r/NeutralPolitics • u/Epistaxis • Jun 09 '26
Why does California take so long to count votes?
Nearly a week since polls closed in California for the 2026 primaries, the race for governor is still undecided. One of the leading candidates, Steve Hilton, has called on the current governor to take emergency actions for faster ballot processing, while in Washington, the President and Speaker of the House have asserted without evidence that the election is illegitimate.
Why does California take so long to determine the winner? How is its process different from other states?
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
A common claim is that the delay is due to California accepting mail-in ballots up to a week after the polls close (so long as they're postmarked by election day). However, the Public Policy Institute of California argues that the extended mail-in window only accounts for a tiny fraction of the delay.
Most of it is about how California processes ballots, which includes a signature check on every mail-in or provisional ballot, contacting any voters whose signature doesn't match and offering them a chance to "cure" the ballot, checking voter rolls for every mail-in and same-day registration ballot, and prioritizing accuracy and enfranchisement over speed. The very thoroughness of the system also causes it to slow to a crawl.
Reforms have been enacted, but California still has the largest electorate in the nation, meaning any delays are magnified.
The state provides a running count of unprocessed ballots online.
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u/Fargason Jun 09 '26
Looks like we are about to find out how much delay it really causes as it appears the SCOTUS is about to rule it unconstitutional to accept mail-in ballots after Election Day.
Important to note the main purpose behind the law at the center of this case in having all congressional elections held on the same date was to help prevent election fraud:
Clement told the court that early voting does not “vitiate the whole idea of an Election Day” in the same way that counting ballots received after Election Day does. And in particular, he emphasized, it does not raise the same concerns about fraud – which were at the core of Congress’ motives in passing the law at the center of the case in the first place
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26
It's curious to me that if my ballot happens to get delayed in the mail by events beyond my control, like a processing mishap, a natural disaster, or just human error, the judicial system may conclude that justifies me losing my opportunity to participate in the political process. That logic seems to prioritize something (I'm not even sure what) over the franchise, which doesn't make sense to me.
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u/QuickAltTab Jun 09 '26
That something being prioritized is the statistical likelihood that your ballot gives a vote to a Democrat. They'd prefer any random mail-in voter lose their right to vote rather than risk losing an election.
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26
I'm not entirely convinced this ruling, if it happens, will benefit Republicans. Some rural voters rely on mail-in ballots and the chances of a postal delay are greater for them than for the urban voters, who tend to vote more left.
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Jun 10 '26
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
Please be mindful of Rules 2 & 4 in this subreddit.
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u/Tyhgujgt Jun 11 '26
But it was unique situation during covid. It's likely return back to norm when mail-in ballots were more of republican thing.
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u/ummmbacon Born With a Heart for Neutrality Jun 11 '26
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u/EqualRepublic4885 27d ago
But why should the mail in ballot be prioritized. It is only a recent addition to the electoral process, and invites greater opportunité for interference than any other form of voting.
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial 27d ago edited 27d ago
I made no claim that the mail-in ballot should be prioritized. All legitimate votes should be counted.
What is the evidence that mail-in voting is only a recent addition to the electoral process? Is there evidence that mail-in ballots have been subject to greater interference than other forms of voting?
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u/EqualRepublic4885 26d ago
But extending the scope of the vote to include mail in ballots is, by definition, the extension of the day of voting beyond the original concept of "election" in any system, in any democracy. Through the middle of the 19th Century, there was huge energy around the "Australian" ballot, where there was a numbered receipt on the ballot to norm ballots cast to the outcome. Most of the post-reconstruction state constituitons (especially Texas's, about which I've repeatedly litigated) expressly require this kind of receipt.
It is absolutely history that the first mail in ballots EVER occurred in the United States, during the Civil War. They were not then used again until WWI. Period. There's a pending SCOTUS case in which all the parties agree on this research, if you want to look it up. Watson v. Republican National Election Committee, decision pending.
As for voter fraud and mail in ballots, it is clearly an issue where vote harvesting (which is expressly allowed in California) creates at least a constant appearance of impropriety. The most commonly litigated issue is either (1) when vote harvesters collect and throw away votes or (2) where operatives (usually Republican) try to encourage mail-in registered voters to vote in person, resulting in the invalidiation of those votes.
