Opinion: Local ballot counting would be fast and efficient if CA started checking voter IDs

Political analyst Kira Davis explains, via X, why SCC is (you heard this right) still counting ballots and determining winners a week after Election Day. Since CA legally prohibits ID verification at the polls, volunteers must painstakingly—and often subjectively, Davis claims—verify signatures, one at a time.

A lot of people ask why it takes California so long to count ballots. I ran for office in 2022 and I learned a lot about how this happens. Let me explain:

California is a No Voter ID state. In fact, our legislature just made it illegal for any municipality to require id for voting. However, ballot verification is the law, so there has to be some process in place for verifying

With no id, the only way to "verify" a vote is signature verification. With mass mail-in voting, that means the vote counters must compare the signature on the mail ballot to the signature on the voter registration. As you can imagine, it is a highly subjective process.

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Not only is it subjective, there is no way to speed up the process. One person. One set of eyes...for every...single...ballot. Further complicating the speed of the count is the necessity of observers.

The only way the subjectiveness of the verification process can be challenged is to have a person standing over the vote counter. That person must present a vocal challenge to any suspicious ballots and that ballot is set aside for further adjudication.

That ballot then goes through the curing process, adding even more time to adding said ballot to the legitimate count. If there aren't enough volunteer observers, most ballots will simply be at the mercy of the registrar employee and their opinions.

So why does it take us so long to count our votes? We have no voter id system and mass mail-in balloting. The only way to "verify" the legality of a mail ballot is to go through this subjective, slow, corrupted process for every single ballot, every single time.

Read the whole thing here.

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Related:

• Analysis: Lax voting options hinder speedy CA’n vote counting

• Why Labor/Left can't win city- and countywide elections in Silicon Valley

• Can't see the forest for the trees

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