This week, the nation watched as California grappled again with the ordinarily straightforward task of counting votes in an election. While large states such as Florida declare election winners within 24 hours, California may take up to two weeks to count all the votes.
Even Los Angeles cannot count its votes in the time of large states despite a $336 million budget of County Clerk’s office headed by an official making $448,179 a year with the help of 1,100 budgeted positions.
In most states, voters would be outraged by the incompetence, waste, and inefficiency. However, in the Golden State, voters shrug, as if they can demand no more from their elected officials than subpar performance.
Call it the Politics of Low Expectations and California is the model for the nation.
For years, my students have asked me what the secret is to a successful marriage approaching four decades (For full disclosure, there is an ongoing contractual dispute over my counting eight years of monogamous dating — leading to two dates on our anniversary cakes). The answer is simple. I reduced her expectations so low that I have exceeded them on a daily basis.
That began with our eloping on New Year’s Eve. We were married after an actual shotgun wedding where the clearly expectant teenage bride’s family was screaming profanities at the teenage groom. After paying $50 and using my high school ring for a wedding ring, we stepped out on the street of Old Town Alexandria as a drunk was retching in the gutter. That left only room for improvement.
On any given day, my wife is simply grateful that I have not traded the house and car for a handful of magic beans.
California Democrats seem to have applied my approach to matrimony to politics, creating a politician’s dream voter with few expectations.
That is most evident with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s infamous high-speed train to nowhere.
In 2008, voters were promised a 500-mile High-Speed train running from San Francisco to Los Angeles for $33 billion. It is now projected to cost somewhere between $126 billion and $231 billion. After roughly two decades, no track has been laid, and the current plan is to focus on building a track between Bakersfield and Merced.
Without any track to display, Newsom recently stood before a freight train on an existing track to insist that his train is moving speedily along.
One would think that citizens would be coming for their leaders with torches and pitchforks. Instead, there is a collective shrug as if it is perfectly normal to spend more than the entire budget of Amtrak on a non-existent train.
The same leaders have burned billions in other boondoggles, including a massive solar power farm that produced energy at a higher rate and incinerated thousands of birds a year.
California is facing a growing crisis of rising homelessness, dismal education scores, and an exodus of business and wealthy taxpayers. It has also imposed taxes that make gas the most expensive in the nation while suppressing its own energy industry.
Now, after many voters took the unprecedented step of voting for Republican candidates for governor and L.A. mayor, citizens will wait for weeks to learn the results of an election that would have been called days ago by third-world countries.
The same politics of low expectations are evident in other states. In New York City, voters just shrug when told that they have a budget rivaling that of the entire state of Florida, resulting in awful educational, infrastructure, and other conditions. Voters have watched as wealthy taxpayers have taken their money and jobs to other states.
In return, figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani promise state-run grocery stores, which will cost tens of millions of dollars to build and operate at a loss.
In Minnesota, elected officials allowed billions to be stolen in fraud while businesses fled a state rife with rioting and homelessness.
In virtually every major city from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, public schools are spending massive amounts on education to graduate many students who lack basic proficiency in English and Math. In Baltimore, a student failed all but three of his classes and was ranked in the top half of his graduating class.
Yet, voters reelected the same leaders who have denied generations any real opportunity for advancement. While other countries maintain superior school systems at a fraction of the cost, urban voters cast their ballots like lemmings for the same party and politicians.
In states like California, politics has long been run on Henry Ford’s pitch that you can have any color Model T so long as it is black. This election seemed to offer voters something they had not seen in many years: a real choice between a Republican governor and an L.A. mayor.
As California slowly counts its votes, the odds still heavily favor the continuation of California as a one-party state. Poor services, rising crime, rampant homelessness, hundreds of billions in waste and other failures are treated as virtually inevitable. The result is an electorate that only a politician would love: passive voters who expect little from their government and receive even less.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Here comes Mr X to tell us that CA has the 4th largest economy blah, blah, blah.
When you mock NY, IL, NJ and MA for losing population to FL the left says it’s the weather and yet CA has the nicest weather in the nation and they are losing people for the first time in their history. X will say that there are people moving there too. HA! Tax payers leave as illegals, homeless people and other deadbeats arrive to garner free stuff. It’s called the doom loop.
