CALIFORNIA COUNTS SLOW. THAT’S NOT A SCANDAL. BUT SOMEONE WILL MAKE IT ONE.
It’s been five days since California’s June 2 primary, and the governor’s race still doesn’t have a final second slot for November. Xavier Becerra is heading to the general. Who joins him is still being tabulated. Less than three-quarters of expected votes have been processed. The next batch drops Tuesday, June 9.
This is normal. It is also, increasingly, politically dangerous.
Donald Trump didn’t wait for the count to close before posting that Democrats were trying to “steal” the California primaries. He said it before the totals reached 70 percent reported. The claim has no factual support — California’s Secretary of State office, county registrars, and election observers of both parties have not raised any irregularity flags. But that’s not really the point of the post. The point is to plant a seed in the minds of voters who will arrive at November’s general election already suspicious, and to ensure that if the Republican candidate loses, there’s a narrative ready to explain it away.
California counts slowly because of how it votes. The state processes an enormous volume of mail-in ballots, which now constitute the overwhelming majority of all votes cast. Under state law, ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to seven days later are valid. Signature verification takes time. Provisional ballots require additional review. When you’re running elections for nearly 40 million residents across 58 counties, with varying population densities and administrative capacities, you don’t count fast. You count right.
Election officials have explained this patiently for years. They have said, repeatedly, that a slow count is not an indication that anything has gone wrong. They are correct. Countries with robust election infrastructure routinely take days or weeks to finalize results. Speed and accuracy are not the same virtue, and a system designed to ensure that every valid ballot is counted — including late-arriving mail ballots from deployed military, hospitalized voters, and rural areas with slow postal service — is a better system, not a suspicious one.
But the information environment doesn’t reward patient explanations. It rewards alarming ones. And California’s legitimate counting process has a feature that is easy to weaponize: it sometimes flips the apparent result. Candidates who look like they’re winning on election night fall behind as mail ballots come in. Republicans have historically performed better in early in-person returns; Democrats have tended to close the gap as mail ballots are processed. This pattern — sometimes called the “blue shift” — has a completely mundane explanation rooted in which party’s voters prefer which voting method. It is not fraud. It is voter behavior. But it photographs like fraud, or at least can be made to look that way to an audience that isn’t familiar with the mechanics.
The 2020 presidential election established a template. Trump lost. He refused to accept it. Courts rejected his claims over 60 times. The January 6th Committee documented the pressure campaign to reverse the results. And yet a substantial portion of the American public still believes the election was stolen, because the narrative of theft was planted before the counting was complete and never fully displaced by the evidence.
California is heading into November with a governor’s race, every Assembly seat, half the State Senate, and all of its congressional seats on the ballot. The legitimate counting process will unfold over days and possibly weeks after Election Day. And somewhere around 10 p.m. on November 3rd, someone with a large social media following will post that the numbers are changing too fast in the wrong direction and that something smells off.
The fix for this isn’t faster counting. Faster counting at the cost of accuracy would be far worse than slow counting done right. The fix is a more informed public, better real-time communication from election offices, and a media environment that treats normal counting delays as normal rather than narratively interesting.
California’s election law is not the problem. The problem is what happens to the results in the space between election night and certification — a space that bad actors have learned to fill very effectively.
The votes will be counted correctly. They always are. Whether the public believes that is a different battle, and it starts long before Election Day.