The nation is again waiting on California to finish tallying votes one week after Election Day.

The state has most of the remaining undecided races that will determine the balance of power in the House, and its slow vote-counting process has drawn greater scrutiny — and some scorn — as each day goes by.

While many states tallied the bulk of their ballots within hours of polls’ closing on Tuesday, California still had approximately 2.6 million ballots to count as of Saturday evening, when the Secretary of State reported that 13.6 million ballots had been counted.

In Santa Clara County, nearly 90% of votes had been counted by 4:42pm Monday.

Leaders in California, the nation’s most populous state, defend the deliberate process as necessary to ensure that the tallies are accurate and that as many voters participate as possible. They say their generous provisions for voters give the public greater confidence.

The delay in full results has left Americans wondering why the balance of power in the House is yet to be known. It has also opened avenues for disinformation, with Democrats and Republicans seizing upon the incomplete results as evidence of voter fraud or manipulation.

Counting votes in California is not as simple as running ballots through a machine.

The state is one of a handful nationwide where every registered, active voter is mailed a ballot. Mail-in ballots take longer to process than those cast in person.

Election offices must verify that the signature on each envelope matches the voter’s signature on file. Instead of throwing out ballots that were filled out improperly, election workers in California spend days calling voters and giving them another chance to verify their signatures so that their votes can be counted.

This process, known as ballot curing, occurs in half of U.S. states. But because nearly all of California’s ballots are mailed or hand-delivered in envelopes, the verification process is more tedious than elsewhere.

And unlike most other states, California counts ballots that arrive up to a week late, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

Twenty years ago, only a third of California voters cast ballots by mail, and 81 percent of votes were counted within two days of Election Day. In the primary election in March this year, when nearly 90 percent were cast by mail, only 59 percent had been counted within two days, according to an analysis by the nonprofit California Voter Foundation.

California gives counties 30 days to finalize their tallies, far longer than most states do. That means that counties can count at whatever speed suits them, hiring varying levels of reinforcements and drawing up different work schedules, as long as they finish by the deadline, said Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber.

Weber said in an interview that she thought Californians were accustomed to a slower vote count and that other Americans became impatient only when there were national stakes, as is the case now with the House.

“That’s not our problem,” she said. “We go as fast as we can.”

California is responsible for the largest share of the outstanding ballots left.

Because Vice President Kamala Harris as of Friday had 10 million fewer votes nationwide than President Biden did in 2020, a handful of Democrats have made unfounded claims that Republicans must have caused millions of ballots for Harris to disappear. Some Republicans in turn have incorrectly asserted that the vote count for Harris is a more accurate reflection of national support for Democrats and shows that President Biden received fraudulent votes four years ago.

“Even actions that are actually just good-faith efforts to have a reliable election” can become fodder for conspiracy theories, said Eric Schickler, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s a lot of suspicion and distrust of governmental institutions — this ends up playing into that.”

Weber said she was aware that an information vacuum could lead to false narratives, but she did not think that providing results faster in California would do much to stop election conspiracists.

“They’re going to do that anyway,” she said. “The reality is that even things that have been resolved, they create stories about them. We want to count every vote.”

In 2022, it took two weeks to determine the winner of a tight U.S. House race in a Northern California district. In 2018, a long delay led then-Speaker Paul Ryan to question the integrity of the state’s voting system after Republicans lost several House contests in which it initially appeared that they would sail to victory.

As of Monday evening, nine of the 16 uncalled House races that will determine control of the chamber were in California, including in Orange County and the Central Valley. Five are among the most hotly contested in the nation.

Alameda County, which includes Oakland, has counted more slowly than any other large county in California. Two days after the election the county had  tallied only about one-third of its ballots. As of Monday, more than one-quarter of the ballots remained to be counted.

The county does not have any battleground House races, but The Associated Press determined on Monday that the Oakland mayor and Alameda County district attorney had both been recalled by voters.

Any changes to speed up the process in Alameda County would have to be approved by its board of supervisors, Tim Dupuis, the Alameda County registrar of voters, said.

“Right now, our staffing levels and the way that we work our hours allow us to get through all of the votes within the time period we’re allotted,” he said.

Election offices do not process ballots 24 hours a day. Many count during normal business hours and give workers days off before the counts are complete.

In Santa Clara County, election workers counted ballots daily over the holiday weekend. In Orange and Marin Counties, employees were working on Saturday and Monday but not on Sunday. In Contra Costa County, counters stopped working on Friday and started again this morning.

Kristin B. Connelly, the Contra Costa County clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, said that her staff of nearly 120 employees was limited.

“We’re using all of our equipment and all of our people to go as fast as we can and maintain the quality,” Connelly said. “There’s constraints about space, there’s constraints about equipment, and so if you want to go faster, you need more of all of those things.”

Except for the whirring of two hulking sorting machines and scattered chitchat, there was quiet and concentration inside Los Angeles County’s 144,000-square-foot building in the City of Industry on Saturday afternoon.

At one station, workers manually verified signatures that scanners were unable to read. At another, rows of workers carefully removed ballots from envelopes and checked for imperfections, churning through a handful of ballots every minute.

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said election responsibilities had ballooned with the surge of mail-in ballots and threats of violence against workers in recent years. As the count continued in recent days, several election offices in California received bomb threats that led to evacuations before law enforcement officials determined there were no explosives.

“They do the best they can with what they have,” Alexander said.

A rush of last-minute ballots compounded the state’s counting burdens. Many local election officials said far more ballots arrived on Election Day this time than did four years ago. That meant that workers had less of a head start on counting, officials said.

In Los Angeles, the most populous county in the United States, roughly four million voters cast ballots, with one million mail-in ballots dropped off on Election Day, said Mike Sanchez, a spokesman with the registrar’s office. Election workers had to finish staffing polling places and counting in-person votes today before they pivoted to processing those mail-in ballots.

In Marin County, more than a third of ballots arrived by mail on Monday and Tuesday last week, said Lynda Roberts, the Marin County registrar of voters. Also, 2,000 voters registered on Election Day. Same-day registration enables more Californians to participate but creates additional work.

“To get slammed at the end like that was a surprise,” Roberts said in an interview.

The delays in California’s tally have most likely distorted the popular-vote tally in the presidential race, Schickler said.

The latest numbers over the weekend showed Trump leading nationwide by about 3.6 million votes, with millions of Democratic votes still to be counted in California and other West Coast states.

In California, Monday’s tally showed Harris with a 2.7 million vote lead over Trump. At that pace, the final California totals would cut about 1 million votes from Trump’s national victory margin.

Schickler said Trump’s victory could ultimately look similar to Biden’s in 2020, with a smaller popular-vote win than there seemed to be on election night. Regardless, it will be difficult for Democrats to reframe the results for the public two weeks later.

“The narrative sets in and can be misleading, and California coming in so late contributes to that,” he said.

The ballot counting numbers were updated Nov. 12 by San Jose Inside. Soumya Karlamangla, Orlando Mayorquín and Coral Murphy Marcos are reporters with The New York TImes. Shawn Hubler contributed reporting from Sacramento. Copyright 2024, The New York Times.