Why can't California count its votes by Thanksgiving?

An old one.

Here’s an old one from 2018 about why it takes California until early December to count its ballots:

Some people have questioned why it takes the state of California most of a month after an election to count the vote, when countries like Paraguay, Laos, and Sierra Leone usually get it over and done with in a few days.

But there’s good news on the horizon for impatient California election watchers.

At the state-of-the-art California vote-counting research & development skunk works in Palo Alto, crack scribes have begun to tally the ballots on high tech clay tablets that must bake in the sun for only a single week.

Gov. Jerry Brown has also announced a big increase in the budget for vote-counters’ abacuses and mats, with legislation pending that would legalize their having desks and adding machines.

Brown added:

“Of course, countries like Paraguay don’t have mail ballots coming in by slow boat from Honduras, the Galapagos Islands, the Kerguelen Islands, Guatelombia, Transnistria, Abbottabad, Abkhazia, Azkaban, Raqqa, Narnia, and The Republic of Pirates.”

The governor further explained:

“Nor do these Third World countries have to provide, by court order, ballots in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Armenian, Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Panjabi, Punjabi, Hmong, Mixtec, Esperanto, Hittite, Klingon, Linear B, Linear A, !San Clickspeak, Shavian Alphabet, Incan Knot Lingo, Runic, Voynich Manuscript, Semaphore, Canary Islands Whistle Speech, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, American Sign Language, Thieves’ Argot, Smoke Signals, Ouija Board, Enigma Encryption, Turing Machine, General Semantics, System Basic, Cityspeak, Telepathy, Dolphin, Assembler, COBOL, Coco Sign Language, HTML, PDF, Graffiti, Gang Signs, SMS, Bitcoin, and Emoji, plus certain languages spoken only by individual pairs of identical twins.”