As the Los Angeles mayoral race shows, the Golden State must deal with serious systemic defects.
As the Los Angeles mayoral race shows, the Golden State must deal with serious systemic defects.
C alifornia’s uniquely dysfunctional vote-counting system is back in the news. The latest results from the ongoing slow count for the Los Angeles mayoral race show that Republican Spencer Pratt is likely to fall behind Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman early this week. If that happens, Raman will advance to the runoff against incumbent Karen Bass.
Apologists for California’s system say that progressive candidates frequently enjoy late returns because their supporters tend to mail their ballots in late. Bass didn’t take the lead until a full week after Election Day 2024. But that shows only that the system is broken. Growing public concern over election integrity is a big factor behind the rise of a statewide initiative to finally require voter ID for both in-person and mail-in voting, a proposed measure that has qualified for November’s ballot.
California has deliberately slowed down ballot-counting to accommodate its chaotic expansion of mail-in voting. The Washington Post’s editorial board calls the Golden State in this regard a “national embarrassment.” The New York Times sighs that California’s elections are in the “pretelegraph era” (though it also claims that this is somehow a “gift to Republicans”).
The system is indeed a designed mess: A voter can return a ballot in any county in California, no matter which county that voter is registered in. A decade ago, California legalized ballot-harvesting — which allows anyone to collect and deliver a limitless number of mail-in ballots — which increases the risk of fraud or coercion. The state mails ballots to all registered voters, 23.2 million of them. Ballots received by officials up to seven days after Election Day are counted.
Tom Del Beccaro, a former GOP state chairman, told me that he has received four duplicate ballots at his address and that his neighbors often get ballots for people who no longer live there. A lawsuit against California’s secretary of state by the nonprofit organization Judicial Watch claims that there are 873,000 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who have moved or died or who don’t have an address but are still getting ballots. In 2024, a previous Judicial Watch lawsuit had forced Los Angeles County to remove 1.2 million inactive voter registrations.
And then there is the issue of signature verification. Los Angeles uses machine scanners to compare signatures on mail-in ballots to all signatures in a voter’s registration file. In California, each county sets its own threshold for ballot authentication. Ballots that meet or exceed it are automatically approved and rarely get a manual review. Sometimes, even ballots that are initially rejected or flagged for scrutiny can be “cured” if the voter corrects any faults. Moreover, a voter who claims to be unable to sign can make a “mark” instead. A witness is then supposed to sign below. However, a former Los Angeles election official admitted to me that no address for the witness is requested and that witnesses’ signatures are not verified.
The Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters says its overall approach to ballot validity is “liberally construed in favor of the voter.” A very large number of ballots are therefore automatically approved. In the 2024 presidential election, only 21,300 ballots were rejected in a county where 3.75 million votes were cast. That is a rejection rate of 0.57 percent. In neighboring Orange County, 13,600 ballots were rejected out of 1.39 million cast. That represented a rejection rate of just under 1 percent, or almost twice as high.
It’s clear that California has a system that favors flexibility at the cost of certainty, reliability, and efficiency. “Every other state manages to count its votes in a somewhat timely manner,” says California Congressman Kevin Kiley, an independent who sits in the House with the GOP. “California’s inability to competently handle the basic administration of democracy is embarrassing. It’s also indicative of why our state has so many other problems.”
The first step on the road to recovery would be for California voters to pass the citizens’ initiative this November. It would require photo ID for in-person voting, it would require that mail-in ballot users write the last four digits of their government ID on their ballot envelope, and it would hold election officials responsible for verifying voters’ citizenship status and, when necessary, for requesting election audits.
A valuable second step would be for people to take the possibility of fraud or built-in error in the system seriously. “California’s election system has serious structural vulnerabilities. Universal vote-by-mail with no voter ID requirements creates conditions where fraud can go undetected and unpunished, eroding public confidence,” Bill Essayli of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles wrote on X. “My office has multiple election fraud investigations underway in coordination with @FBILosAngeles.”
California’s opaque and drawn-out voting system makes it very difficult to detect criminal behavior. As Hans von Spakovsky and I wrote in Our Broken Elections in 2021: “The real problem in our country is that we have systems that are so deliberately sloppy or where rules are so loosely enforced that you can’t tell where the incompetence ends and any fraud begins.” For example, preliminary and unofficial data suggest that an unusually high number of the ballots that arrived on Election Day in Los Angeles, and have pushed Raman’s numbers higher, have come from downtown areas where the homeless population is concentrated. In California, it seems that dysfunction has been developed into an art form.