California public schools routinely rank among the lowest in national education testing for mathematics, and it’s tempting to connect this statistic to the Golden State’s glacial vote counting process. Sadly, the failure of California’s election officials to discover a winner in certain key House races can’t be written off to anything as innocuous as poor math skills. In CA-13, for example, GOP incumbent John Duarte was about 3,100 votes ahead of Democrat challenger Adam Gray on Nov. 6. The total number of votes cast in this district was less than 210,000 but, after more than three weeks of ballot counting, election officials now say that Gray leads by 190 votes.

At the risk of repeating myself, now is the time to rein in one-party fiefdoms like California with national election reform.
Meanwhile, in CA-27, Republican incumbent Mike Garcia led Democrat challenger George Whitesides by about 4,800 votes on Nov. 6. But the vote counters soldiered on and inevitably they found enough ballots for the Democrat to declare himself victorious. Likewise, in CA-45, GOP incumbent Michelle Steel led Democrat challenger Derek Tran by about 10,000 votes shortly after Election Day. The counting continued, of course, and after a couple of weeks the Democrat found himself with a 102 vote lead. The rest was as inevitable as Greek tragedy. Both Garcia and Steel conceded without a fight, presumably to avoid being slandered as “election deniers.” Thus, three GOP House seats succumbed to the counters.
How Does California Do It?
It’s possible, of course, that these Democrat wins were achieved legitimately. But how could it have taken weeks to discover this miracle? The most likely answer is that Democrat vote counters in Merced, Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Orange counties mined their caches of defective ballots and “fixed” enough to put their candidates over the top. California is a universal mail-in state where Voter ID is literally illegal and every person listed on its voter rolls is aut...