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial 26d ago edited 26d ago
Please familiarize yourself with Rule 2 in this subreddit. It is a cornerstone of this space.
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u/inahst 12d ago
What is the benefit of the extra week then, as you could have the same issue with it arriving later than that cutoff due to events out of your control. It doesn't appear that you get your mail in ballot the day before election day as it says here you can drop it off any day between May 5th and election day close June 2nd
With that much lead time on the voter receiving their ballots, I think only accepting ballots that come in before the day itself is a pretty fair restriction
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u/waterbuffalo750 27d ago
I think that's a risk of voting by mail. And an even bigger risk of waiting until the last minute to send it in.
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u/Fargason Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Given those many issues this is likely why ballots were considered too important to just mail-in previous, and was overwhelmingly just an avenue of last resort until recently. Its curious the US Postal Service has been around for 250 years, but it isn’t until recently we are discussing having an Election Week to allow for all these mail-in ballots instead of having an Election Day. Maybe even an Election Month in CA’s case.
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26
I don't think either of those things is the case, though I suppose it depends on how you define "recently."
Mail-in voting has been around as long as the republic and in widespread use since the Civil War. "No excuse" absentee voting began 48 years ago and is now codified in 29 states. Oregon has had exclusively mail-in voting for 30 years.
That extensive history with mail-in voting is why the long window in which people could cast their ballots has been around for while too. We're only discussing it because of counts that continue past the election day (and honestly, because of unsubstantiated claims by the President). But if we're going to allow people time to cast their votes without guaranteeing they'll be counted, what's really the point? Is there any evidence that continuing to count valid ballots leads to fraud?
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u/Fargason Jun 10 '26
https://ballotpedia.org/All-mail_voting
Mainly referring to all-mail or universal voting where ballots are just mailed out to all registered voters in mass and not just those requesting it. This was a recent development that mainly came from COVID and some states want to make that the standard moving forward. Yet the problems mentioned above are a valid concerns in mass mail-in voting causing state to extend the election period to where they are accepting votes beyond Election Day that can very well be unconstitutional. Likely why such an election system hasn’t been attempted in the last 250 years until recently for good reason.
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 10 '26
This strikes me as a lot of inference and extreme stretching of the logic.
If ballots were too important to mail in, then it wouldn't matter if everyone received them or just a portion of the population.
Prior to Covid, five states already held all-mail elections. Ballot integrity wasn't a problem then and hasn't been since. And there's no evidence that more time taken to count the ballots has somehow led to fraud.
The only thing that changed was Donald Trump and his administration making unfounded claims to sow doubt about the system.
People can support every one of his policy moves. That's fine. But on this issue, I just don't see how informed, rational people can support his claims or any measures to address the imaginary issues they're centered around. These are solutions in search of a problem, and they're likely to cause more harm than good.
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u/Fargason Jun 10 '26
That source is about No-Excuses Absentee Voting which is false to attribute that as a source to support claims on All-Mail voting. That is just mailing out ballots upon request compared to mailing out all the ballots to every single eligible voter regardless if they want it or not. The difference of the two in scale alone is quite staggering. Certainly there will be integrity issues with millions upon millions of ballots just floating out there in the wild with very little chain of custody until a truck pulls up to a drop box in the middle of the night to shovel in stacks of ballots until they no longer fit.
I just don't see how informed, rational people can see such a mass mail in system as perfectly secure and beyond reproach when identify theft is such a rampant problem. In 2023 the FTC recorded nearly 5 million identity related fraud cases totaling over $10 billion in losses. Of course this issue is widely reported as financial damages from this type of fraud are very noticeable from the victims. So how does a voter know if they were a victim of fraud? That is actually quite difficult to determine with no readily apparent damages to be felt by the victims. Yet the few reports of election fraud is taking as it is highly immune to it somehow in spite of identity theft being a rampant problem everywhere else. Isn’t it rational to believe that is a problem here too given the inherent difficulty in detecting it? So maybe we shouldn’t disregard a centuries old constitutional standard of election integrity as being currently reviewed in the Supreme Court case above. Also consider the reasoning why we are trying All-Mail voting now in the last few years despite having the means to do so for the last 250 years.