Tuesday’s June 2nd 2026 Election, wasn’t even close to being a ‘BIG ELECTION’, it was merely a STATE Primary Election.
But it goes to show you what will happen when the Big Election does happen (i.e.: State & National Elections – the 2028 United States presidential and congressional election). ‘Election Malfeasance’ (Vote Count delays) will not stop until the Powers-to-Be get what they want.
Which raises the question: Is it Democracy of the People or a Democracy-Show for the People?
They Keep the Myth alive.
Start with a simple question. If you wanted to design an electoral process that reliably produced a predetermined outcome, what would it look like? You would make it slow. You would make it opaque. You would build in enough uncertainty that no one could ever quite put their finger on it. You would make the process seem legitimate on election night and then extend it long enough that the final result could drift in the direction you needed. And you would make sure that anyone who questioned it could never quite prove intent.
California’s system matches that design almost perfectly. That is not an accusation. It is an observation. A $336 million elections budget in Los Angeles alone. 1,100 staff. Two weeks to count votes. Results that shift steadily in one direction the longer the count runs.
You do not have to prove fraud to indict a system. The test for a legitimate election is simple. Can the people who are supposed to be sovereign actually verify the result? Speed matters. Transparency matters. Traceability matters. Not because we assume cheating. Because a system that could conceal it has already broken faith with the voter.
The standard for consent of the governed is higher than “we cannot prove it was rigged.” The burden runs the other way. Show us a count that is fast, transparent, and verifiable. Or admit the system was not built for the voters.
California is a lost cause. Although beautiful state with vistas of mountains and coastal paradise, they keep nominating charlatans to run their state, which is nothing more than those smart enough to fleece the taxpayers who are stupid enough to continue to vote for those in power.
Come On Man! Look Kinkos just finished printing the 50,000 completed unsigned ballots for delivery to the LA County Registrar’s Loading Dock and the 2:30am delivery was delayed by an hour because of the shoot out on the Freeway. However, counting has resumed now that the pallets have been placed in a ‘secure area’ right? The fix (oops I mean the final count) will be in by next week sometime unless Kinkos receives another order!! Haha.
You summed it up, using the same words twice. “…voters shrug, as if they can demand no more from their elected officials than subpar performance.” You also carefully avoided the fact that, in all the places you used as illustrations, there is a commonality. DEMOCRATS! Sadly, these places allow ridiculous decisions, dysfunctional governance and totally inept oversight. They blunder into cosmic level problems, then demand that taxpayers from the rest of the country bail them out, never recognizing or admitting their culpability in the issue. This is why those of us in the rest of the country have become so angry at these places and the politicians on the national level who won’t hold them accountable and force them to suffer from their monumental failures. Those of us who live in places where logic, discipline and common sense rule our decisions have a phrase we find appropriate. “Let them eat cake!”
Your post reminds me of the old adage that says. . .”A fool and his money are soon parted.”
Voting in California this primary season is testing the California voting system to the max. Clearly, they’ve allowed Becerra to overtake Hilton. With Hilton on top, the machine politicos would be extremely worried about the general election. No doubt they are pondering whether to allow Steyer to also overtake Hilton -just to be on the safe side. At no time are they concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, all three being essential parts of machine politics.
I read an article where the unions are suing the state to allow the employees to continue working from home. They claim that driving to work will do environmental damage and an environmental review is necessary.
So if they are staying home and working, how can they count the ballots at the office?
the illegal immigrants are helping with that
Give them a break. Difficult to count votes before they’re created. Plus it’s the first time they’ve had to do it in a while, so they’re a bit rusty. Although I do admire your marital strategies. Low expectations is the most any husband can hope for.
Perhaps democracy was a mistake after all?
No it was not a mistake. Union control of a state is what the problem is. I am not saying unions are bad however in Ca. they do basically control all aspects of the state operations. Thus long delays and cost overruns.
People complain that the IRS settlement was just Trump negotiating with himself –,as if we had a unitary executive. Yet every government employee contract in California was produced by the Democratic Party negotiating with itself. And few even realize it.
It looks like establishing the woke paradise is harder than expected.
It takes time to cheat and know the exact number of votes you need to fake to win.