Excerpts:

The nation is again waiting on California to finish tallying votes almost a 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 nearly five million to count going into this holiday weekend, just under a third of all of the ballots that were cast there.

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.

---

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.

---

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 are in California, including in Orange County and the Central Valley. Five are among the most hotly contested in the nation.

---

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 that 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,” Ms. Alexander said.

---

The delays in California’s tally have most likely distorted the popular-vote tally in the race between Ms. Harris and President-elect Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schickler said. The current figures show Mr. Trump leading nationwide by about 3.6 million votes, but millions of Democratic votes have yet to be counted in California and other West Coast states. (Full Article)