Mail-in ballots do not delay the counting of votes in CA; oversaturation does

By Eric McGee and Mindy Romero, especially for CalMatters

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In recent years, California’s ballot counting has been the slowest in the nation.

Sometimes with congressional control hanging by a threadthe California slow count has led to disappointment and even baseless accusations of fraud. Intense attention stimulates the search for ways to speed things up.

California’s policy for counting ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive up to seven days after got up something like a scapegoat. It doesn’t help that the US Supreme Court, in a Mississippi case, seems inclined to ban the practice for the whole country.

But regardless of what the Supreme Court does, late-arriving ballots aren’t the real problem. And removing them risks disenfranchising voters without actually addressing the problem to be solved.

To say that the newsletter comes late sounds bad. However, these “late” ballots must be marked by Election Day, so they would be considered perfectly acceptable if they were otherwise cast.

A ballot sent to a mailbox outside a polling place is no different from a ballot dropped inside at the same time. Still, the latter will be counted on election day, and the former may not be available until several days later. Such arbitrary discrepancies should be avoided.

Critics argue that allowing postage stamps on Election Day simply encourages procrastination without actually counting more ballots.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. According to data from the US Election Assistance Commission, allowing postage stamps on Election Day has cut the state’s late rejection rate in half.

Furthermore, the relationship between Election Day postage stamps and slow vote counting is weak. Election Day postmarks represent a small fraction of the ballots that remain to be counted after Election Day.

In 2024, the California Secretary of State reported 243,976 unprocessed Election Day postmarked ballots at the end of election week and 4.1 million raw ballots received on or before Election Day. Eliminating postmarked ballots on Election Day would barely reduce post-election workloads.

The real reasons for California’s slow count are the large volume of mail-in ballots and the way the state processes them.

After the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the state mailed the ballot to every voter by default. The entire additional mail ballot process now applies to almost double the volume of 2018.

Signatures must be verified for each ballot to ensure that the correct person submitted it. It is an election security measure designed to instill the confidence in the election that critics of the slow count say they want.

A true fix would focus more clearly on the counting process itself, seeking to tighten it without disenfranchising voters.

California’s generous rules for verifying signatures and correcting problems are designed to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised, but the deadlines for this process are much later than in any other state. Speeding things up can make sense.

Likewise, the California election certification deadline is among the newest in each country. Moving the certification deadline earlier — and providing more funding and resources for registrars to implement new technology and improve the process — could get the job done faster.

Allowing postage stamps on Election Day does not mean that voters must send in their ballots as late as possible. In fact, changes in the way the US Postal Service processes mail have made postage stamps a less reliable date stamp for many rural voters.

We should encourage voters to mail their ballots as soon as they feel comfortable or drop them off at an official polling place.

If a voter does send in a ballot and it arrives late, the state must accept it in the name of voter access. Abandoning a late ballot sent until Election Day would cut some voters off from our democracy, with no clear gain from that loss.

California’s slow ballot count is disappointing. There is no reason to take it for granted. We need to explore policy solutions that can speed things up. But proposals to speed up the process — in California or any other state — must show clear evidence that they will work and provide voter access. Anything less is a disservice to voters.

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