Florida Counts Its Election Ballots Fast. Why Can’t California Keep Up?

Three hours after polls closed on Tuesday night, Florida had reported enough ballots for The Associated Press to make calls on almost all of its dozens of contested primary elections.

The same night in California, the last votes were cast for a special congressional election to replace former Representative Eric Swalwell. The nail-biter contest between two Democrats was not called until Thursday evening, with a margin of roughly 6,000 votes separating the contenders.

California’s more sluggish ballot-counting process — which can sometimes delay results for weeks after Election Day — has provided fertile ground for President Trump and his supporters to sow doubt over election results that favor Democrats.

This week, though, the counting pace raised another question: Why is Florida this much faster than California at returning election results?

The answer harks back to 2000, when the protracted recount in Florida kept the country in the dark for weeks about the result of the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The delayed results placed the state in a harsh national spotlight and prompted state officials to examine what went wrong.

Cord Byrd, the current Florida secretary of state, said that one major issue at that time was the lack of statewide standards for handling ballots.

“We’ve been hammering away at this for 26 years to craft a well-functioning election code,” Mr. Byrd told The New York Times on Thursday.

He attributed his state’s speed in part to the fact that mail-in ballots must arrive by the time the polls close. Roughly one-third of Floridians vote by mail, according to Mr. Byrd.

(As in other states, voters who are in line before polls close can still cast their ballots.)

In contrast, mail-in ballots in California that are postmarked by Election Day will be counted as long as they arrive in the week after an election. It leads to a pileup, said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies voting and elections.

“You’ll get, like, a million mail ballots dropped off on Election Day, and it’s just a huge logistical issue to process those,” Dr. McDonald said.

Mail-in ballots take longer to process than in-person votes because the signatures must be verified. Election workers in both Florida and California can begin processing and verifying those ballots as they are received, per the states’ election codes.

Florida may also be quicker to count ballots because it does not allow same-day voter registration, said Daniel A. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies voting rights and elections. But the efficiency is a trade-off, he added.

“It certainly is eliminating those individuals who might want to participate, who have moved, who have established residency, but who haven’t done it within that time frame that Florida requires,” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Byrd, a Republican aligned with Mr. Trump, feels that the speedy vote-counting in Florida helps increase confidence in elections, noting that delays make it easier for “those that want to play upon election fears” to do so.

“In a republic,” he said, “we have to have the losing side accept the results.”