From Newsgroup: sci.math

California takes forever to count ballots. And thererCOs no excuse.

No excuse for the delays, no excuse for the Election Night leads that
are mysteriously reversed as the mail comes in.

It doesnrCOt have to be this way. CaliforniarCOs rCLelectile dysfunctionrCY is not a necessary condition. ItrCOs not about fairness, or access, or the
size of the population. ItrCOs a political choice.

A lifetime ago, I was an election observer in a squatter camp in a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa.

It was the year 2000, and South Africa was holding its first municipal elections. After the polls closed, the election staff gathered all the
ballots from the cardboard boxes and assembled around a table to count
them.

There was no electricity in that part of the shantytown, and so the
officials had to count by candlelight.

One by one, the ballots were counted by hand. Observers from the
different political parties could demand to examine each ballot for any irregular markings.

The process took several hours, but was over by midnight.

I learned that even in a country with much of the population living in
extreme poverty, ballots could be counted quickly and fairly.

Today, in California, it is the second day after polls have closed, and
no one knows the final result. Not only that, we donrCOt know when we will know.

Members of the public and candidates alike are left to refresh the
results all night on various government webpages, and to scour the news
for updates about when the next round of counting might be finished.

Gavin Newsom, our governor and future presidential hopeful, likes to
boast about how California is the fourth-largest economy in the world,
and how we lead the world in high-tech innovation.

All of that is true. It is also true that we cannot count.

The worldrCOs poorest people, without access to adequate education and electricity, are better at turning in results than the most
technologically advanced civilization ever to inhabit the earth.

Granted, the South African ballot only had two contests to vote for,
rather than several dozen, but the fact is that they were faster in
counting by hand than California is in counting by machine.

(South Africa, by the way, also only had one day of voting, in person,
with photo ID. How barbaric. Someone must not have told the new,
post-apartheid government that those rules are all racist.)

The major races in California seem unlikely to change much as more
ballots come in. But there are several key races that depend on the
remaining ballots.

One is the race for the U.S. House in the sixth congressional district,
where rCo as of the last reported result rCo about 1,100 votes separate the second-place Republican from the third-place Democrat.

The difference matters, because if the Republican holds onto second,
then independent candidate Kevin Kiley will likely win. Kiley, who is
the incumbent, had to leave his party to save his career after Newsom
and the Democrats redrew his district under Proposition 50.

If the Democrat overtakes the Republican, then the Democrat,rCo Richard
Pan, a former member of the State Senate rCo will almost certainly defeat
Kiley in November.

The race could determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the
House rCo and whether President Donald Trump will be impeached again
(since Democrats will not be able to restrain themselves, and they have
already proven that they donrCOt need a real reason).

But the voters of the sixth congressional district have to wait. So do
the voters of California and the rest of the country. All because
California takes forever to count ballots.

We are told that California takes a long time to count ballots because
it allows ballots to arrive up to seven days after Election Day if they
are postmarked by that date.

California also allows unlimited numbers of ballots to be dumped at
polling places by third parties, a dubious practice called rCLballot harvesting.rCY It is harder to count ballots when you have to sift through unanticipated truckloads of envelopes.

But the real reason is that there is no political will to fix the
system. The incumbents rCo almost all of whom are Democrats rCo like the way
it works just fine. And the unions who control much of state politics
find that turning out pieces of paper en masse is easier and more
effective than trying to move actual human beings to the polls.

So, we sit and wait rCo a society reaching new frontiers every day in the
field of artificial intelligence and space exploration, lagging behind
the Third World in counting pieces of paper.

https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/opinion/no-excuse-for-californias-slow-ball ot-count/
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