Well done, California Democrats.

We weren’t sure you could do it, but you came through.

In just one primary election you managed to pull off a rare trifecta of political infamy for the Golden State: the embarrassment of a vote-counting system that takes so long it would have looked obsolete in colonial Virginia; the shame of an election process that invites deep suspicion about the integrity of the democratic order at a time of historically low public trust; and the misery of an outcome that just about guarantees the same misrule by the same people responsible for the dysfunction and chaos that is steadily bleeding the state dry. 

Last month, Gavin Newsom issued a call to election officials across the state. “We must continue building confidence in our elections and ensure that not only every vote is counted but every vote is trusted,” he wrote, hailing new rules and procedures that were supposed to speed up the vote counting. 

How’s that working out for you?

The state that is home to companies whose technologies can perform the most complex tasks in nanoseconds was still counting votes a week after the polls closed.

To Gov. Newsom and his party, this is progress. To the rest of the planet, it just looks like a joke.  

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton was right to say that “the world is laughing” at California’s snail-paced ballot counting, but for Californians, it’s no laughing matter. 

By midnight in Florida on election night, almost all the votes are counted and results declared. In California, they’re barely getting started. 

For a state already losing the reputation battle to more dynamic, nimbler rivals, the electoral shambles is more evidence that California is failing. 

But it’s not just embarrassing. It undermines faith in democracy itself.

There’s no hard evidence of widespread fraud in this month’s primary, but the way California conducts its election seems almost designed to undermine public trust in the process.

The manner in which Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Rahman steadily overtook Spencer Pratt’s solid lead days after the initial vote count may just about be explicable by the disproportionately high number of Democrats who mail in their ballots –– and whose votes are counted late.

But it had a distinct throwback quality to the days when Democratic machines in American cities would hold back their vote counts until they new exactly how many their candidate “needed” to pull ahead. 

In classic California fashion, the panoply of rules supposedly designed to make ballots fairer and more trusted have the opposite effect: allowing seven days for mailed-in ballots to arrive; elaborate signature verification processes; forms of identity with laughably weak security like gym memberships, ballot harvesting and great dumps of votes garnered by partisan activists. 

No wonder trust in the process is slumping. 

But worse than the process of this year’s primary election, of course, is the seemingly inevitable result it produced once again. 

In LA, Pratt’s defeat and the prospect of a runoff between two Democrats is not only a depressing reminder of the rancid stagnation you get when one party has virtually unaccountable control. 

It’s another indictment of the way in which the state picks its leaders. 

The jungle primary model was supposed to benefit moderate candidates in both parties by encouraging them to seek voters across the political spectrum. Instead, it more often deprives voters of real choice.  

Instead of separate party primaries which produce two candidates who then offer genuinely competing platforms in the general election –– when more people vote –– we have a system that frequently eliminates true choice.  

Karen Bass and Raman now face no restraining alternative from the other side of the political spectrum. 

For a city that has been ravaged by homelessness, crime, failed public responses to emergencies and chronically poor educational opportunities, this is a travesty: The answer to four-plus years of mismanagement is an invitation to choose between the candidate who’s been responsible for it with ruinous Democratic policies, or the candidate offering to outflank her with Democratic policies guaranteed to be more ruinous.

At the state level, at least the jungle primary produced a general election contest with a real choice. Thanks to Republican voters consolidating behind Hilton, he gets to go head to head against quintessential establishment Democrat Xavier Becerra. 

At least Hilton has an opportunity to lay out the promise of a turn away from the endless, vicious vortex of tax and spend policies that have harmed the state’s economy and driven wealthy creators away while doing nothing to improve public services.    

If you want a look at what more Democratic rule would mean, just take a glance at Measure ER in LA County, which as of this writing is ahead. It’s yet another tax increase –– this one a sales tax surcharge supposedly to fund health care but which seems certain to cause only more pain to hard-pressed consumers.

That’s quite a trifecta, Democrats. While you’re celebrating, California is 0-for-3. 

Gerard Baker is editor at large of The Wall Street Journal.

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