California Chaos, By Design

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Nothing about the mess in California’s primary elections is a surprise. The system is working exactly as it was designed. California Democrats designed it to be a mess.

Over the decades, Democrats in Sacramento enacted revolutionary changes to the election process. Those changes are to blame for the chaos.
Automatic voter registration was one. This means every contact with the government registers a voter.
Next comes automatically mailing ballots to every single registrant, even those automatically registered. Ballots then fill mailboxes across the state. California enacted a twenty-two-day grace period after election day to cure defective mail ballots.
For good measure, California does a slipshod job of voter roll maintenance, keeping tens of thousands of obsolete registrations without required information such as dates of birth.
This means the voter rolls stay sloppy for decades.
What a dangerous contagion California created. The Left hoped the California election system would spread across America.
Some progressive states eventually adopted parts of the California disaster, including automatic voter registration for groups like welfare recipients.
A week later, we still don’t know who won in California. That’s destabilizing. Consent of the governed thrives when voters know who won, and believe it.
Consider Florida. Once the worst, it now leads the nation getting election results quick. Unlike California, Florida requires mail ballots to arrive by election day. Unlike California, Florida does not automatically mail ballots to every voter. Florida also keeps voter rolls clean.

Florida knows election results on election night.
California is upside down world. When all these bad ideas became law over the last fifteen years, I could see where it was going. Disaster was around the corner, yet no California Democrat raised the alarm. They insulted anyone who opposed their legislative agenda, calling them “vote suppressors.”
Never mind that reliance on the mail to deliver ballots means that many lose their right to vote, because the post office loses mail.
Thirteen million Californians voted by mail in 2024. You can be sure that many thousands of ballots were lost. The Post Office has a goal of 95% success for political mail. That’s another way of saying a five percent failure rate.
Who are the real vote suppressors?
Leftist academics share much of the blame for the California mess. Hometown law school professors have been pushing for California’s revolutionary election process changes for decades. If you oppose their radical transformation, you are smeared as a vote suppressor.
The Supreme Court will soon resolve the issue of when mail ballots must arrive. Under federal law, ballots must be cast by Election Day. But what does that mean?
Those who advocated for this California mess are unrepentant. They want weeks of leeway for late ballots despite the language of the federal statute.

This mess is no accident. It was deliberate. Legislation passed over decades in Sacramento produced the mess.
The delay in the California results is not “par for the course.” No amount of patience is required for week after week of waiting for ballots to trickle in from the mailman. The delay is unacceptable and corrosive to civil society.
Americans want certainty. Americans grew up knowing who won an election on election night – whether the President of the United States or president of the student body. Our nation has a deep reserve of trust for the process. But poorly designed elections systems that promote instability are eroding that trust.
Power in California will end up with the candidates who align most with this chaos. The discord is deliberate. It is the fruit of decades of state legislative changes. Their plan was to export these designs nationwide.
The good news is the counting chaos may ensure the ridiculous California election system won’t spread to other states.