The Folly of California’s Voting Rules

Lingering uncertainty over the results of California’s primaries are exposing the folly of the state’s reliance on mail-in ballots, which could take weeks to tabulate. The runoff candidates seem set in the race for mayor of Los Angeles, but the top two vote-getters for governor are not yet known. The practice of counting votes after Election Day is one that the Supreme Court this term could well, in the case of Watson v. Republican National Committee, restrict. California encourages these delays by sending every registered voter a mail-in ballot prior to the election, then allowing to be counted ballots received up to seven days after the election. Some 80 percent of the state’s voters cast mail-in ballots. This roiled the race for mayor of Los Angeles, where an insurgent tough-on-crime candidate, Spencer Pratt, was hoping to reach second place in the primary and qualify for the two-person final round in November. Early results suggested that Mr. Pratt might make the cut-off, teeing up a blockbuster contest against the Democratic incumbent, Karen Bass. With some 92 percent of the ballots tabulated as of this writing, though, Mr. Pratt, with 25.8 percent of the vote, has fallen behind a far-left candidate, Nithya Raman, with 28.5 percent. Ms. Bass, with 34.3 percent, is so far the top vote-getter and looks assured to have a place on the ballot in November.In the race for governor of California, only about 83 percent of ballots have been counted so far. Republican Steve Hilton, with 25.1 percent of votes, has fallen to second place against President Biden’s health and human services secretary, Xavier Becerra, with 27.7 percent. In the immediate aftermath of the voting, Mr. Hilton had appeared to be the top vote-getter. Mr. Becerra’s lead has now led vote-watchers to assert that he will advance to the run-off. Fluctuating outcomes like these sow questions, and in some cases skepticism, over vote-counting process and the integrity of elections. This makes the Watson case all the more timely ahead of this year’s midterm voting. The dispute centers, in effect, on whether Election Day is constitutionally understood to be a specific date, by which votes must be counted, or whether states like California can keep their lax policies on late-arriving mailed ballots. An election analyst, Dan Eaton, tells CBS 8 that in 2024 in California, some 2.5 percent, or 400,000 of ballots cast were postmarked on or before Election Day but were received over the subsequent seven days. This was not enough to call into doubt Vice President Harris’s lead in California over President Trump, since she carried the state by more than 3 million votes. Yet such a large proportion of late-arriving ballots could raise doubts in closer races.The Watson case, per Mr. Eaton, “is about saying, ‘no, no, no, if a ballot is not received by the Registrar of Voters by Election Day, you cannot count it, it’s invalid.” When the case was argued before the Nine, several of the court’s conservative justices expressed doubts about laws like California’s allowing late-arriving ballots to be counted. Such policies, Justice Samuel Alito lamented, meant that “we don’t have election day, we have election month.” In an insight that looks prescient in light of Messrs. Pratt’s and Hilton’s shifting standing in the primary results, Justice Alito added that “confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined” if “the apparent outcome of the election” when polls close turns out to be “radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash of ballots.” The stakes in the Watson case are underscored by the wait for final results in California’s primary elections.This article has been updated to reflect current vote counts. Karen Bass is the mayor of Los Angeles, an earlier version misstated her first name.

The Folly of California’s Voting Rules

The Folly of California’s Voting Rules

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