President Donald Trump has been having a field day with the agonizingly slow vote count in California’s primary.

“The Dumocrats are at it again!” he posted on Truth Social on Thursday. “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.”

Which, of course, set off a frenzy of “Trump lies” responses by Democrats and the press.

But even if Trump is wrong about fraud, he’s right to complain about this laughably inept process.

As of this writing, two full days after polls closed, just 60% of the votes for governor, and less than two-thirds of the votes for the Los Angeles mayoral race have been counted. In a primary election.

As a result, three days after the polls closed, none of the Republicans running for governor or mayor knows if he will qualify for the general election in November.

NBC 4 Los Angeles, in an article attempting to explain the slow count, said that “the nation’s most populous state prioritizes accuracy and accessibility over speed.”

Then it goes on to say that “ballots are mailed to every eligible voter — some 23 million of them — and the state has permissive rules for returning them.” Ballots “will be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at an election office within seven days.” [Emphasis added.]

So, what the reporter should have said is that California doesn’t prioritize accuracy at all.

It prioritizes convenience, often at the expense of accuracy.

Mailing out 23 million ballots to people who never asked for an absentee ballot might make it easier to vote, but it throws the door wide open to fraud. How many of those ballots get sent to the wrong address? To people who’ve died? To people who’ve left the state?

Judicial Watch claims that there are more than 800,000 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who shouldn’t be there. Yet mail-in ballots go out to each and every one of them.

(One of us who recently moved to California has received multiple mail-in ballots for people who no longer live at that address.)

Worse, California also allows ballot harvesting – which lets third parties deliver a limitless number of mail-in ballots – another open invitation to fraud.

And California voters are supposed to believe that ballot counters meticulously study every mail-in ballot that arrives days after the election to make sure signatures match those on file, the postmarks are correct, etc.

Why should Republicans in a state dominated by far-left Democrats trust this system? Especially when they watch their leads slowly evaporate as all these late-arriving ballots get counted by people who have a vested interest in keeping Republicans out of office?

Even if the system isn’t rife with fraud, California voters deserve better than this. Because the appearance of fraud is just as bad as its actual existence.

–  Written by the I&I Editorial Board