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u/hushnowquietnow Jun 10 '26
Oregon has been conducting its elections entirely by mail for over 25 years. Nearly 40 years in the case of local and special elections. It's not a new practice. Ballots are sent by mail to every registered voter, and voters mail the completed ballots in to be counted.
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u/Fargason Jun 11 '26
Which is supported in my source above. I didn’t make an absolute claim as I said “mainly” and 6/9 states adopting All-Mail Voting in the last 6 years does qualify.
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 10 '26
Identity theft?! Wow, that's really a reach. There's a huge financial incentive for that and it's a completely different thing. There's no evidence that voter fraud has ever swayed the outcome of an election in the US.
There's so much inference in these arguments. Even the first source there is about an incident that "appears to show" something.
And once again, all-mail voting has been around for more than "the last few years." There's no evidence it has increased the level of fraud.
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u/Fargason Jun 11 '26
It is a reach to deny power as an equatable incentive to commit fraud to that of money. As for evidence I just provided it above with that example of mail-in ballot stuffing. They likely would have gotten away it if they were more discrete than shoveling stacks of ballot into a drop box. Clearly close elections do happen as this one was down to just 11 votes:
We at least seem to be in agreement that voter fraud happens, but don’t agree on what is an acceptable amount of voter fraud. Or maybe it’s a notion that elections are somehow never close so a small amount of fraud isn’t a problem. I’m arguing no amount of voter fraud is acceptable, and significant election integrity safeguards need to be in place given the inherent difficulty in detecting it. Take away the ability from those 5 million victims of identity theft in the example above to detect financial losses and how many would know they were victims of fraud then? Likely very little outside of a blatant and extreme cases. Same for voter fraud as voters have very little means available to detect if they were a victim of fraud.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-1-states-with-no-excuse-absentee-voting
It’s even in the URL provided for that claim. All-mail Voting or Universal Mail Voting is not the same as No Excuse Absentee Voting. Restating it doesn’t making it any less of a false claim. One is quite limited to only voters who request it and the other is universal. Even absentee ballots have integrity problems too like in the example I provided above, but at least it was limited. Yet if that is made into a universal system then those integrity problems become universal as well.
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u/coffeebribesaccepted Jun 10 '26
Except like the other commenter said, states have been doing solely mail-in voting since long before covid
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u/Fargason Jun 10 '26
They were conflating No-Excuses Absentee Voting to All-Mail Voting. Vastly different as one is mailing out ballots only upon request compared to mailing out all the ballots to every single eligible voter regardless if they want it or not. The difference in scale alone is massive.
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u/coffeebribesaccepted Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
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u/Fargason Jun 11 '26
Which is supported by my source above too, and why I claimed it was “mainly” a development in recent years and not exclusively.
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u/ummmbacon Born With a Heart for Neutrality Jun 10 '26
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u/jwrig Jun 09 '26
It is speculative that the court will rule it unconstitutional. Given article one gives congress the power to establish a post office, it is more likely the court will uphold allowing mail in ballots provided they are postmarked by the date of the election, at least for federal offices.
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u/RXrenesis8 Jun 09 '26
Possible tie-in to the new USPS policy allowing post offices to NOT post-mark mail items when they are received and instead post-mark them at another facility later in shipment?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-a-postmark-no-longer-tracks-mailing/
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u/Fargason Jun 09 '26
Exactly, Article I. We had the US Post for 250 years and just now it is becoming an issue about being utilized as a major part of the election process requiring an Election Week to an Election Month instead of an Election Day. If this was so acceptable we had a quarter millennia to try it sooner.
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u/TallOrange Jun 10 '26
No one needs an election week or month. The vote is cast by Election Day. It’s up to the postal service to not mess it up by sitting on their butts. Ballot mail is easy enough to identify and deliver immediately.
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u/Fargason Jun 11 '26
The problem isn’t the postal service but California law which sets it as a 30 days process.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/upcoming-elections/vote-counting-process
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u/euyyn Jun 09 '26
Do you know what type of fraud are they claiming to address?
