The final makeup of the 119th Congress was not settled until a month after the 2024 election as California worked to tabulate and certify its results. Representatives from both sides of the aisle say that was a problem, and some are pushing for Congress to intervene.
“Everyone has experienced the heartache of seeing their candidate ahead, then behind, then ahead, then behind, and it really diminishes people’s trust in the integrity of our elections, whether or not that mistrust is well-founded,” Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte told NOTUS.
Earlier this month, Obernolte introduced legislation that would require California and all other states to report 90% of ballots 72 hours after the election and certify all results within two weeks of Election Day.
Currently, state certification deadlines are all over the place.
Some smaller states, including Delaware, Vermont and South Dakota, have deadlines of days or a week after the election. California, New York, Texas and other states have certification dates in December, a month after general elections are held. A handful of states, like California, have different deadlines to submit certified presidential election results and those for other federal offices.
“No matter which candidate you should support or which political party you’re a member of, it is not good for our democracy to have the results of elections counted over a period of a month instead of days,” Obernolte said.
Obernolte’s bill debuted with only GOP co-sponsors, but most Democrats NOTUS spoke with agreed the process needed fixing.
“Are we going to have the funding to get the capacity to do it?” Rep. Ro Khanna said. “We’re going to need more funding.”
Rep. Ami Bera said he had yet to take a close look at Obernolte’s bill, but broadly supported increasing the speed.
“Obviously we’d all love for California to speed up the tabulation of votes,” Bera said.
Rep. Bryan Steil, chair of the House Administration Committee, used a Tuesday hearing on California’s voting procedures as a venue to criticize the state’s use of mail-in voting, claiming it “opens the door for potential fraud.”
The committee’s only Californian took issue with the claim.
“Not a single Republican or political observer contested the outcome of any House race or provided any evidence that California suffered from fraud,” Rep. Norma Torres said during the hearing. “Our election infrastructure is sound.”
Abandoning a mail-in ballot option, ranking member Joe Morelle said, would “disenfranchise millions of military and overseas voters who rely on mail and online voter registration” to cast their ballots.
California’s Republican lawmakers were quick to point out to NOTUS the bill wouldn’t bar their constituents from voting by mail. About 13 million California voters cast their ballots by mail during the 2024 general election, while just over 3 million voted in person, according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.
Weber’s office took issue with Obernolte’s proposal, citing “critical problems” like accounting for military voters and the vast size of some of the counties that have to account for major shares of the state’s total vote.
“This bill would essentially require California and other states to eliminate significant voter protections designed to encourage participation in our democracy,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “It is another solution for a nonexistent problem.”
California’s GOP lawmakers, like Rep. Darrell Issa, said they weren’t looking at “restricting any part of the activity.”
“We’re simply saying that after the election, there has to be a reasonable determinant and there has to be a cutoff on Election Day,” Issa said.
There’s already a bipartisan effort to speed tabulation underway in the California Legislature. Democratic Assemblymember Marc Berman is pursuing a fix that would require most votes to be counted within 10 days after Election Day. Berman began pushing his bill in December, weeks after the election but before the state’s votes were officially certified.
Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former assemblymember, said he didn’t trust the California Legislature to handle the issue and doubted its eventual fix would match the speed required in the federal legislation.
The federal bill “honestly isn’t really even asking that much,” Kiley said. “It still provides a fair amount of leeway, but we’re just trying to move it out of the bounds of totally ridiculous and make it a little more sane.”
Not every Republican is on board.
Rep. Doug LaMalfa took issue with the tabulation speed (“They’ve really slowed it down,” he said.) But LaMalfa said he’s wary of a federal bill and questioned elements of Obernolte’s proposal.
“Elections have really been set up constitutionally as a domain of the states for the most part, unless they misbehave,” LaMalfa said. “I’m not sure about a federal bill. I’m not knocking the bill; just haven’t decided.”
“The more of this mail-in voting you have, the ballots are late, how do you guarantee 90%?” LaMalfa said. “Now, if they would just shift to ‘all the ballots need to be in on election night’ — no more of this dribble-drabble stuff.”
One Democrat said he didn’t see vote-tabulation speed as an issue at all.
“Everything I’ve seen suggests that they count them as quickly as they can, while at the same time ensuring there are no problems,” Rep. Mike Thompson said.
Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and San José Spotlight.
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