Audio By Carbonatix

Ronald Reagan once quipped that “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Were the Gipper to return now, he might well agree that California’s interminable elections would come a close second in those stakes.

One does not need to believe that authorities in the Golden State are engaged in fraud — and, for the record, we have seen no evidence of that — to observe that the manner in which they are running California’s plebiscites is unacceptable. California’s system is slow, opaque, and difficult for the average voter to comprehend. It departs from norms that exist in every other state and most other first-world countries. It engenders confusion and mistrust. It is, in short, a national disgrace.

Sometimes, societies play host to complex institutions that, while difficult to explain to the uninitiated or the suspicious, contain virtues that are worth the cost. California’s voting system does not fit this pattern. On the contrary: California has adopted a set of election standards that are both inadequate per se and likely to give rise to conspiracy theories. This represents the worst of both worlds.

It does not have to be this way. Florida, a state of nearly 24 million, is able to announce its winners within hours of the polls closing. California, by contrast, often takes weeks. At the time of writing, voters in California were still waiting to learn who will proceed to the general election, despite election day having been on Tuesday last week. This is typical. In 2022 and 2024, it was unclear for a while which party had won the House of Representatives, because key races in California remained uncalled.

There is a reasonable case to be made in favor of a limited set of accommodations for citizens who struggle to vote. But that case is not unlimited and ought not to be made at all costs. At some point, a system that was ostensibly designed to help a relatively small number of voters overcome genuine obstacles became an open-ended effort to remove every conceivable inconvenience from the process. By accepting ballots that arrive long after Election Day, allowing signature curing for up to 22 days, and continually creating new exceptions that favor the tardy, California has made a mockery of the responsibility and agency that we ought to expect from most voters. When combined with the state’s ill-advised embrace of ballot harvesting, the result is a system that treats voting less as a civic duty to be discharged within clear and predictable rules, and more as an administrative problem to be solved after the election has taken place. At the margins, access is important. But so are finality, transparency, and public confidence. California has pursued the first objective with such zeal that it has undermined the others.

Worst of all: California’s government seems wholly unbothered by the mess. The system was designed by the Democrats to help the Democrats; the Democrats keep winning; so what’s the problem? This is a regrettable attitude in and of itself, and one that contrasts unfavorably with the sweeping set of reforms that Florida instituted after the debacle of Bush v. Gore. But it also serves to undermine some of the state’s broader aims, such as its institutional support for the National Popular Vote compact, which it joined in 2011. At present, there exists a one-word rejoinder to that bad proposal: California. Under our present system, California’s failure to count its votes in a transparent and timely manner mostly affects California. Under California’s desired nationalized system, the whole country would be repeatedly held hostage by its self-indulgence. Radicals, as ever, are their own worst enemies.

In 1916, Americans sat waiting on California to learn whether Charles Evans Hughes or Woodrow Wilson would be their next president. Back then, the delay — just three days in total — was understandable. The state was geographically enormous, most transportation methods were slow, there were no computers to aid with the counting, and, as it turned out, the difference between the candidates was so slim (3,773 votes) that it proved impossible to infer the result from broader patterns. Today, no such excuses obtain. California is an embarrassment because it has chosen to be so. For shame.