California’s primary elections were on Tuesday, yet we will not truly know the results for several weeks, because California’s incompetence in every area of governance extends to elections.
As of 9 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, 13 hours after polls closed Tuesday night, California has counted about 58% of the total votes cast. For comparison, in that same time frame, Iowa, Montana, and South Dakota have counted more than 95% of the votes cast, and New Jersey has counted more than 90%. You can quibble that those states had a head start of a few hours over California, but it’s irrelevant; California won’t have counted more than 95% of the votes by the end of this week.
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You could argue that California has such a large population that the slower vote count makes sense, but it is still so disproportionately, absurdly slow compared to other large states. Florida, with a population of nearly 24 million and spanning two time zones, is able to count nearly all of its votes within a few hours of polls closing. In 2024, it took California a week to count 76% of its votes, with 43 congressional and state legislature races counting less than 70% of the tally. In 2018, it took nearly a month after the election for the Democratic candidate to declare victory in the state’s competitive 21st Congressional District, and in 2020, it took until December for him to concede after a loss.
Because California allows mail-in ballots to flood in after election day and relies heavily on distributing mail-in ballots, the state drags its elections out for weeks or even months, with no urgency in the counting process once the ballots do arrive. Conspiracy theories are inevitable, as scores of late votes dramatically shift the vote share in crucial races in a way that always seems to favor Democrats. You would be hard-pressed to argue they are unfounded, either, when Gov. Gavin Newsom is running around talking about secret plans Democrats have to undermine the process if it doesn’t play out the way they want.
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Civilized societies don’t run elections this way because it destroys voter trust in the system. Worse still, these same California Democrats who refuse to fix this system want to turn presidential elections into a contest decided by the national popular vote, where California’s glacial vote-counting would hold the nation hostage and amplify conspiracy theories far more than anything Donald Trump said after losing in 2020.
California Democrats cannot build houses or infrastructure in a reasonable time frame, and they can’t count votes at a reasonable pace either. Every failure in California, from slow vote counts to the perpetually delayed high-speed rail, can be chalked up to the total incompetence and apathy of Democratic politicians.