California’s Latest Election Mess Demands Supreme Cleanup

As of the close of the business day Wednesday, California election officials had counted a little over half of the votes cast in Tuesday’s primary election for governor. It could take days, if not weeks, until the election results are final. 

A full day after the polls closed, the election was “too early to call,” according to NBC News. Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host endorsed by President Donald Trump, led Xavier Becerra, the Biden administration’s bumbling Health and Human Services secretary, by 2 percentage points — 27.6 percent to 25.6 percent. Billionaire climate change cult leader Tom Steyer was in third with 19.8 percent of the vote. 

The top two vote-getters move on to November’s general election. 

When will we know the final tally? Who knows? As The Federalist’s Hayden Daniel quipped, “Colombia, a mountainous country infested with drug lords and guerrillas, is counting its votes more efficiently than the state of California.” 

California is Exhibit A in the argument to Make Election Day Election Day Again.

Thanks to the Golden State’s muddled universal mail-in voting and generous grace period — seven days — for ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted, the electoral waiting game has become a frustrating way of life. Not just for California voters, but for the entire representative democracy. In 2024, California’s extended Election Day forced the country to wait more than a month to learn the majority-minority power balance in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

The slow count didn’t instill a lot of faith in California election integrity then, and confidence levels certainly won’t improve with the latest debacle. 

A looming U.S. Supreme Court ruling could end the seemingly endless Election Day of California and other blue and red states. 

‘A Matter of Common Sense’

Watson v. Republican National Committee will decide whether federal election statutes preempt the California quagmire — laws allowing ballots to be counted long after Election Day. That decision is expected any day. 

“The issue in the case is, what does the statute, what does the law literally mean when it says ‘Election Day,’ that ballots have to be cast by Election Day?” J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told me Wednesday in an interview on The Vicki McKenna Show. 

The law seems pretty straightforward. Election Day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Watson v. RNC originated in Mississippi, where in January 2024 the GOP, the Republican Party of Mississippi, and two individuals challenged state law. The Magnolia State is among more than a dozen states that allow mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked on or before Election Day. Deadlines vary. In Mississippi, the grace period is five business days. In California, the cutoff is seven days after the election. Illinois and Washington allow ballots to arrive 14 and 20 days, respectively, after the election, according to Ballotpedia. 

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court found that candidates have standing to challenge the extended ballot count laws. That case, Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, involves the Land of Lincoln’s two-week grace period. 

“I hope the court is going to decide election officials can’t count ballots that come in after an election. That’s just basically a matter of common sense,” election integrity advocate Marshall Yates told The Federalist in a phone interview. Yates leads the Oversight Project’s new Redistricting and Election Protection for American Integrity and Representation (REPAIR) initiative, fighting against racially gerrymandered political districts. 

‘A Finish Line’

The Public Interest Legal Foundation challenged North Dakota’s 13-day extended ballot counting period. Last year, the state enacted legislation requiring all mail-in ballots arrive by close of the polls on Election Day. Ballots received later will no longer be counted. PILF’s argument, like in Watson v. RNC, is that federal law stipulates elections be held on a single day. 

“The law here is pretty clear. It says ‘Election Day’. It doesn’t say ‘days after,’” Adams said. “It creates a finish line on the first Tuesday in November.” 

The Mississippi case does not touch the “starting gun,” Adams added. Early voting — even the insanely long period of pre-election day voting in states like Virginia — has been decided by the court. If a state wants to launch early voting for the November election the day after Labor Day, nothing prevents it from doing so. 

Democrats hate the effort to check the excesses of extended ballot counts. 

“Throughout this Nation’s history, the term ‘election’ has been universally understood to refer to the voters’ act of choosing an officeholder — not to the later administrative acts of receiving or counting ballots,” the Democratic National Committee wrote in an amicus brief in Watson. 

Not quite, Adams said. The explosion of universal mail-in ballots automatically sent to voters didn’t really get started until 2020, during the great Covid scare, “when states started shoving the election into the mail and having the Post Office determining who is winning, which is always a dangerous thing to do,” Adams said. 

‘It Does Feel Like Politicking’ 

While the Watson ruling is expected any day, Yates worries the liberals on the high court will drag their feet in releasing it. Those concerns are understable. 

As The Federalist’s editor-in-chief, Mollie Hemingway, uncovered in her New York Times best-selling new book on Justice Samuel Alito, the high court’s three liberals long delayed the release of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling reversing Roe v. Wade. They refused to deliver their long overdue dissent for months, stone-walling even after their ideological allies at Politico leaked a draft of the majority opinion in early May 2022 and put the lives of their conservative colleagues in peril.  

The liberal justices, it appears, stonewalled another key election ruling, April’s Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively put an end to Democrats’ nakedly race-based gerrymandering. Doing so, they hoped, would politically benefit Democrats in November’s midterm elections. They were wrong. 

This week, it seems the liberals exposed doing the same in the Supreme Court’s opinion halting a lower court’s injunction against an Alabama’s halving of two majority-minority, or affirmative action, districts. In the dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argues allowing Alabama to at least take half measures to follow Callais and excise a discriminatory, race-based congressional district, would be disruptive to voters ahead of the state’s general election. 

“They want to have their cake and eat it, too,” Yates said, adding that it’s concerning that the mail-in ballot decision is taking so long to come out as well. 

“It does feel like politicking,” he said. 

California’s drawn-out, mail-in ballot count has raised concerns about voter fraud and ballot manipulation. Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., who chairs the House Administration Committee that oversees federal election law, has been highly critical of California’s controversial grace period. 

Steil earlier this year introduced the MEGA Act (Make Elections Great Again). The legislation includes several election-integrity reforms, including ending the long voting post-season. 

“All ballots should be in by the close of polls, but that’s not how it works in California. I saw the process firsthand at LA Central Count in 2024,” he wrote on X Wednesday. “The state actually accepts ballots up to A WEEK after Election Day.” 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.