California Steals Its Own Election

Experts predict Mr. Sanders will win most of the uncounted ballots since young people often vote late. But the delayed results will dampen the benefit he might have gained from his California victory on Super Tuesday’s election night. Not that his friends on the left in Sacramento care. “In the state with the largest electorate in the nation, the vote count does not end on Election Night—and that’s a good thing,” declared Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Tuesday.

Mr. Padilla is trying to put a positive spin on California’s voting fiasco. Lawmakers recently overhauled election procedures in the name of making it easier for young people and Hispanics to vote. Yet the result was the opposite, and Mr. Sanders is the victim.

Start with the state’s 2016 Voter’s Choice Act, which allowed counties this year to reduce polling places and instead send absentee ballots to all voters. The law also expanded in-person voting and let voters cast ballots at any polling place in their county. Voters may also register, or change their party identification or address, on Election Day.

As a result, polling places were swamped with new voters and independents who didn’t realize they had to formally request mail-in Democratic ballots. Fifteen counties experienced problems trying to connect to online voter databases. After waiting in line for hours, many voters had to cast provisional ballots.

The Legislature gave Los Angeles County an exemption from the 2016 law after local officials complained it was too expensive to mail ballots to each of its 5.5 million voters following a $300 million voting system upgrade. Called Voting Solutions for All People, the upgrade made Iowa’s caucuses look competent.

Poll workers were supposed to use computer tablets to look up voter registrations, but the devices stalled as more tried to connect with the county online database. Then voters couldn’t figure out the high-tech voting contraptions, which required selecting choices on a touch screen, printing out a physical ballot, re-inserting the ballot into the machine and clicking a final button.

Many voters left without completing all steps or realizing they didn’t vote. Because machines repeatedly broke down, many voters had to complete write-in forms, some of which were in languages they didn’t speak. All these dysfunctions resulted in hours-long lines, which one voter compared to being stuck in traffic on LA’s 405 freeway.

Only two companies bid for LA’s new voting system because one condition was that it be publicly owned—i.e., socialized. One was U.K.-based company Smartmatic, which got its start developing a new system for Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela in 2004. The other had developed ObamaCare’s Healthcare.gov website, which famously crashed on its launch date. Smartmatic won. Voters lost.

Even considering uncounted votes, turnout is running lower than in the June 2016 primary. So to recap: California Democrats moved up the state’s primary to make it more relevant and reduced voting obstacles to boost liberal turnout. In the end they disenfranchised many Democratic voters, and denied Mr. Sanders the flush of his primary victory. This would be darkly amusing if it didn’t undermine trust in the legitimacy of election results.