"Count all the votes!" as the lefties liked to say loudly.

That was their justification for mass mail-in ballots in California, ballot-harvesting by illegals, and extended voting for weeks and weeks. Election Day? No, election month. They said it was to expand the franchise to "marginalized communities" and raise turnout.

Curiously, turnout has now hit a near-record low in a presidential primary year as this Secretary of State supplied data makes clear.  Before these new "innovations" were enacted, mostly in the era of COVID, it was not unusual to have turnout in such years in the 70% range. Today, they got ... 34%, just slightly above 2022's 33.2%, which wasn't a presidential primary election year. 

Now we're onto the extended counting.

Count all the votes!

Except that they're not counting all the votes, they've got better things to do with their time than count ballots.

According to CalMatters:

The latest official tally from the Secretary of State’s office shows that more than 5.8 million ballots have been counted from California’s primary, with 1.7 million still to go.

Based on today’s updated umbers, the total of 7.5 million votes means a turnout of about 34%, well below the norm for presidential primaries, but not the record low that some analysts projected based on early numbers.

It also means that it’s going to be a while before some results are finalized, likely amplifying complaints that it takes too long to count votes in California. While voting by mail has been happening for a month, as long as ballots were postmarked by last Tuesday and they arrive at elections offices by this Tuesday, they will be counted. As expected, the votes being counted after primary day are trending more Democratic and younger.

They said they'd count all the votes -- and as of today, they haven't counted all the votes.

Which is funny stuff, because supposedly less-developed nations like Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, with much larger populations of voters, can count all its ballots overnight on 100% turnout in some cases, and still come up with a result that's fair and normal.

California can't. Might the inability to count the ballots on time the way normal countries do have something to do with why fewer people are voting?

It seems logical to me. 

It's also interesting that turnout is so low even with junk-mail balloting as the law of the land in California -- mass mailed wherever an address can be claimed. It sounds as though effort-free voting is leading to no effort at all, nothing demanded of the voters.

And the bottom line here is that with all these measures with claimed benefits for democratic participation have led to less participation everywhere -- from voters, to vote counters.

But only one of these two things can be called culpable. The absence of voters amounts to an absence of confidence in the system, from how candidates are chosen to how ballots are counted. Lack of confidence equals low turnout, which for Democrats, is a good thing because dead districts as very low turnout precincts are called, allow for the placement of Democrats in power without accountability for either their unpopular ideas or their personal pocket-lining. Engaged electorates don't put up with that from their elected leaders but unengaged voters do.

Fact is, Democrats have elections just how they like them in California. The one thing now that lies in tatters is all their rhetoric about counting ballots and increasing turnout.

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