California held its primary election on June 2nd. Today is June 24th. Some races still aren't fully called. Let that sink in.

The state with the largest economy in the Western Hemisphere, home to Silicon Valley and some of the most sophisticated technology companies on earth, cannot tell you who won a mayoral race three weeks after people voted. And the people running California's elections want you to understand that this is fine, actually. It's by design. It's about accuracy and access.

With respect: that's not good enough.

How California Counts Votes

Here's how the system works. California mails a ballot to every one of its 23 million registered voters. Those ballots can be returned by mail — and they are counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at an election office within seven days afterward. If a voter's signature on the ballot envelope doesn't match what's on file, election officials are required to notify the voter and give them an opportunity to come in and verify their identity. In the 2026 primary, the deadline for that signature cure process was June 24th — three weeks after the election.

This is how the LA mayoral race played out this month. Initial Election Night results showed Republican candidate Spencer Pratt — yes, that Spencer Pratt — in second place, with progressive Nithya Raman coming in third. Five days after the election, as late-arriving mail ballots were counted, Raman overtook Pratt and advanced to the runoff. Pratt's supporters immediately cried fraud. Trump posted about it online. The DOJ announced an investigation.

Was there fraud? Almost certainly not. Election experts were clear on that. The shift was entirely predictable — mail ballots tend to skew Democratic, and voters who return them later tend to be more progressive. What happened was math, not manipulation. But the slow count created a perfect environment for conspiracy theories to take root and grow.

The Trust Problem

Here's what the defenders of California's current system don't want to acknowledge: even if the slow count is legitimate, the slow count is a problem. Public trust in elections isn't just about whether the results are accurate. It's about whether people believe the process is fair. And when a result flips five days after an election, in a high-profile race, with no clear explanation from state officials about why that's normal — the trust erodes.

As Thad Kousser, co-director of the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections at UC San Diego, put it: "The longer it takes to call a race, the further voter confidence falls and the more conspiracies grow."

This is not a partisan observation. It's a civic one. Voting advocates — not Trump supporters, not Republicans, but voting rights advocates — have been urging the state legislature to better fund election offices so they can process ballots faster. Newsom himself signed a bill last year requiring the count to be completed within 13 days rather than 30. That's not fast enough.

What Should Change

Other states run large mail-in elections and count them faster. Colorado has been doing all-mail voting for years and typically has results on election night. The difference isn't magic — it's funding, early processing, and clear deadlines.

California should require mail ballots to arrive by Election Day, not just be postmarked by it. Thirty-six states already have that requirement. The state should also dramatically increase funding to county election offices to allow them to process ballots as they arrive in the weeks before Election Day, rather than facing an avalanche on election night.

None of this requires sacrificing accuracy. It requires Sacramento to treat the speed and transparency of elections as being just as important as their accessibility. Right now, California acts like those are competing values. They're not. A slow count that nobody trusts doesn't serve democracy any better than a fast one.

Three weeks is too long. California can do better. It just needs to decide it wants to.