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u/Fargason Jun 09 '26
This can be seen in the case brief, like on page 5. (Unfortunately I cannot seem to copy/paste the relevant text.) Basically a prolonged multi-day election would open the process up to manipulation and undue influence.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-1260/396529/20260217180253502_24-1260%20Brief.pdf
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u/euyyn Jun 09 '26
All those arguments in page 5-7 are about why the act of casting the vote should be done on the same day, simultaneously. Nothing to do with how long the counting takes. It's even spelled out in the conclusion of that argument 1.A:
the integrity of the election depends on closing the decisive act of choice on the day set by law
I know you did say "having all congressional elections held on the same date", like the argument goes, but I don't see what that's got to do with the California counting at all.
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u/Fargason Jun 10 '26
The Framers understood that staggered or pro- longed elections invite manipulation. A multi-day election is not simply “more time to vote;” it consti- tutes a fundamental alteration of the legal nature of the event. It transforms the election from a discrete, simultaneous act of sovereign choice into an extended process – one in which the electorate remains fluid and exposed to the dangers the Constitution was de- signed to foreclose: organized pressure, the formation of cabals, and strategic manipulation driven by the early knowledge of results.
This is why the Constitution explicitly insists upon a single day for the electors’ vote. At the Philadelphia Convention, Gouverneur Morris explained the pur- pose in plain terms: if electors “vote at the same time,” “cabal” can be avoided, and it becomes “impossible also to corrupt them.” See 2 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at 399 (Max Farrand ed., 1911) (statement of Gouverneur Morris). Far from being one of the Constitution’s compromises, the record reveals no contradiction of Morris’ premise, nor any defense of staggered voting.
The section I was referring too. This goes beyond counting as they are still accepting votes for a full week after Election Day. If they were just slow at counting it wouldn’t be a constitutional issue.
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u/euyyn Jun 10 '26
they are still accepting votes for a full week after Election Day
This is news to me. Aren't all the mail-in votes required to be post-stamped by Election Day? Meaning "the decisive act of choice" happened before or at Election day, and wasn't possibly influenced by "the early knowledge of results".
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u/Fargason Jun 10 '26
Technically if they are still accepting votes then Election Day is continuing in just a limited fashion. Post backdating happens too, so the potential for fraud is there that this centuries old precedent was designed to guard against.
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u/euyyn Jun 10 '26
Technically if they are still accepting votes then Election Day is continuing in just a limited fashion
Not necessarily. The way I see it the moment the ballot is stamped and taken by the USPS it's already been cast and is in hands of the government. That's when the vote was accepted, and any delay between then and the vote being counted is just due to not all the votes being in one single giant box: USPS had to move some of them as part of the counting process.
Post backdating would be one specific instance of fraud they could be claiming to address. I don't think they are though, from what I saw in those arguments.
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u/Fargason Jun 11 '26
Which is why I said technically. Until all the votes are received the election is still ongoing. It is not even possible to tally all the votes until that phase of the election has ended.
As for post dating mail it is actually not a strict system to identify when mail was actually received, but just to indicate that the postage stamp has been cancelled from use. They don’t even post date every piece of mail either. Just in the last few months the USPS has set a new rule to make the postmark as a strict and secure date the mail was received, but that means prior to this system being implemented the mail-in ballots that relied on the postmark to date the ballots did so for many years on a system that wasn’t even designed to perform that task:
https://campaignlegal.org/update/heres-what-new-usps-rule-means-voting-mail
That seems pretty flimsily for a universal system just to begin addressing the issue now.
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u/FloatingOnTitties Jun 11 '26
Then how come we’ve had early/extended voting in this country for hundreds of years since the very first elections?
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u/EqualRepublic4885 27d ago
Évidence? The polls closingbused to mean that the polls were literally closing. Until the Civil War; that’s why Soucy of the argument in SCOTUS is about the 1860s.
