Democrat politicians assume Democrat voters can't remember Election Day

California takes forever to count votes in part because Democrat legislators assume Democrat voters' lives are hot messes.

Why does Democratic California take all of November to count votes?

One big reason is because Democratic legislators stereotype Democratic voters as more disorganized and less civic-minded than Republican voters. They figure that the easier voting is in California, the more Democrats will get their acts together enough to vote.

And this no doubt was true in, say, the Mitt Romney era of GOP candidates, but it would be interesting to find out if it’s still true in 2024.

So, the state of California gives counties up to 30 days to count votes, with many counties electing not to spend much money on overtime or temporary workers. Hence, vote-counting in California drags on into early December.

This is not good for public confidence in democracy, however. After all, slow-counting is also highly useful in vote fraud and it’s not obvious how to tell the difference.

For example, consider the ongoing race to win House of Representatives district CA-45 in Orange and Los Angeles Counties. From LAist:

But then today:

Democrat Derek Tran pulls ahead of GOP's Michelle Steel by 36 votes in the 45th House District

By Josie Huang
Updated Nov 16, 2024 6:12 PM

The vote count in the 45th Congressional District keeps tightening. After shrinking for days, GOP Rep. Michelle Steel's lead over Democratic challenger Derek Tran disappeared with a release of new tallies from Orange County on Saturday.

Tran now leads by 36 votes, although new numbers from L.A. County have not been released since Friday.

At the moment, with five House races still up in the air (two of them in California), the GOP appears like it will have a majority in the House of Representatives. The Washington Post says the Republicans are ahead 218-212, with 218 being the exact number needed for a majority. Yet, staffing the Trump Administration and the usual exigencies could still easily push determination of which party elects the Speaker into special elections early next year. So, we could have quite possibly wound up with the whole country obsessing like in Florida in 2000 over California’s slow vote count.

Not counting many ballots until the second half of November has long been recognized as extremely sapping of public confidence in the accuracy of vote-counting, so nobody did it until California and a few other states in recent years. The first Mayor Daley wouldn't have dared.

Slow-walking the vote count in places you control gives you more options. Stealing votes is risky, so you don’t want to steal pointlessly many. The ideal tactic is to wait until the other side lays all their cards on the table, then deliver the number you need.

In the 1960 Presidential election, the first Mayor Daley famously held back disclosing his last set of Cook County ballots for JFK until the Republican machine had caved in and disclosed their last set of downstate ballots for Nixon, setting off a victory celebration at JFK HQ.

Theodore H. White, the famous political reporter, wrote in his memoir a couple of decades after it happened:

Even in the most corrupt states of the Union, one cannot steal more than one or two percent of the vote… The AP was pressing its reporters for returns, and the reporters were trying to gouge out of the Republican and Democratic machines their vote-stealing, precinct by precinct totals. … It was downstate (Republican) versus Cook County (Democratic), and the bosses, holding back totals from key precincts, were playing out their concealed cards under pressure of publicity as in a giant game of blackjack.

… the AP ticker chattered its keys once more and reported: ‘With all downstate precincts now reported in, and only Cook County precincts unreported, Richard Nixon has surged into the lead by 3,000 votes.’

I was dismayed, for if Nixon really carried Illinois, the game was all but over.

An exaggeration by White: Nixon would have had to carry Texas as well. But Texas’s new voting system had proved a huge fiasco and it was assumed it would take some lengthy period of time to recount the Texas vote by hand (which wound up going for JFK/LBJ). But keep in mind that the risk of delay played into Nixon’s famous decision to quickly concede, in which he implied that a long (2000-like) recount would give the Communists an opening to cause trouble abroad while the Commander-in-Chief succession in Washington was uncertain.

And at this point I was jabbed from dismay by the outburst of jubilation from young Dick Donahue, who yelped, ‘He’s got them! Daley made them go first! He’s still holding back — watch him play his hand now.” I was baffled, they were elated. But they knew the counting game better than I, and as if in response to Donahue’s yelp, the ticker, having stuttered along for several minutes with other results, announced: ‘With the last precincts of Cook County now in, Senator Kennedy has won a lead of 8,000 votes to carry Illinois’s 27 electoral votes.’

Later that evening, Kennedy told his friend Ben Bradlee of an early call from Daley, when all seemed in doubt. “With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends,” Daley had assured Kennedy before the AP had pushed out the count, “you’re going to carry Illinois.”

White had left this seamy anecdote out of his more hagiographic bestseller The Making of the President 1960.

Not surprisingly, slow vote-counting is like pouring napalm on conspiracy theories. To this day, for example, tens of millions of Americans believe Nixon was the rightful winner in 1960.

For example, Mexico is pretty quick compared to California at counting votes, but in 2006 the leftist candidate AMLO led for the first day or two of counting, but then, finally, a truck arrived full of PAN votes, so PAN won. AMLO claimed fraud and spent a year occupying the national square.

Quick, decisive vote counting, like Florida in 2024 rather than Florida in 2000, builds confidence in democracy. California-style retarded vote counting undermines public confidence in democracy.

In the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election, the Democratic operatives in Cook County tried to steal the vote count for the latest edition of Adlai Stevenson to run for the Democrats. I had just moved to Chicago the week before and had recently read White’s account of 1960, so I was fascinated by observing a protracted vote count in real time. The pre-election polls all showed the Republican candidate way ahead, but long after election day, remarkable numbers of Stevenson votes kept being found in the Usual Suspect precincts in Cook County. Finally, after about four days of slow-motion vote-counting, a large cache of GOP votes was somehow discovered in the then-Republican suburban DuPage County, and Republican Big Jim Thompson was declared the winner.

Unluckily for the Democratic operatives, Stevenson, a naive aristocrat, demanded a recount, overruling his henchmen’s more worldly advice that: You know, Adlai, we gave it our best shot, but now is the time to move on, forget about the past, and we’ll go get ‘em next time.

The recount discovered rampant vote fraud and dozens of Democrats and a few Republic staffers were convicted.

By the way, the above logic is why I quickly lost interest in the Republicans’ second theory of how Biden stole the 2020 election. The initial theory — that the Democratic machine in a few huge urban counties like Philadelphia County stole just enough votes to tip the Electoral College despite Trumps’ strength across the country — at least was coherent and based on 20th Century history.

But then it turned out that Biden underperformed in Philadelphia and the other Usual Suspect counties. Instead, Biden overperformed across the country in traditionally honest upscale suburbs, including white counties in places that were the opposite of swing states. What kind of cunning plan was that: for Biden to steal fewer votes in Philadelphia, where he had the motive and means, but to steal more votes in, say, suburban Utah, where he had no chance of moving the Electoral College needle and few operatives in place?

Of course, imaginative folks can always come up with elaborate explanations of why the statistical results in 2020 didn’t look like what vote fraud would do, but the notion that the Democrats concoct brilliant plans to fool Steve Sailer strikes me as implausible.