California: the high-tech society that can’t (or won’t) count ballots

California takes forever to count ballots. And there’s no excuse.

No excuse for the delays, no excuse for the Election Night leads that are mysteriously reversed as the mail comes in.

It doesn’t have to be this way. California’s “electile dysfunction” is not a necessary condition. It’s not about fairness, or access, or the size of the population. It’s a political choice.

A lifetime ago, I was an election observer in a squatter camp in a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa.

It was the year 2000, and South Africa was holding its first municipal elections. After the polls closed, the election staff gathered all the ballots from the cardboard boxes and assembled around a table to count them.

No excuse for the delays, no excuse for the Election Night leads that are mysteriously reversed as the mail comes in. AP Photo/William Liang

There was no electricity in that part of the shantytown, and so the officials had to count by candlelight.

One by one, the ballots were counted by hand. Observers from the different political parties could demand to examine each ballot for any irregular markings.

The process took several hours, but was over by midnight.

I learned that even in a country with much of the population living in extreme poverty, ballots could be counted quickly and fairly.

Today, in California, it is the second day after polls have closed, and no one knows the final result. Not only that, we don’t know when we will know. 

Members of the public and candidates alike are left to refresh the results all night on various government webpages, and to scour the news for updates about when the next round of counting might be finished.

Gavin Newsom, our governor and future presidential hopeful, likes to boast about how California is the fourth-largest economy in the world, and how we lead the world in high-tech innovation.

All of that is true. It is also true that we cannot count.

The world’s poorest people, without access to adequate education and electricity, are better at turning in results than the most technologically advanced civilization ever to inhabit the earth.

Granted, the South African ballot only had two contests to vote for, rather than several dozen, but the fact is that they were faster in counting by hand than California is in counting by machine.

(South Africa, by the way, also only had one day of voting, in person, with photo ID. How barbaric. Someone must not have told the new, post-apartheid government that those rules are all racist.)

The major races in California seem unlikely to change much as more ballots come in. But there are several key races that depend on the remaining ballots.

One is the race for the U.S. House in the sixth congressional district, where — as of the last reported result — about 1,100 votes separate the second-place Republican from the third-place Democrat. 

The difference matters, because if the Republican holds onto second, then independent candidate Kevin Kiley will likely win. Kiley, who is the incumbent, had to leave his party to save his career after Newsom and the Democrats redrew his district under Proposition 50.

If the Democrat overtakes the Republican, then the Democrat,— Richard Pan, a former member of the State Senate — will almost certainly defeat Kiley in November.

The race could determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the House — and whether President Donald Trump will be impeached again (since Democrats will not be able to restrain themselves, and they have already proven that they don’t need a real reason).

But the voters of the sixth congressional district have to wait. So do the voters of California and the rest of the country. All because California takes forever to count ballots.

We are told that California takes a long time to count ballots because it allows ballots to arrive up to seven days after Election Day if they are postmarked by that date.

California also allows unlimited numbers of ballots to be dumped at polling places by third parties, a dubious practice called “ballot harvesting.” It is harder to count ballots when you have to sift through unanticipated truckloads of envelopes.

But the real reason is that there is no political will to fix the system. The incumbents — almost all of whom are Democrats — like the way it works just fine. And the unions who control much of state politics find that turning out pieces of paper en masse is easier and more effective than trying to move actual human beings to the polls.

So, we sit and wait — a society reaching new frontiers every day in the field of artificial intelligence and space exploration, lagging behind the Third World in counting pieces of paper.

Joel Pollak is Opinion editor of The California Post.

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