Solutions to speed California vote count and make voting easy

SACRAMENTO — Every two years, elite athletes compete in the Olympics, biennial plants like carrots and onions produce seeds, and people across America watch with amazement and growing impatience as California counts its electoral votes.

Extended counts have become as much a part of electioneering in the Golden State as overstuffed mailboxes groaning under the weight of wall-to-wall advertising, flashy promises and endless campaign flyers.

The tabulation, which can last weeks after election day, is largely the product of a laudable goal: to encourage as many people as possible to vote.

California, which sends an absentee ballot to every eligible voter, ranks among the top states in terms of ease of voting. This is something to celebrate. Voting is a way to direct the direction of our state and nation and invest in its future by being an active participant.

Long live participatory democracy!

Unfortunately, the delay between election day and final results has led to all sorts of wild, false claims peddled mainly by Republicans trying to curry favor with a long-suffering President Trump by parroting his conspiratorial chatter.

“They keep the elections open for weeks after election day,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said recently, suggesting fraud cost the GOP three House seats in California in 2024. “On the face of it, this looks like a fraud.”

That’s a lot, um, hooey.

There is no widespread fraud or election fraud in California. Period. Full stop.

Yet such false statements have profoundly diminished our faith in our elections and our increasingly weakened democracy.

What if it were possible to speed up the tabulation of millions of ballots while also preserving California’s friendly voting system?

Kim Alexander believes it is possible to do both.

“We need to stop explaining why it’s taking so long and start figuring out how to do it. [produce election results] “In a more satisfying way,” he said. “There are many things we could do better and differently. It just takes some creative thinking and some willpower.”

Simply put, “The longer it takes for ballots to be counted, the more voter confidence erodes.”

Alexander, head of the non-partisans California Voter Foundationhas been working for more than three decades to make elections in the state more efficient, more transparent and more accountable.

His interest in politics and election mechanics emerged while growing up in Culver City, where his father served as an alderman and mayor.

As a 7-year-old working in the garage, it was Alexander’s job to keep track of returns on his father’s first campaign, crunching the numbers at an election night party while his mother was on duty in the kitchen and calling the city clerk for updates. Even at that young age, Alexander learned the importance of a fair and effective scheduling process.

Over the years, he found his father’s political career hampered by a Democratic gerrymander, which hindered his hopes of being elected to Congress or the Legislature as a moderate Republican. He saw firsthand the impact of money in politics. (His father had told him that he turned down conditional donations.) This helped turn him into a political reformer.

After working as a legislator and serving at the good-government lobbying group Common Cause, Alexander became head of the California Voter Foundation in 1994.

As a political non-combatant, Alexander won’t say what it feels like to watch the reckless attacks on our elections from inside the White House and whether he’s more or less optimistic these days. All he allows is “I like to describe myself as a realist with high goals.”

There are good reasons why California is taking so long to count ballots.

First of all, there are many of them; More than 16 million residents voted in the last presidential election; this was more than the population of all but 10 states. Voting by mail has skyrocketed in popularity, and because most ballots don’t arrive until after election day, they take longer to count. There are also a number of measures to prevent fraud and ensure accurate counting. “We check all the signatures,” Alexander said. “We’re making sure no one votes twice.”

Simply explaining these facts can help build trust, he said. However, this will not speed up vote counting in the state. Here are some things Alexander recommends:

— Increasing funding for California’s 58 counties to expand equipment, staffing and space needed to process ballots. In recent years, the state has been asking local election officials to do more than just reimburse their expenses.

— Educate voters and encourage them to turn in their ballots sooner. In this vein, a system called “sign, scan and go” allows voters to return their mail-in ballots in person at a designated polling place. A pilot program in Placer County found it cut processing time by three to four days. The system can be implemented throughout the state.

— Better manage California’s voter database by doing it top-down in Sacramento, rather than counties auditing their own data and feeding it into the system. This bottom-up approach causes delays and lag time in processing ballots.

— Establish “ballot clearing” days to speed up the delivery of out-of-county ballots to where they belong and save time. (Under California law, voters can return ballots anywhere in the state, but the ballot must be routed to their county for tabulation. This process can now take more than a week.)

The problem is that, apart from permanent budget pressures, interest in election mechanics (a technical and arcane subject if ever there was one) is episodic and temporary. This is like worrying about a leaky roof when it’s 95 degrees outside and the sun is shining.

But even if voters don’t clamor for a solution to California’s slow vote count, lawmakers need to act.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently stood up to defend the state’s “safe and secure elections” against one of Trump’s many unwarranted attacks. If he wants to polish his credentials for the 2028 presidential race — which Newsom does a lot — one way would be to speed up the distribution of election results.

So the rest of the country won’t be asking again in November: What’s going on in California?