Election results take days when margins are thin and mail ballots arrive last
Election night produces something that looks like a finished count. It isn't: no state is done counting ballots that night. What makes a state look finished is that its notable races get called early, while the ballots still being processed stop being interesting.
The wait itself comes down to the margin of victory. The closer the race, the more returns analysts need to see before they will make a call, so a nail-biter can stay uncalled in a place that counts briskly.
California's slow count has a more mundane cause than its reputation suggests: what Kim Alexander calls the "pig in the python" problem — a logjam of millions of vote-by-mail ballots returned on Election Day that still have to be processed. When the queue arrives all at once at the end, the tally runs past election night.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Count speed and answer speed are different things. A state can process ballots briskly and still leave a race uncalled, because what's missing in a close contest isn't ballots — it's the certainty an analyst wants before putting a name on it. The wait is a judgment call, not a queue.
That's generous to the queue. The single biggest cause of California's delay is a pile-up of millions of mail ballots returned on Election Day, which is a scheduling problem with millions of participants, not a philosophical shortage of certainty. Blame the python, not the analysts.