing reflected the fact that Bass, Raman, and other Democrats split the Democratic vote multiple ways while Pratt ran as the sole well-funded Republican. In the end, Bass garnered 34.3% of the vote, to 29% for Raman and 25.5% for Pratt.

The same dynamic played out statewide in the governor’s race, where eight credible Democratic candidates together captured 61% of the vote, but no Democrat got close to the majority needed to avoid a runoff. Xavier Becerra won 28.1% of all votes. Trump’s favored candidate, a Republican and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, came in second with 24.7%. Tom Steyer placed third with 22.8%. The only other serious Republican candidate, Chad Bianco, sheriff of Riverside County, had 10.3%. The eight other Republican candidates had a combined 1% of the total vote. Together, Republican candidates garnered 36%. That Hilton advanced to the runoff only became clear as mail ballots were counted, a result that reflects how California’s open primary system functions when the vote is split across many candidates.

The threat from outside

California’s 58 counties could and should receive more state and county funding to process ballots faster. Election officials like Jesse Salinas, registrar of rural Yolo County and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, have noted that limited staff, space, and equipment (Yolo County has two envelope-sorting machines, each costing about $250,000), slow the count. But the answer to underfunding is more funding—not treating a deliberate, integrity-driven system as a problem that proves Trump’s point.

The threat to California’s elections is not internal mismanagement. It is an external attack. The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a Republican National Committee challenge to a Mississippi law that allows ballots arriving up to five days after Election Day to be counted. Fourteen states allow mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day if they are postmarked by that day. If the court rules for the RNC, states would lose the ability to count any ballot that doesn’t arrive by Election Day itself. In 2024, more than 400,000 California mail ballots (2.5% of the total) arrived after Election Day and were counted under current law. A ruling against late-arriving ballots would disenfranchise those voters and their counterparts in other states. It could also affect Americans serving in the military and citizens living abroad, who traditionally rely on absentee mail-in ballots. Alabama and Florida have the largest number of such ballots from overseas. Such a ruling could also potentially overturn the constitutional principle that states, not the federal government, set the times, places, and manner of holding elections.

In March of this year, Trump signed an executive order instructing the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver ballots in states that have not given the federal government access to their voter rolls. Congressional Democrats and all 23 Democratic state attorneys general are urging courts to block it before it takes effect. If upheld, it would represent an unprecedented federal intrusion into state-run elections—not to protect the vote, but to suppress it.

In April, Trump issued another executive order charging the Postal Service with determining who may vote by mail and instructing it to refuse to deliver ballots sent by anyone not included on newly created federal mail voter lists. It even threatens criminal penalties for election officials, mail carriers, and others who send ballots to, or deliver completed ballots from, individuals the administration deems ineligible.

California’s election system has become a flashpoint in the broader fight over voting rights in America. Trump and his allies have spent years attacking mail-in ballots. However, the evidence does not support the claim that California’s elections are compromised—or that counting every vote is a problem worth solving.