"We ask the public's patience," a representative of Governor Gavin Newsom's office posted.
Sacramento, December 11 - The Golden State continued today to withhold its official verdict on the outcome of events in Syria, despite the elapse of nearly four days since the vast majority of other states finished their tallies and declared winners and losers.
California officials reiterated this morning that the painstaking process of ascertaining whether Syrian incumbent Basher Assad will remain in office has yet to conclude, even as nearly every other reporting area determined by this past Sunday morning that Assad had been removed.
"We ask the public's patience," a representative of Governor Gavin Newsom's office posted on X. "The State of California takes a deliberate approach, and will not rest until the desired outcome is achieved."
Analysts differed on the solidly-Democratic state leadership's preferred outcome: some surmise that the party's dominant progressive wing, which carries even more influence in California than elsewhere in the Union, sees Assad as a proven ally in confronting the "Zionist entity," under Shiite Iran's aegis; others see California Democrats as eschewing support for Assad per se when the apparent alternative, a group of violent Sunni Islamists, sits closer to the sympathies of the party's core values.
Other jurisdictions concluded already in the wee hours of Saturday night and Sunday that Assad had lost his bid to remain in power. Accounts of a plane carrying him, possibly to Moscow, circulated, including information that the plane went down over a rebel-held area. No confirmation or Assad's welfare or whereabouts were available most of Sunday, but reports later emerged that he had fled to Russia.
California, however, has long maintained a reputation for slower electoral record-keeping. Its count of presidential and Congressional ballots cast on November 5 - or mailed in earlier - took weeks, when no other US state had much trouble producing a final count within hours of polls closing.
Both the US ballot-counting and the Assad-downfall acknowledgement have prompted or reinforced suspicions, especially among partisan critics, that the Democrat-controlled apparatus in the state aims not to produce an honest reckoning but one favorable to the Democratic Party establishment, through selective disqualification of votes for Republican candidates in a process that could not achieve such results were they to tally ballots at a normal pace. In terms of Assad, pro-Iran and pro-Assad - or just anti-Israel - hope to secure an outcome that will keep Assad in power in Damascus, given his regime's reliable service as a conduit for Iranian arms and money transfers to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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