It’s Time To Fix California’s Broken Ballot-Counting System

No one believes California has honest elections.  Folks have SEVEN days after an election to get their ballot in.  Elections start 30 days prior to election day.  The Secretary of State refuses to audit the voters list—too many illegal aliens registered to vote and the Democrats need those corrupt votes.  You are not allowed to challenge illegal voting at the ballot box—if you do, they get to vote and YOU get arrested!

“Two weeks after November’s election, some 570,000 ballots in California had yet to be counted, the Secretary of State’s Office reported at the time, according to multiple news outlets. Elections officials faced another 126,000 ballots that needed to be “cured,” or errors such as missing ballot envelope signatures that needed to be fixed, the East Bay Times reported. 

By early December, the molasses-slow vote count continued. CalMatters reported that 27,000 ballots remained uncounted and north of 91,000 marked for potential curing. As the publication noted, nearly a month after the election, California’s newly-elected class of state lawmakers was sworn into office — before their election results are certified. “And in one competitive Assembly district, a leading candidate took office even though her race is still not called.”

“Cured”?  That is a corrupt practice—either you voted correctly or not.  Why is this allowed?  Literally California knowingly counted 127,000 illegal ballots, just as a starter.

I would hope the DOJ under Bondi will come in an take over the registration and vote counting process—we have a civil right to honest elections—even with crooked Democrats in charge.

It’s Time To Fix California’s Broken Ballot-Counting System

By: M.D. Kittle, The Federalist,  5/5/25   https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/05/its-time-to-fix-californias-broken-ballot-counting-system/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=its-time-to-fix-californias-broken-ballot-counting-system&utm_term=2025-05-05

‘California elections can be described in one word: Slow,’ Austin Gilbert, a Republican campaign field operative told a House committee.

Two weeks after November’s election, some 570,000 ballots in California had yet to be counted, the Secretary of State’s Office reported at the time, according to multiple news outlets. Elections officials faced another 126,000 ballots that needed to be “cured,” or errors such as missing ballot envelope signatures that needed to be fixed, the East Bay Times reported. 

By early December, the molasses-slow vote count continued. CalMatters reported that 27,000 ballots remained uncounted and north of 91,000 marked for potential curing. As the publication noted, nearly a month after the election, California’s newly-elected class of state lawmakers was sworn into office — before their election results are certified. “And in one competitive Assembly district, a leading candidate took office even though her race is still not called.”

It wasn’t until a week-and-a-half before Christmas that Secretary of State Shirley Weber was finally able to certify the results of the election in the nation’s most populous state. Granted, deep blue California elected another bumper crop of Democrats. The left’s desperation candidate, former California Senator and Vice President Kamala Harris, handily beat Republican Donald Trump on the Left Coast. But days after Election Day, a dozen California races were unresolved, leaving the nation in suspense over a razor-thin power struggle in the House. One race couldn’t be called two weeks after the election as the catatonic counting continued. 

“This is uniquely important because the balance of power in the United States House of Representatives at that time still had not been determined, in large part because the races in California weren’t called due to the lax election laws that are resulting in these delays,” said Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., chairman of the Committee on House Administration, said last week as he opened a hearing titled “Why the Wait? Unpacking California’s Untimely Election Counting Process.” The hearing examined the underlying causes of the state’s frustratingly slow election results. 

 “California elections can be described in one word: Slow,” Austin Gilbert, a Republican campaign field operative who has run numerous campaigns over the last decades in the Central California Valley and High Sierra, said in testimony. 

‘The Original Culprit’

Gilbert and others told the committee the delays are beyond frustrating; the root causes open the door to potential election fraud. 

“Over the last decade California has prioritized voter access over efficiency, effectiveness, and safety, inundating elections officials with time-consuming verification and sorting processes, security flaws and a reliance on mail for voting,” Gilbert said. 

The campaign consultant noted the state’s Voter’s Choice Act of 2016. Billed as the path to modernize elections, California changed from traditional in-person voting to a new method of voter centers, drop boxes and, ultimately, universal mail-in voting. 

“This process was designed to be slow from the beginning,” Gilbert said.  

