California vote-by-mail system slows close race results, officials say

California’s slow election-night count is usually a sign of ballot access, not ballot trouble. With every active registered voter sent a vote-by-mail ballot for the 2026 primary, county officials are processing a system built to trade speed for verification, especially when races are tight.

Under state rules, county election offices have a 30-day canvass period to process and count ballots after Election Day. Vote-by-mail ballots count if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days, and officials also must handle provisional ballots, ballots from same-day registrants and ballots that need to be remade because they were damaged. Before many mail ballots can be tabulated, signature checks must match the envelope against voter registration records, a step Shirley Weber says does not exist in the same way for in-person voting because the verification happens before the ballot is cast.

That structure helps explain why California’s totals often keep changing after polls close. The Secretary of State says results remain fluid during the canvass, with county election officials due to report final official results by July 3, 2026, and Weber scheduled to certify the statewide results on July 10, 2026. The state’s official results portal also notes that voting totals are updated as counties submit new data after election night.

The state’s reliance on mailed ballots is not marginal. In the 2024 presidential election, 13,034,378 of 16,140,044 Californians who voted cast ballots by mail. California also expanded its voting model through the Voter’s Choice Act, enacted as Senate Bill 450 in 2016, which lets counties mail ballots to every voter, expand early in-person voting and use vote centers and secure drop boxes. Thirty counties have adopted that approach.

That scale, combined with close contests, can stretch out the final call. In 2024, one county still had counted less than a third of its ballots 10 days after Election Day, according to a state legislative staff analysis cited by KQED. LAist reported that some Los Angeles City Council races in the 2024 primary took about a week to call, and Proposition 1 was not called for 15 days. That measure passed by just 0.4 percent.

Governor Gavin Newsom has pressed counties to move faster, warning that every extra day gives misinformation more room to spread. His message has landed amid Republican claims from Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson that California’s pace is suspicious. State officials say the delay is built into the safeguards of a system designed to count every eligible ballot, not just the ones that arrive first.