Why hasn't the US finished counting the US presidential votes?

Problems with ballots such as stains or voter identification make the vote counting process take a long time.

California is still counting votes for the US presidential election. Photo: npr

Two weeks after election day, Hillary Clinton led US President-elect Donald Trump by two million popular votes, but Mr. Trump was the overall winner because he won the electoral votes.

Clinton's popular vote lead is expected to grow in the coming weeks — largely because California, a populous state that leans Democratic, has yet to finish counting its votes, according to NPR.

One reason California takes so long to count ballots is because of coffee stains on mail-in ballots. California allows voters to register to vote by mail, as long as they submit their application at least seven days before Election Day.

“The coffee stain looks like an oval,” said Sacramento County registrar of voters Alice Jarboe. “So we have to remove all the coffee stains.”

It appears some Californians filled out their ballots while having breakfast, as not only coffee stains, jams and jellies are also factors that make it difficult to count ballots.

“We did see those on the ballots,” Jarboe said. “They jammed the counting machines, so we had to make copies of those ballots.”

Reproducing a ballot is not a quick job. Two election workers will work together to duplicate damaged ballots.“One person would read it, the other person would mark it up,” Jarboe said. “And then they would cross-check it to make sure it was copied correctly.”

A quality control team will check it one more time. The damaged ballot is eventually stamped with a large blue "no longer valid" stamp.

Jarboe said there was a quicker fix than using a correction pen: "We'll erase the problematic ovals. Sometimes voters will make a mistake and then cross them out to re-select, and we'll erase the part they didn't want and put a star on the ballot - a sign that the ballot has been corrected," she said.

There are also "provisional ballots" that take longer to process.Provisional ballots are used when there is doubt about whether a voter is eligible to vote, such as when the voter fails to present identification, the voter's name does not appear on the list in a certain precinct, or the person's registration contains incorrect information such as an incorrect address or name.

Verification “slows down the counting process,” said Paul Mitchell, one of California’s top election analysts. “But if you trade off the speed of counting votes for the disenfranchisement of some people, I don’t think it’s worth it.”

California counties have more than two weeks to certify their final ballot counts. Several other large states, like Florida and Virginia, have already done so.

Mitchell said California's slow vote counting left Americans with an inaccurate understanding of election results.“Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead is now much larger than it was announced on Election Day or even in the days after the election,” he said. “And that gap is widening.”

It is likely that 14 million voters cast ballots in California, and Clinton won the state by a margin of nearly 2:1. However, the popular vote margin did not affect the final result. Clinton was determined to win California and its 55 electors. The reason Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote was because she won big in populous states that traditionally leaned Democratic, and lost by a narrow margin in some other states.

Mitchell estimates that Clinton would likely beat Mr Trump by 2.5 million popular votes nationwide - the largest margin for an electoral vote loser.

The Electoral College system is designed to give small, rural states a voice and a stake in the election. It requires candidates to strategically carry enough states to get at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes. After his victory, Mr. Trump praised the system as “bringing all the states into play, even the smaller ones.”

He said that if the election results were based on the popular vote, he would change his strategy, campaigning in big cities like New York, Florida, California and would "win even more easily and decisively".

According to VNE