Trump cries ‘steal’ over slow California vote count, but anti-fraud system works, say experts

California’s slow vote counting has frustrated political observers eagerly awaiting results, and handed Donald Trump and others an opportunity to claim “election rigging”. But experts say the system is working as designed: to protect against fraud and assure every vote is counted. Within a day of the polls closing in California’s primary election this week, Trump started accusing Democrats of “ trying to steal ” the elections for the state’s governor and the mayor of Los Angeles. The justice department sent a federal prosecutor to observe the ballot-counting process in Los Angeles this week. Republicans have lobbed such allegations against California for years, pointing to the state’s slowness in tallying ballots and the shifting results over the course of the counting as evidence of vote manipulation. Prominent Democrats, including outgoing governor Gavin Newsom , are increasingly fretting that the state’s tortoise-like pace is becoming a liability for public confidence in elections in an era where conspiracy theories spread quickly through social media and can emanate straight from the White House. But California’s vote-counting pace is actually a byproduct of a system of redundant verifications and opportunities for voters to fix errors. Every voter in California receives a mail-in ballot, and a vast majority of voters vote via mail. The signatures on those ballots are verified electronically and by human observers. …