This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
In recent years, California’s ballot counting has been the slowest in the country.
With control of Congress sometimes hanging in the balance, California’s slow count has led to frustration and even unsubstantiated accusations of fraud. The intense attention has spurred a search for ways to speed things up.
California’s policy of counting ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive up to seven days after has become something of a scapegoat. It doesn’t help that the US Supreme Court, in a case out of Mississippi, seems inclined to ban the practice for the entire country.
But regardless what the Supreme Court does, late-arriving ballots aren’t the real issue. And eliminating them risks disenfranchising voters without actually addressing the problem that is meant to be solved.
To say a ballot comes in late sounds bad. However, these “late” ballots must be postmarked by Election Day, so they would be considered entirely acceptable if they had been cast any other way.
A ballot mailed in a post office box outside a polling location is no different than one dropped off inside at the same time. Yet the second one would be counted on Election Day and the first might not be received until several days later. Such arbitrary discrepancies should be avoided.
Critics claim that allowing Election Day postmarks simply encourages procrastination without actually counting more ballots.
But the evidence suggests otherwise. According to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, allowing Election Day postmarks has cut the state’s rejection rates for lateness in half.
Moreover, the link between Election Day postmarks and slow vote counting is weak. Election Day postmarks amount to a small fraction of the ballots left to be counted after Election Day.
In 2024, the California Secretary of State reported 243,976 unprocessed Election Day postmark ballots at the end of election week and 4.1 million unprocessed ballots that had arrived on or before Election Day. Eliminating Election Day postmark ballots would barely dent the post-election workload.
The real causes of California’s slow count are the sheer volume of mailed ballots and how the state handles them.
Since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the state mails every voter a ballot by default. All the extra process for mailed ballots now applies to nearly twice the volume as in 2018.
Signatures must be checked for each ballot to ensure the correct person submitted it. This is an election security measure meant to instill the confidence in elections that critics of the slow count say they want.
A true fix would focus more squarely on the counting process itself, seeking to tighten it up without disenfranchising voters.
California’s generous rules for checking signatures and correcting problems are designed to ensure voters are not disenfranchised, but the deadlines for that process are much later than in any other state. Accelerating things might make sense.
Likewise, the deadline for certifying California’s elections is among the latest of any state. Moving the certification deadline earlier — and providing more funding and resources for registrars to implement new technologies and improve the process — might get the job done faster.
Allowing Election Day postmarks doesn’t mean voters should mail their ballots as late as possible. In fact, changes to the way the US Postal Service processes the mail have made postmarks a less reliable date stamp for many rural voters.
We should encourage voters to mail their ballots as early as they feel comfortable or to drop them off at an official voting location.
If a voter still mails a ballot and it arrives late, the state should accept it for the sake of voter access. Abandoning late ballots sent by Election Day would cut off some voters from our democracy, with no clear gain from this loss.
California’s slow ballot count is frustrating. There is no reason to accept it as inevitable. We should explore policy solutions that might speed things up. But proposals to accelerate the process — in California or any other state — must show clear evidence they will work and will accommodate voter access. Anything less is a disservice to voters.
