When a ballot contains errors, the state gives voters 22 days to “cure” it—a timeline already cut by the state assembly last year.
California is far from the only state to allow for ballot curing—34 states and the District of Columbia, including battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada are among others that allow for the fixes, which is part of why national elections can similarly take weeks to finalize.
A mirror of 2020 false election fraud claims
While voters of every political affiliation cast ballots by mail, Democrats tend to use them more. Because mail ballots take longer to count than in-person votes, the count tends to shift toward Democrats over time, a phenomenon known as “the blue shift” or “red mirage.”
This pattern has been seized upon by the President and other Republicans to attack mail-in voting. Trump has baselessly characterized the voting tactic as a source of fraud in elections, and claimed without proof that the 2020 election, won by President Joe Biden, was “stolen” from him through mail-in ballots.