Ashlee Titus, a Sacramento-based private practice attorney, told the committee she worked her first election as a campaign lawyer in 2004. Even then, it took two weeks after that March election for the nominee to be known, she said. Twenty years later, the attorney said there are more close contests that take three to four weeks or more after the election to determine a winner. 

“The original culprit is no-excuse absentee ballots,” Titus said.

In 1978, California became the first state to allow voters to apply for a ballot by mail without a reason. In 2021, far-left Gov. Gavin Newsom, fresh from locking down the state amid Covid, signed a bill into law that mandates every California voter automatically receive a vote-by-mail ballot. Newsom and his Democrat allies insisted the wide-ranging legislation would “increase voter access and strengthen integrity in elections.” Instead, the changes have increased election integrity concerns and further slowed down the ballot-counting process, critics assert. 

“Vote by mail is the worst way to run an election. In 2020, it led to chaos and disenfranchisement. Election officials do not know what happened to nearly 15 million mail ballots in 2020. Another 560,000 voters had their mail ballot rejected by election officials,” the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election-integrity watchdog, details on its website. PILF notes that mass, particularly universal vote-by-mail initiatives require accurate voter rolls, a deficiency in states like California which have been sued over their dirty registration databases. 

‘Far Beyond Election Night’

In California, postmarked mail-in ballots may be counted if received by an election official by the seventh day after the election. In November’s election, nearly 81 percent of California’s voters cast a mail ballot, Titus said. About half of the ballots were dropped off on Election Day and aren’t processed until days or weeks after election night. 

When a ballot is received, election officials begin the “laborious signature-comparison” process, Titus explained. There are multiple levels of review, and California law makes it difficult to challenge ballots. Depending on the county (Golden State counties have different rules), signature curing, or correcting, may take up to 28 days after an election. In California, many ballots are returned via campaigns through the state’s ballot harvesting allowances. 

A law temporarily in effect for the 2024 general election barred counties form certifying their elections until the 28th day after the election. Titus said cash-strapped counties who can’t afford paying canvas workers overtime stretched out the post-election process. And then there is California’s generous same-day-voter registration, or conditional voter registration, law, a “safety net for Californians who miss the deadline to register to vote or update their voter registration information for an election.” Election-integrity advocates say the allowance is not only fraught with security concerns, it is labor-intensive on the processing end. 

“California’s election laws impose numerous procedures that extend ballot processing and counting far beyond election night,” Titus told the committee. “Election administrators must contend with constantly changing rules and manage a larger volume of complicated provisional ballots in a one-month period following each election.” 

No wonder California lags the nation in election results. Titus said there is a “cumulative effect.”

‘Pig in the Python’

Committee Ranking member Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., huffed that California’s November election featured “no evidence” of “any irregularities or fraud.” There were certainly problems that raise integrity questions. As the Sacramento Bee reported, California elections officials rejected 122,480 vote-by-mail ballots because they arrived late, had mismatched voter signatures or no signature.

“We’re holding this hearing because my colleagues simply dislike the way Californians voted,” Morelle said in his opening remarks. “It’s not the procedure Republicans actually have a problem with, it’s the outcome.”

It’s the procedure, too. 

While Morelle read from the Democrat’s little red book on elections, attacking congressional election-reform bills such as the SAVE Act that requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections, it’s hard not to see that California, as President Abraham Lincoln once said of Union General George B. McClellan, has a case of “the slows.” 

And as CalMatters notes, the slow vote count can’t help but sow doubts. Even the left-leaning California Voter Foundation knows that. Kim Alexander, the group’s president described the notorious glacial pace of vote tallying as a “pig in the python.”

“This giant wad of ballots that all arrive at once, that all have to move through the process, and you can’t speed it up,” she told CalMatters. “You have to do every single step, otherwise you lose the integrity of the process.” 

The group, whose leadership has ties to the Democratic Party and released a shallow 2021 report on harassment of election workers according to InlfuenceWatch, believes transparency is the answer. Transparency never hurts. But Titus said it will take fundamental fixes to turn the slowdown around. She noted there are several bills pending in the California state legislature aimed at cutting the delays, but real reform must address the root causes. 

“The solutions must focus on mail ballots and same-day voter registration procedures and deadlines, otherwise California will continue to be last in the nation to finalize its election results,” the attorney said.