A voting booth is set up in 2023 at Urban Ore in Berkeley. California’s procedures for ensuring a fair and accurate vote count take more time than those of many other states, and delay the certification of final results.

1 … 2 ... 3 … 4 … 5 … 6 … 7 … 8 … 9 … um … what’s next?

Oh, that’s right: 10.

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Thank you for waiting, America, while this Californian took his time counting. I know that you get impatient when we Californians count slowly, especially when counting votes.

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Just think: With the time you wasted waiting for me just now, you could have slapped tariffs on allies. Or launched another war.

But I just had to get to 10. Because my fellow Californians and I want to take full responsibility for how long it takes us to count all our ballots.

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So, let us say now, from the deep, dark bottoms of our hearts: We’re sorry, America.

We’re sorry that we can’t give you final results on election night, that we require weeks to complete vote tallies. We’re sorry that we make you wait before you can threaten newly elected officeholders on social media.

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We’re doubly sorry that we let our voters wait until Election Day to mail their ballots, giving them as much time as possible to consider their decisions and incorporate last-minute revelations. We are sorry that we don’t understand the virtues of just going with our guts on ballot choices — because careful deliberation is for sissies and Scandinavians.

Also, sorry that we have to give those ballots seven days after Election Day to arrive, because of the mess your government has made of the U.S. Postal Service.

That might sound like enough apologies, but it isn’t. Sorry for limiting our sorries to contemporary processes. Real accountability means saying sorry for our history of expanding the franchise!

The New York Times, in an editorial, called out Californians for this grievous sin of letting too many people vote. In past centuries, the Times scolded, “Americans quickly learned the results of major elections. By the late 1800s, telegraphs made it possible for people to read results in the next day’s newspapers.”

Great point. We must apologize to the Times and to America for advancing beyond late-19th century elections.

Among our grievous errors was granting voting rights to California women in 1911, which produced many more ballots to count. Apologies, too, for allowing our people to decide laws and constitutions through direct democracy, through measures that make our ballots so long (and tedious to count). Sometimes our ballots have 50 or more contests.

We’re also sorry for California’s population growth since the 19th century, to nearly 40 million. If we hadn’t grown into the world’s fourth-largest economy, we could run tiny, discriminatory elections as we did a century ago, and keep you and the Times happy.

But our apologies to America must go beyond history. We should say sorry as well for our recent campaigns to convince more Californians to register to vote.

I am sorry to report that California has increased its number of registered voters from 15.7 million in 2006 to over 23 million now. That more-than-7-million-voter increase is extraordinary because the state population increased by only 3 million in the same period.

And sorry that all those new voters have created so many concerns about voter fraud among good-faith democracy advocates like President Donald Trump and the Supreme Court.

Sorry that, in recent oral arguments around mail ballots, Justice Sam Alito told a tale about “a big stash of ballots” that were counted late and  “radically flipped” an election.

And sorry that there’s no evidence of such radical flips here. Indeed, we are profoundly sorry that it’s easier to find proof that Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas secretly accepted gifts from billionaires than it is to find any real problems with our counts.

Here, we must add another expression of remorse for our own extensive checks against fraud. Because those extra checks really slow down the count. We are sorry that California counties have such a detailed process for confirming signatures on mail ballots.

We are sorry that the painstaking nature of this process undermines the nation’s faith in democracy, according to the editorial board of the Times.

“When elections are quickly decided, it builds confidence in the democratic process,” the Times wrote, boldly embracing speed over accuracy, a stance sure to boost confidence in that newspaper. “When uncertainty lingers for days, Americans wonder why government today can often seem less competent than it once was.”

As a final note of contrition, we must express our sorrow at all the focus on the Golden State’s elections. California, sorry to say, has all kinds of governance problems — in taxes, spending, pensions, regulation, constitutional structure and democratic participation. All could benefit from more scrutiny.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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Which is why we’re sorry, America, that you’re focused on our election management — a real California strength.

And we’re sorry that you can’t see it that way.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square and is founder-publisher of Democracy Local.

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