As state election officials watch an angry President Trump and other partisan leaders slam what they claim are slow vote counts, political influence and delayed results in Florida, Georgia and Arizona elections, they have one thought: That could be California.

Days after Tuesday’s election, a handful of closely watched congressional races in California still haven’t been decided and a final count is days and possibly weeks away.

If the results from those California races were needed to determine which party would control the House, “the only question would be what names Trump was calling (Secretary of State) Alex Padilla,” said Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc., which collects and analyzes voter information.

Changes in rules, the growing use of mail ballots and efforts to ensure that more people get a chance to vote and that all the ballots cast are counted have stretched the election night tally deep into November.

“We’re in a rush to get everything done by Thanksgiving,” said John Arntz, San Francisco’s elections director.

The first problem is a simple one: California is a really big state with a lot of people who vote.

By the time all the state’s precincts had reported on election night, about 7.4 million votes had been counted. But by Friday, there were still more than 4.8 million late-arriving and provisional ballots to be tallied.

Those 12.2 million votes are more than the total population of all but the nation’s six largest states. The 4.8 million ballots left to be counted surpass the number of people who live in Louisiana (population: 4.6 million), the 25th-largest state in the union.

Counting that many ballots takes time, and there aren’t many ways to shorten the process, said Sam Mahood, a spokesman for Padilla.

“There are a massive number of ballots, and we have 58 very different counties, each with its own way of counting and its own level of resources,” he said.

Then there’s the problem that while more Californians are getting their ballots in the mail, they don’t all feel compelled to mail them back.

In San Francisco, 67,000 mail ballots were turned in at the polls on election day. “That’s about 13 percent of the city’s 503,000 registered voters,” Arntz said.

Statewide, the bulk of uncounted ballots are mail ballots that arrived too late to be tallied on election day.

“That’s about 40 percent of the turnout,” Mitchell said. “We’ve never had an election that was so heavily weighted toward late ballots.”

While more than two-thirds of the votes in the June primary election came from mail ballots, there are voters who still like the polling place experience, said Kim Alexander of the nonpartisan California Voters Foundation, which works to improve the state’s election process.

“There are people who don’t trust the post office and want the satisfaction of physically dropping their vote off,” she said. “And there are a lot of people who like the election day voting experience, and even voters who want to get that ‘I Voted’ sticker.”

But the biggest reason for California’s long count is a matter of priorities, Mahood said. In tech talk, those delays aren’t a bug, they’re a feature.

“State election law is written to maximize voters’ ability to vote and to have those votes counted,” he said. “It’s better to make sure of getting everyone’s vote counted than to speed things up.”

Recent changes in election rules have made it both easier to vote and more difficult to count those votes quickly.

Mail ballots postmarked by election day are now counted if they arrive by the next Friday. In this election, San Francisco received 20,000 mail ballots Wednesday. Those votes, which would have been rejected in the past, were added to the city’s tally.

For the first time this year, counties are required to inform voters when there’s a problem with a mailed ballot, whether it’s a missing signature or one that doesn’t seem to match the signature on file. Voters have time to make the needed change, even after the election.

“Our signatures may change over time, but that shouldn’t jeopardize our right to have our votes counted,” Padilla said in August when the Legislature passed the measure.

In San Francisco alone, there were more than 500 ballots returned without signatures for this election. Instead of rejecting them, officials had the voters come in and sign their ballots, making them part of the count.

Even when voters return their ballots to the wrong county, California election law provides extra time to get those ballots to where they belong.

Contra Costa County election officials, for example, tweeted a picture of out-of-county ballots they were preparing to send to the proper jurisdictions.

We’re sorting out Vote by Mail ballots to return them to the appropriate county. #cococote #CAVotes pic.twitter.com/lOao2GuEPW

— Contra Costa Elections (@cocoelections) November 8, 2018

“There are a lot of fail-safes in our election process that protect voters,” said Alexander of the voters foundation. “We could certify an election in the week and disenfranchise thousands of voters, and that’s what a lot of states do.”

California gets ridiculed by pundits and others for the time it can take to decide a close election and a certification process that doesn’t provide the final election numbers until early in December, and that’s just not fair, Mitchell said.

“For too many people, politics is a sport and they just want to know who the winner is,” he said. “But that shouldn’t supersede the right of a voter to cast a vote and get it counted.”

The complaints about the process don’t come from everyday Californians, Mahood said.

“The vast majority of voters in California are happy there are safeguards,” he said. “Most of the complaints are Twitter chatter from political insiders who want to know who won.”