Super Tuesday started and ended on Tuesday last week for most states. For California, it’s still going on with the slowest vote counting in the country.
As of Tuesday morning, one week after the day of the election, California has still only counted 76% of the presidential primary votes for the GOP and Democratic primaries. None of the 42 contested House primaries have counted more than 94% of the vote. In fact, 10 House primaries haven’t counted more than 70% of the vote, and three of those haven’t even counted 60%.
Meanwhile, the following states have counted more than 95% of the vote: Alabama (both presidential and House primaries), Alaska, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina (presidential, House, and statewide primaries), North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. Arkansas’s only race below 95% counted was the GOP presidential primary at 93%. Colorado’s is at 94%. Utah’s GOP primary is at exactly 95% counted as of Tuesday morning.
California doesn’t get to blame its population size for the slow count, either. Texas has counted 93% of its votes in the GOP presidential primary and more than 95% of the vote in the Democratic presidential primary, both primaries for the U.S. Senate seat, every contested House primary, and every contested state legislature race.
This is the norm for California, thanks in part to the state setting its deadline for mail-in ballots well after election day, whereas most states require those ballots to be received by election day. California has lagged behind vote counting in the last three election cycles, which is not only embarrassing in its own right but fuels election conspiracy theories with every day past the election that votes continue to trickle in.
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This is a problem, even though California isn’t a competitive state for statewide races. California has multiple competitive House races that could decide control of the chamber, and those are the races that take the longest to count and confirm a winner. There are still two districts where California hasn’t even confirmed one candidate who will go to the general election top-two runoff: California’s 31st Congressional District, in which two Republicans could end up freezing out Democrats, and the 22nd Congressional District, a blue district that Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) typically wins and that, in the past, has taken a full month or more to count the votes in.
There is no excuse for California to be so far behind the rest of the country when counting votes that there are still races up in the air a full week after the election. Aside from this being a clear display of incompetence, every election cycle that this happens in sows more distrust in elections and more division in our politics.