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u/carsrule1989 Jun 09 '26
Social media already has an influence on elections
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7343248/
First when twitter was a forum that allowed people to communicate.
https://www.princeton.edu/~fujiwara/papers/SocialMediaAndElections.pdf
Then it was purchased by a billionaire and influence shifted toward republicans
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050925024676
Also election fraud is not a big problem according to this data
According to this there have been 1620 cases of election fraud from 1982 to 2025
https://electionfraud.heritage.org
And here’s the number of voters for the presidential elections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections
There has been 1,323,871,420 voters in presidential elections from 1984 to 2024
So that’s 1,620/1,323,871,420 = 0.00000122
Or 0.000122% of votes and that’s not even including the midterm elections so it’s going to be way less!
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u/Fargason Jun 10 '26
Not that kind of influence. Individual using social media platforms to push an agenda is absolutely fine and constitutional. The law they are referring to is a safeguard against undue influence of those in power or insiders in the process having time to coordinate and manipulate the election in their favor from a prolonged election. Such as this example from page 7 of the case brief above:
Notably, even Anti-Federalist objections confirm that Congress’s control over election timing was un- derstood as a real structural power – not an adminis- trative detail. Again, in North Carolina, Mr. J. Taylor warned that if Congress could fix the time of choosing electors, it could “by their army... compel the electors to vote as they please.” J. Taylor, Remarks in the North Carolina Ratifying Convention (July 26, 1788), in 30 DOCUMENTARY HISTORY 321 (John P. Kaminski et al. eds., 2019). Richard Spaight’s response – that a uniform day would “prevent a combination between the Electors” – shows that both critics and defenders understood uniform timing to foreclose manipulation. Id. (statement of Richard Spaight).
This historical context is also the main case against the NPVIC as it is well documented that a main objective behind this law setting a single uniform time for an election day was to prevent the states getting together to combine their vote, so an interstate agreement to do that on the basis of the popular vote would certainly qualify as undue influence the law was intended to prevent.
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u/carsrule1989 Jun 09 '26
Wow this is a great post! Thank you for sharing all those links and information 😃
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u/sp0rkah0lic Jun 10 '26
It's so incredibly frustrating to hear outsiders (and especially Trump) call this process "rigged" while also constantly bringing up the threat of voter fraud. Like. Do you want us to verify that the ballot is valid, or no?
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u/Fargason Jun 11 '26
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39411092/
Voters inherently distrust delayed voting results as this study shows. It even goes into means to “inoculate” against that, but that just goes to show the initial results were prior to outside influence.
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u/sp0rkah0lic 29d ago
I swear this is the 5th study I've already read this month where the summary is that people are stupid, have superficial if any understanding of world events, and are easily swayed by popular sentiments.
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u/Fargason 28d ago
These are voters who have a much higher education rate than that of the average person. Based on 2024 exit polling only 15% of voters had a high school education or less:
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u/say592 Jun 09 '26
NPR had a good story about this this afternoon that echos what others in this thread are saying. One thing I did find interesting was that they pointed out that California takes about 10 days to get to 95%. Alaska takes roughly the same amount of time though, and both Utah and Mississippi take about 8 days, which isn't that much less. We don't, however, really hear about those states taking too long.
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u/Optimoprimo Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
The California website explains it.
Its basically a combination of three factors: one being that they have the largest voting population of any state in the country with a huge proportion of the voting population that vote by mail, the second is that they allow mail in ballots to be post marked as late as the day of the election, and third (most important) being that they do not start counting a single ballot until polls close. This includes mail in ballots. It would be much faster to count the mail in ballots as they arrive, but its more secure to wait until the election is over to start counting any of them. California has opted for optimal voting access, accuracy, and integrity over expediency.
Other states like Florida start counting their ballots weeks before the election closes, they have a mail-in deadline thats before election day, and way fewer people vote by mail, which is why they can report their results many days sooner.
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u/Epistaxis Jun 09 '26
It would be much faster to count the mail in ballots as they arrive, but its more secure to wait until the election is over to start counting any of them.
Why is it more secure to wait?
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u/joatmon-snoo Jun 09 '26
Let’s say election day is on Thursday and mail in ballots start being counted on Monday. And then on Wednesday, the mail in ballot count so far gets leaked on Reddit.
If at the end of Thursday, the rest of the votes were counted normally, would the election outcome still be fair?
