There is a ritual to California’s elections now, and the ritual is patience. The polls close, the night ends, and the counting goes on — for days, sometimes weeks, in a state so large it counts like a small nation.
To those who live there, it is procedure. To the President of the United States, watching from across the country Thursday, it looked like theft.
“The Dumocrats are at it again,” Donald Trump wrote on TRUTH Social, in the capital letters that have become their own form of punctuation. He accused Democrats of trying to “STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.”
What troubled him was the timing — the mail-in ballots arriving and being tallied in what he called “very late and massive numbers” after Election Day had come and gone.
In a separate post, he went further, claiming a federal investigation was already underway. “There’s big cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks,” he wrote.
“Under investigation by the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why [is] the vote counting delay???”
California’s officials have heard this complaint before, and they answer it the same way each time: the slowness is the system working, not failing.
State law gives county officials up to thirty days to finish the canvass — to verify signatures, process the mail ballots, run the required audits, and only then certify the result.
Ballots postmarked by Election Day are counted even when they arrive after it, which means a close race can hang unresolved for a long while.
The early numbers, the in-person votes and the mail already in hand, come first; the later batches arrive and quietly rearrange the margins.
By Thursday, only about 56 percent of the state’s ballots had been counted.
In the governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton remained near the top as results kept coming in. Under California’s “top two” system, the two leading candidates advance to the general election no matter their party, which is how Democrats and Republicans end up crowded into the same primary field.
It is a process built for size and verification, not for speed, and that may be its real political problem. For Trump and a growing number of Republicans, the long count has itself become the evidence — proof, as they see it, of a system that cannot be trusted, especially in those races where the margins narrow as the last ballots are read.
