California verifies voting slowly, fueling mistrust

from Maya S. MillerCalMatters

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Political persecution, threats of violence and the seizure of sensitive documents may sound like a heist or thriller storyline.

For California election officials tasked with ensuring participatory democracy, these are now daily realities — from Riverside County, where Sheriff Chad Bianco confiscated more than 650,000 ballots from his own county’s voter registry to Shasta County, where he threatened violence forced the longtime registrar into early retirement.

The integrity of the state’s voting systems will come under intense scrutiny this year with control of the U.S. House of Representatives, as Californians could play a decisive role in which party wins the majority. Yet while timely and decisive results are more important than ever, California is notorious for its excruciatingly slow vote counting.

That long wait has increasingly sowed distrust in the accuracy of results in California, especially among Republicans, and especially in races where a candidate leading on Election Day falls behind as more ballots are processed in the following days.

“Every day counts,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voters Foundation. “Election security is about security in reality and also security in perception, both of which are equally important.”

During a panel Thursday on election integrity presented by CalMatters and the UC Center for Students and Policy, Alexander argued that election administrators are putting themselves in a “false choice” if they sacrifice timeliness for accuracy. When the winners are not determined for days, sometimes weeks, the resulting uncertainty leaves room for doubt to take root, speculation to grow and misinformation to spread.

It took eight days in 2024 for the Associated Press to announce that Republicans had won control of the U.S. House of Representatives, in part because of absentee ballots in California races, Alexander said. Two years earlier, it took nine days. In 2020, it took the AP seven days to determine that Democrats would keep the House, she said. Each time, the results in California’s swing districts played a decisive role.

“We’re creating an opportunity for people to make these claims,” ​​Alexander said, referring to largely unsubstantiated allegations of systemic voter fraud and election manipulation. “We have to admit it.”

Fellow panelists defended California’s meticulousness as critical to election integrity. Assemblywoman Gail PellerinDemocratic chairman of the Assembly Elections Committee and former Santa Cruz County Clerk of Voters, said county officials need time to verify voter signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes “so that people are not disenfranchised because of handwriting or not signing.”

“There’s nothing in the law that says I have to meet your deadline,” Pellerin said of the media and journalists eager to announce the race on election night. “What the law says is that I have to count the votes accurately, for sure. I have to check them, and double check them, and audit them, and then certify them.”

Matt Barreto, director of the UCLA Voting Rights Center, noted that counties have 30 days after the election to certify their results and submit them to the secretary of state. That process, he said, must be completed as quickly as possible, but “not at the expense of the county recorders who are doing their job effectively to ensure that every vote is counted.”

Katharine Baker, head of the UC Center, stressed — specifically to Pellerin — that counties need more money to make sure they have enough staff and the equipment they need to report effectively.

They all agreed there was one thing voters could do to speed up the count: Mail in their ballots early so counties could process them before Election Day.

Big partisan divide over election integrity

California voters are highly polarized in their views on the state of democracy in their state and country, largely along party lines.

A new survey by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies found that a third of Democrats say they are “extremely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the way democracy is working in California, while only 4% of Republicans say they feel that way. Conversely, more than two-thirds of Republicans are not at all satisfied, compared to 10% of Democrats.

These results are virtually unchanged from voter responses in 2024, despite several major political events, including a presidential election that President Donald Trump won, a new presidential administration and special election in California in which voters accepted more partisan gerrymandered congressional districts.

“It speaks to the fact that in many ways our democracy is blocked,” said Eric Schickler, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley and co-director of the institute. “Republicans have one view of what’s wrong — they make allegations of voter fraud and slow ballot counting,” he said, “and Democrats have another, which is concerns about voter suppression.”

The survey also highlighted the partisan divide over a proposed ballot initiative from Republican Assemblyman Carl De Maio of San Diego, which would require Californians to show photo ID to vote. When asked if they would support the measure, but without any context about who was for and against it, 56 percent of respondents said they strongly or moderately supported it, while 39 percent strongly or moderately opposed it.

But they shifted as voters became more informed. When told that DeMaio is the main supporter of fraud prevention and that Democrats say the measure is part of Trump’s agenda to prevent people of color from voting, support flipped, with just 39% in favor of the measure and 52% opposed.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.