Now that the 2024 election is a full month behind us, and now that California has finished counting votes and stealing House seats from Republicans, we should probably figure out what went wrong.

Or is it unreasonable to expect this one-party Democrat-controlled state to count its votes within a reasonable period of time, just like the other 49 do?

“It took 28 days, but Adam Gray is finally going to Congress,” the Washington Examiner reports. “Nearly a month after the election on November 5, the Democratic nominee for California’s 13th Congressional District was finally declared the winner in a very close race that was the last to be called.”

According to the Associated Press, Gray beat his Republican opponent, incumbent John Duarte, by less than 200 votes. What are the odds? It’s almost as if the Democrats kept counting votes until they had enough and then found a couple hundred more just to make it look legit.

“Duarte’s defeat,” adds the Examiner, “marks the latest setback for Republicans in California. Reps. Mike Garcia (R-CA) and Michelle Steel (R-CA) were also defeated by Democratic opponents in the 2024 election. Steel’s race also took several weeks to call, with her defeat only officially being announced on November 27.” Again, what are the odds?

Gray’s seat was the last of the 435 House seats to be called, so we now know that Republicans will have a razor-thin 220-215 majority in the House. But that number will dwindle, at least temporarily, to 217, as the Republican conference will lose three members to appointments to Donald Trump’s cabinet: New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador; Florida Congressman Michael Waltz as national security advisor; and another Florida Congressman, Matt Gaetz, who resigned his House seat in a failed attempt to become Trump’s attorney general.

Once again, the Democrats’ massive bulk-mail ballot fraud strategy worked.

It’s essential that we clean things up. And we can start by holding national elections to a higher vote-counting standard. As the Washington Examiner’s editorial board argues: “If some state and local jurisdictions want to keep their current crazy mail-in voting systems for state and local elections, they should be free to do so. If Oakland, California, wants to take a month to find out who its mayor is, that’s fine. But for federal elections with national implications, voters across the country deserve to know what the balance of power will be in the House and Senate on election night.”

What a novel idea.

Two more wins for voting integrity would be to demand proof of U.S. citizenship and voter ID in all national elections. These are ideas whose time has come.

Just before Election Day 2024, I noted three remarkable findings within a recent Gallup survey: first, that 76% of U.S. adults favor the concept of early voting; second, that 83% favor proof of citizenship when registering to vote for the first time; and third, that 84% say photo ID should be a requirement prior to voting.

In a narrowly divided country, these findings suggest rare and overwhelming bipartisan support. If congressional Republicans are smart, they’ll be pounding the last two of these ideas incessantly between now and the 2026 midterms.

In his 2021 book Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich devoted a whole chapter to election integrity. His formula? “To get to the election system that is best for Americans and our system of government … we need to establish a simple, accepted goal: every American citizen who is eligible to vote should be able to do so securely and easily and have his or her vote counted — exactly once. Every election rule we make must be in pursuit of this goal and no other.”