THE NEW YORK TIMES: Why we might not know California’s election results for days

Polls in California closed at 1pm Wednesday (AEST), but the results of the primary election in the US’s most populous state might not be known for days.

California’s heavy reliance on mail ballots, which require a lot of labor to certify and tabulate, has slowed down its vote counting process for years. But that delay could be compounded this time by the fact that many voters seemed to have waited until the end to submit their ballots, in part because they were unsure of whom to choose in the volatile governor’s race.

To count each mail ballot, election officials must compare a voter’s signature against one on file, open each envelope, pull the ballot out and prepare it for processing. That adds time compared with having voters validate their signatures at a polling place without an envelope.

Shortly after polls close Tuesday night, early in-person votes and mail-in ballots that arrived in the first few weeks of voting will be released as the state’s initial, but incomplete, results. (Officials have to send in their first batch of results no more than two hours after the polls have closed and they have begun processing ballots.) Curious voters can track the ongoing tally on The New York Times’ California primary results page once polls close.

Later Tuesday night, elections officials are expected to update those tallies with votes cast in person at vote centers on election day, according to Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc. in Sacramento.

But most of the ballots that last-minute voters submit in envelopes likely won’t be counted until later in the week, Mitchell said. That could mean millions of outstanding votes left to verify and process — and days of waiting for results.

Mitchell’s tracking data suggests that Republicans were quicker than Democrats to submit their ballots. That could mean the initial results will show an early lead for Steve Hilton, the Republican front-runner in the race, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump.

But late polls indicated that two Democrats had comparable support, with Xavier Becerra slightly ahead of Tom Steyer. Both candidates are expected to fare better as more mail ballots get counted after election day. The top two finishers, regardless of party, will head to the general election in November.

There is hope that it will not take weeks to determine the outcome, as has happened in some past California races.

Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who cannot run again because of term limits, signed a new state law last year that requires county officials to submit their results within 13 days of an election, with some exceptions. In a letter to county officials this year, Newsom said that he was cognisant of California’s reputation for counting votes slowly and urged them to process ballots as quickly as possible, recognizing that delays allow disinformation to fester.

Kim Alexander of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation said that she hopes the Legislature will increase funding to help counties accelerate vote counting by improving equipment and hiring more staff.

“They passed the law requiring counties to count most of their ballots within 13 days, but that did not have any funding attached to it,” she said.

She also wants the state to do more to encourage people to vote early to prevent the bottleneck of ballots that typically arrive in envelopes on election day.

“That’s really what’s driving the long vote count more than anything else,” she said.