California’s election system is a farce.

Balloting guardrails? Gone.

Voter ID? Racist, we’re told.

An efficient, reliable vote count? You’ve got to be kidding.

Deliberate or not, it’s a process that invites exploitation.

And when results shift days after voting closes –– as they do repeatedly in California elections, and as they have since Tuesday in the races for governor and LA mayor –– many voters believe the worst.

So: Good that the federal government is investigating. 

First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in LA, said that federal officials are auditing state voter rolls and have opened multiple investigations into possible election fraud.

Such scrutiny is long overdue.

Essayli and others have noted that in California, universal mail voting without voter ID has made it easy for bad actors to commit fraud without detection or repercussion.

Add to that an inane vote-counting system that takes weeks to complete, and we have a process that instills not confidence, but doubt and derision nationwide.

Gov. Gavin Newsom often likes to brag that’s California’s a leader, but on the fundamentals of voting and democracy, it’s a laughingstock. 

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State officials say they drop guardrails and count slowly to ensure broad access to voting, to prioritize accurate counting over speed.

But those are happy talking points. 

Access and oversight are not mutually exclusive. Neither are speed and an accurate count.

Other states and nations manage to balance all of the above, and they do so routinely.

And California’s glacial vote-counting process is an outlier not just in the United States, but in the world.

Clearly: The state’s voting system needs a revamp. Voters can start by approving a voter ID measure on the Nov. 3 ballot.

Among other changes, California should send mail-in ballots only to voters who request them; require each voter to submit his/her own ballot; require that all votes are received, not just postmarked, by Election Day; and deliver final vote counts within hours, not weeks.

Other states do such things. California can, too.

What’s missing is not knowledge, imagination or examples of better approaches.

What’s missing is the political will in Sacramento to do what’s right. 

What’s missing is the very leadership voters struggle to find in a system that seems warped and broken and stacked against the very new approaches we need.

Yes, things need to change.

Because public faith in California’s voting system? It’s shot.