By Rich Lowry
Tuesday,
October 22, 2024
Elon
Musk can land a rocket booster back at the launch tower minutes after it
takes off, but swing states can’t count votes in a timely manner.
Unlike
recovering a rocket booster, vote-counting is not complicated and requires no
advanced engineering.
We’ve
managed to do it expeditiously and accurately through all of our history, yet
it is at this moment — when Donald Trump will cast doubt on any result he
doesn’t like, and trust in our institutions is low — that we’ve hobbled our
ability to complete this simple task.
We
no longer have Election Night; we have Election Days. In 2020, the general
election was held on Tuesday, November 3, but most media organizations didn’t
call it until Saturday, November 7.
This
kind of delay is a national embarrassment. It creates uncertainty and breeds
distrust, and it’s also completely unnecessary.
The
culprit is early voting, or how some states go about processing — or more
accurately, not processing — the early vote. Only in government is it possible
to have people do something well in advance and still have it end up delaying
everything, out of easily fixable bureaucratic ineptitude.
Consider
Pennsylvania. It embraced no-excuse mail voting in 2019 without making the
necessary changes to count these ballots in a timely manner.
In
their wisdom, the Pennsylvania authorities don’t allow election employees to
begin processing the early and absent vote until 7 a.m. on Election Day,
ensuring that they can’t cope. (There is something else important happening on
Election Day — yes, you guessed it, the administering of an election.)
There
are a lot of steps that go into the so-called pre-canvassing of mail and
absentee ballots, from confirming that the outer envelopes are signed and
dated, to opening the outer and inner envelopes, to unfolding the ballot
itself.
Most
states allow this work to happen before Election Day, because that’s the
rational thing to do.
Lawmakers
in Pennsylvania have deadlocked along partisan lines over whether, and how, to
do the same. Republicans have wanted a voter-ID requirement as part of a change
to the process, while Democrats have opposed that provision. So the Keystone
State will once again conduct its vote-counting in an absurd manner that ill
serves the nation.
(Some
Republicans worry that pre-canvassing will allow Democrats to learn how many
fraudulent votes they need to produce to win. Pre-canvassing doesn’t involve
the actual tabulating of ballots, though, and there is zero evidence that it
has abetted widespread fraud in other states where it is the norm.)
It’d
be one thing if we didn’t know the results in Alabama or Massachusetts, states
that are deep red or blue, on Election Night. But with Pennsylvania likely to
have delays, as well as Wisconsin and Arizona, we are talking about the very
most sensitive, important states on the map.
An
erstwhile swing state, Florida, provides a model. It has a massive early vote
and yet rapid tabulating. Counties in the state process early ballots before
Election Day. It helps that the state doesn’t allow ballots arriving after 7 p.m.
on Election Day to be counted, avoiding the problems of states that, foolishly,
permit post-election ballots.
Florida’s
opposite in this, as in so much else, is California. The Golden State has made
a practice of overwhelming itself with mail-in ballots. It still hadn’t counted
a third of its ballots after Election Day in 2020, and kept counting for weeks.
This year, ballots arriving up to a week after the election will be considered
valid. A Democratic assemblyman told the AP that the state doesn’t need to
please “a society that wants immediate gratification,” as if there’s something
wrong with expecting expeditious, reliable election results.
It
might seem facetious to say that Elon Musk will manage to send a rocket to Mars
before states figure out how to eliminate intolerable delays in the vote count,
but with Musk hoping to do that just a couple of years from now, it’s almost
certainly true.
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