Some Californians were carving Halloween pumpkins and taking their kids trick-or-treating when they cast their ballots in this year’s election. Now they’re putting up Christmas trees while officials are still tallying votes in some places.

With the vast majority of ballots counted, most of the races have been called by media organizations anyway, including some very close ones. In Orange County, Democrat Derek Tran was declared the winner in his race against incumbent Michelle Steel last week.

With that and a race in Iowa called the same week, California now claims the distinction of being home to the last congressional race in the country that has yet to be called. That’s in the Central Valley’s 13th District, where, with an estimated 99% of the votes counted as of Monday afternoon, Democratic challenger Adam Gray was leading Republican Rep. John Duarte by 143 votes.

That doesn’t mean everyone should keep hating on California for taking so long. First of all, we have more people than any other state. Second, every voter in the state is automatically mailed a ballot starting about a month before election day. In Los Angeles County, more than 70% of voters mailed in ballots or dropped them off, said Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the county registrar-recorder. According to the office of the California secretary of state, nearly 90% of voters cast their ballots by mail in the 2022 midterm.

Californians are also allowed to register and vote by provisional ballot on election day. It takes more time to process those ballots.

California ballots had to be postmarked by Nov. 5 to be counted but could be received by election officials up to seven days later. All those mailed ballots have to be checked to see whether the signatures match the ones on the voter rolls. And if they don’t, voters are contacted and told they can correct — or “cure” — the ballot with a signature.

The state’s voters had until Dec. 1 to fix their ballots. And so we still have votes being counted even as Christmas shopping is in full swing.

L.A. County workers have been processing and counting ballots every day since Nov. 6, the day after election day, except for Thanksgiving, according to Sanchez. In fact, the week after the election, the county had shifts processing ballots around the clock.

Could some counties process and count ballots faster? Maybe. Some state legislators are interested in finding ways to expedite the process.

But what’s more important is that the slow pace has gone hand in hand with allowing voters ample time and a few ways to get their ballots in — and then to fix issues that might prevent them from being counted. The painstaking process of collecting and checking these ballots speaks both to election integrity and to giving voters access and opportunities to vote.

That makes it worth waiting for a few races that seemed to take forever to call.

Closure is coming. All counties are required to submit their results for statewide elections by Friday. (And, as far as state officials know, no county has ever missed the deadline.) And the secretary of state is expected to certify statewide election results on Dec.13 — still weeks before any of the winners’ terms begin.

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