Why Do California Votes Take So Long to Count?

An unpaywalled oldie ...

Why do elections in California take ten or twenty times as long to tabulate as elections in, say, Paraguay?

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

Nor do these Third World countries have to provide, by legislation or court order, ballots in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Armenian, Navajo, Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Panjabi, Punjabi, Hmong, Mixtec, Esperanto, Hittite, Proto-Indo-European, 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, Pig Latin, 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, Tattoos, SMS, Bitcoin, and Emoji, plus certain languages spoken only by individual pairs of identical twins.