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Some critics say the state’s slow vote counting process leads to distrust, while supporters say there are several laws that county officials need to follow to make sure every vote counts.

“The key difference is that a lot of these places that people compare us to have just a one-day option to vote, where we have multiple days which is an advantage that others don’t have,” said Yolo County Registrar Jesse Salinas.

California is one of eight states that mails a ballot to every eligible voter.

“A lot of voters will wait until the last day on Election Day to cast their ballot and they will vote by mail or they will do it through this conditional process. So, what that means is we have to wait until after Election Day to start processing all of those ballots and that does take time,” Salinas explained.

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Created four years ago to solidify the political clout of Little Saigon’s Vietnamese American community, California’s 45th congressional district has become one of the nation’s most narrowly contested House seats.

And with votes still being counted in a race that’s still too close to call, experts say the presence of a Vietnamese American on the general election ballot — a first for CA-45 — is a possible tipping point in a contest that could come down to a handful of votes.

On Friday, the latest tally in CA-45 showed Democratic challenger Derek Tran, a lawyer with longstanding ties to Little Saigon, with a 515-vote lead over Rep. Michelle Steel, a Republican from Seal Beach who is hoping to win her third term in office.

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Christine Pelosi is one of many Bay Area volunteers who have headed to the Central Valley to “cure” ballots in an incredibly tight House race. On Wednesday afternoon, after a few days of volunteering in the Merced area, she was “staking out” a Modesto home with a colleague, hoping to connect with a voter whose ballot was rejected over a signature problem, she told the Chronicle.

Pelosi, the daughter of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and a longtime California Democratic Party leader who is widely thought to be eyeing her mother’s seat when she retires, posted about her effort, including a video of her singing “On the Road Again” by Willie Nelson, though with a ballot curing lyrical twist. 

She is part of a broader effort by both campaigns in the House race to fix problems with voters’ ballots that will allow them to be counted before the Dec. 3, deadline.

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The Close Count Transparency Project: is a tracker created by the California Voter Foundation that provides daily updates on the results of 11 competitive U.S. House races and seven state legislative races, as well as the statewide vote count status. The tool tracks candidates’ vote share, votes counted and the number of unprocessed ballots in each county the districts cover. 

Why so slow? With a huge influx of ballots arriving all at once, they all must move through every step of the counting process that cannot be sped up. For example, in this past election cycle, more than 126,000 ballots in California needed to be “cured” — they had been rejected for missing or mismatched signatures and voters have time to submit a form to verify their signatures. The widespread use of vote-by-mail also slows the vote count.