Results are coming in for the California primary. Why counting all the ballots will take weeks

If you thought it took a long time for the Iowa caucus results to come in, you haven’t seen anything yet.

That’s because it will take weeks for county elections officials to tally up all the votes, thanks to rules designed to make voting more accessible than ever before.

For the first time, Californians could register to vote and cast ballots at any polling place on or before Election Day.

Mail ballots will be counted as long as they were postmarked on election day and arrive at county elections offices by Friday. And while California’s primary was earlier than usual, many Democratic voters held onto their ballots while waiting for results in earlier caucuses and primaries, further delaying the count.

Another factor: Automatic voter registration at the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles has contributed to a huge rise in No Party Preference voters, all of whom needed to take an extra step if they wanted a partisan primary ballot. Since the launch of the Motor Voter program, NPP voters have surpassed Republicans to become the second largest voting bloc in the state.

“We’ll have a pretty good sense of what most of the election results are going to be,” said Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state. “But for final results, it’s going to take a few weeks.”

The first election returns are generally ballots received before Tuesday’s election day, which tend to skew toward whiter and more conservative voters. In 2016, Bernie Sanders gained a few points on Hillary Clinton as more results came in.

During the 2018 midterms, several House Democrats went on to win Republican-held seats after overtaking the leads GOP candidates held on election night.

This year, here’s what will happen between election night and the time time the final statement of the vote is issued:

Weighing the ballots

Counties will wait until Friday to receive all the mail-in ballots. Some counties in the state will physically weigh the outstanding votes to generate an estimate on the number of unprocessed ballots. Others have different methods for predicting how many votes still need to be counted.

“We won’t even know how many more outstanding ballots there will be to process until ... Friday (March 6),” Padilla said.

Because same-day conditional voter registration was offered statewide, county elections officials will have to take extra time to process the registrations before they can begin to count the ballots.

Confirming the results

Before counties submit the final results, they must perform a post-election audit. One percent of precincts are chosen randomly and then counted by hand to ensure the accuracy of the voting machine’s count.

A slow stream of results will flow in during the days and weeks after the election, as counties have until April 3 to report their final results to Padilla’s office. Padilla will then certify the final results by April 10.

While election night results will be broken down by congressional district, the estimates of unprocessed ballots will be sorted county by county. As result, it will take longer to understand the breakdown of delegates for the top 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg.

Candidates need 15 percent support statewide or at the congressional level to be eligible for a portion of the state’s 415 pledged delegates.

What it all means

California bumped up its primary from June to March, in part, to get more national attention and have greater influence on the Democratic nominating process. New laws implemented since 2016 will make the vote count slower.

A UC Berkeley poll shows strong support among Californians for looser voting laws, even if it means taking a longer time to count all the ballots. In the survey, 64 percent of respondents said it is more important to maximize opportunities for Californians to vote, while 35 percent said it was more important to ensure a faster count.

At the end of the day, the top Democratic candidate needs 1,991 delegates to secure the party’s nomination at the Democratic National Committee’s summer convention. California is the most delegate-rich state in the nation and has an outsized role in deciding the nominee. As the month-long process for counting votes continues, the Golden State will carry major importance and likely be a subject of ongoing conversation.

This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 8:13 PM with the headline "Results are coming in for the California primary. Why counting all the ballots will take weeks."