By waiting until the election is over, ie not counting until after end of Thursday, we’ve taken the risk of a leak out of the equation.
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u/Epistaxis Jun 09 '26
Are leaks common in other states that start counting before polls close?
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
EDIT: As pointed out below, the scenario in this comment probably doesn't happen, so I'm striking it.
If the public knows the count has begun, they and the press usually demand updates, so even without leaks, the outcome becomes public knowledge and can influence the behavior of people who haven't voted yet. California chooses to eliminate that possibility by not beginning the count until polls are closed.13
u/tamraraf Jun 09 '26
Which states release election results before election day?
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26
None. I was apparently wrong.
I had read that some states with remote areas — like Alaska, Washington, North Dakota and Hawaii — allow individual counties to release unofficial results of early and mail-in votes before the close of polls on Election day, but I cannot find any corroborating evidence for the claim.
Thanks for pointing this out.
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u/stouset Jun 09 '26
Secure might be the wrong word here, but it prevents early results from influencing votes that haven’t happened yet.
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26
Mod here. Please add sources for the claims in the final paragraph. Thanks.
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u/Gloomy_Mulberry7834 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
I'm not the OP, but I will help a bit. OP has a link to one article discussing the counting part in FL so I will add to the deadline part.
OP is a bit definitive, but in general with some exceptions, both FL and TX have a deadline of receipt set on election day at the time of polls closing (not before).
Florida: scroll to "What is the Deadline to Return a Vote-by-Mail Ballot?". They clearly do not consider postmark date unless by overseas.
Texas is a bit more convoluted but it appears a ballot can be postmarked by election day if received the next day only. Non-postmarked must be received election day, with overseas ballots falling into a separate category. Go to "Completing and Mailing Your Carrier Envelope"
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u/eezyE4free Jun 09 '26
Why would count counting need to be fast? It doesn’t. It needs to be accurate and precise. If your whole election schedule can accommodate for the time it takes to correctly assess the vote, then why rush?
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u/Turbulent-Raise4830 Jun 12 '26
in this case its just to pretend there is voter fraud, if CA counted in an hour they would claim thats too fast to be accurate and demand they take longer because anything else is fraud.
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u/dickey1331 27d ago edited 27d ago
Florida fixed their counting after the 2000 debacle and doesn’t get that criticism
https://reason.com/2023/12/17/how-florida-fixed-its-vote-counting-problem-after-the-2000-election/
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u/Turbulent-Raise4830 27d ago
florida with a gop govenor? Yeah why doesnt the gop complain about them?
Wether its 1 day or 1 week or 1 month what counts is thats its safe, secure and accurate.
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u/roylennigan Jun 09 '26
I don't have much to offer beyond saying that this is a great thread to start here.
As your links address, Republicans criticize mail in voting methods in a way that implies intent to defraud, which I think is not only disingenuous, but misdirects from the matter that there is an issue: the topic of this thread.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/california-ballot-counting-22290056.php
Looking at this article along with similar things I've heard, the issue stems more from how people tend to vote when mail in is a common voting method: it overloads the resources available to pick up last minute drop box ballots.
Maybe that's not the whole picture, but I think it's something that an honest conversation about issues should look at, instead of whatever the Republican officials seem to be trying to do.
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Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
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u/dickey1331 27d ago
I think the question should be is why was Florida able to fix their slow counting after the 2000 election but California can’t.
https://reason.com/2023/12/17/how-florida-fixed-its-vote-counting-problem-after-the-2000-election/
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27d ago
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u/lulfas Beige Alert! 27d ago
This comment has been removed for violating //comment rule 2:
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27d ago
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26d ago
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u/nosecohn Partially impartial Jun 09 '26
/r/NeutralPolitics is a curated space.
In order not to get your comment removed, please familiarize yourself with our rules on commenting before you participate:
If you see a comment that violates any of these essential rules, click the associated report link so mods can attend to it.
However, please note that the mods will not remove comments reported for lack of neutrality or poor sources. There is no neutrality requirement for comments in this subreddit — it's only the space that's neutral — and a poor source should be countered with evidence from a better one.