Trump cries ‘steal’ over slow California vote count, but anti-fraud system works, say experts

The Los Angeles county ballot-processing center on Wednesday, in City of Industry, California. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP View image in fullscreen The Los Angeles county ballot-processing center on Wednesday, in City of Industry, California. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP Trump cries ‘steal’ over slow California vote count, but anti-fraud system works, say experts State’s tortoise-like pace is byproduct of system of verifications and opportunities for voters to fix errors California’s slow vote counting has frustrated political observers eagerly awaiting results, and handed Donald Trump and others an opportunity to claim “election rigging”. But experts say the system is working as designed: to protect against fraud and assure every vote is counted. Within a day of the polls closing in California’s primary election this week, Trump started accusing Democrats of “ trying to steal ” the elections for the state’s governor and the mayor of Los Angeles. The justice department sent a federal prosecutor to observe the ballot-counting process in Los Angeles this week. Republicans have lobbed such allegations against California for years, pointing to the state’s slowness in tallying ballots and the shifting results over the course of the counting as evidence of vote manipulation. Prominent Democrats, including outgoing governor Gavin Newsom , are increasingly fretting that the state’s tortoise-like pace is becoming a liability for public confidence in elections in an era where conspiracy theories spread quickly through social media and can emanate straight from the White House. But California’s vote-counting pace is actually a byproduct of a system of redundant verifications and opportunities for voters to fix errors. Every voter in California receives a mail-in ballot, and a vast majority of voters vote via mail. The signatures on those ballots are verified electronically and by human observers. When a ballot contains errors, the state gives voters 22 days to “cure” it. The result is a system that is both highly accurate and resistant to letting small oversights devolve into trashed ballots. But in the state with the most registered voters by far, it comes at the cost of speed. “There’s not a lot of people I know who would say: ‘Nah, I would rather have known who won the race faster than have my vote count,’” said Paul Mitchell, vice-president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc. “So what’s the rush? The focus should be making voting as easy as possible.” “The only people who complain about it are the people who lose,” Mitchell added. “The conspiracy around it is really a conservative thing.” Still, experts see obvious ways the system could improve. The legislature could invest the money that counties need to pay for staff, equipment and space to process ballots faster. The state assembly reduced the number of days a voter has to “cure” ballot errors from 26 to 22 last year. Cutting it further could substantially shorten wait times without severely inconv