A week after Election Day, and the race for mayor of Los Angeles remains unsettled. In a city of nearly four million people, in a state with one of the world’s largest economies, the inability to declare a winner in the civic mayoral primary is more than frustrating, it’s embarrassing.
The June 3 primary sent voters to the polls, yet as of this writing, the battle for second place, which determines who will face incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in November, is still unresolved. With nearly 50% of the expected vote counted, Bass led at 37%, while challengers Spencer Pratt and Nithya Raman traded positions in a razor-thin contest.
According to recent polling, Raman has edged into second place at 27.1% to Pratt’s 26.7%, a margin of just 3,113 votes. Three thousand votes in a city of millions and California needs weeks to sort it out.
To bring this into perspective, nations across the globe routinely count far more ballots than California on a single evening.
- France, with 68 million people and polling stations across multiple time zones and overseas territories, reports results on election night.
- The United Kingdom counts paper ballots by hand yet typically delivers full results within hours.
- India, home to 1.4 billion people spread across a vast continent, manages to count votes from its general elections in a single day.
These countries process more ballots than California, a single state, and do it dramatically faster.
California, by contrast, is requesting up to a month to finish counting ballots. The delay isn’t mysterious, as some would have you to believe: “The main culprit here is that California is an all-mail state, meaning that it mails a ballot to every single registered voter,” said Stephen Richer, former Registrar of Voters for Maricopa County, Arizona. The state has 23 million registered voters, and roughly 13 million of the approximately 16 million votes cast in the 2024 presidential election were mail-in ballots.
Under California law, ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to seven days later must be counted. County officials have until 30 days after the election to complete the process, with final primary results due to the Secretary of State by July 3, 2026, a full month after the June 3 vote.
While California treats this timeline as standard operating procedure, the rest of the democratic world has solved the ballot-counting challenge. The common thread among fast-counting nations is a system centered on in-person voting on a single, defined Election Day. California has instead made a deliberate policy choice favoring universal mail-in balloting, and is now living with the predictable consequences.
“The two biggest variables of how long it takes a state to count ballots aren’t so much the policies. It is, one, the margin of victory, and two, the number of mail ballots that are cast at the last minute,” noted David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Signature verification on mail ballots, provisional ballots from same-day registration, and generous “cure” periods for voters to fix errors all add additional time. Time that could be saved if the choice was made to switch to a one day, in-person voting system.
