In nearly every area of American life, the 21st century has accustomed us to faster service, faster delivery, and faster information. We get news as it happens, not from the evening news, the next day’s newspaper, or even the next hour’s broadcast. We get movies on demand at home, not months after their release or from rental stores or mailed DVDs. We get same-day deliveries of books, groceries, even furniture. We can order coffee from our phones so it’s ready when we reach the front of the line. We can hold instant arguments with strangers a thousand miles away over politics.
Yet somehow, the counting of votes only seems to get slower. Worse, the glacial pace at which some cities and states count votes is ever more visible to voters. Websites and cable news can keep us glued to screens as the tallies rise, and then stop, before those counting go to bed for the night, or even sometimes subtract things that were added to the count by error. The marriage of more transparency for the totals with less speed and the necessary limits on transparency of the counting process itself have combined to provide all sorts of dry tinder for rigged-election conspiracy theories, especially when there are patterns of tranches of Democratic votes being counted last. Demagogues have been predictably swift in throwing lit matches.
Different jurisdictions have different problems. Blue cities are almost always the last in their states to report tallies. New York and California seem to count in geologic time. Republican state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have resisted the pre-canvassing of mailed-in ballots, a procedure used in Florida and other states to expedite the counting of those ballots on Election Night. Liberal activist courts have been barred by federal law since 2002 from holding the polls open late in favored locales, but they still create mischief in other ways, such as throwing out deadlines designed to ensure that all ballots arrive by Election Day (as Pennsylvania’s supreme court did in 2020). Alaska’s overly complex ranked-choice voting system, which was designed to require all ballots to be physically retrieved from remote parts of the state, meant that a special House election in August could not report results for two weeks. New York City’s experiment with ranked-choice voting in its Democratic mayoral primary in 2021 had similar problems. Same-day voter registration also produces delay, because it increases the number of votes cast through provisional ballots.
None of this is necessary. Many other advanced democracies resolve their elections in one night. While we prefer our system to the political systems of Britain, France, or Israel, and while our country is much larger and spread over different jurisdictions and multiple time zones, there is no good reason why our vote-counting system should be this much slower.
There is no single solution to slow vote-counting, but there are some obvious ways in which the process can be improved. Pre-canvassing is one. Additionally, courts should be barred from extending the deadlines to submit ballots, absent truly catastrophic circumstances. States should replace incompetent local elections officials and adequately fund jurisdictions that need more help getting votes counted quickly. Voter registration should be closed far enough ahead of Election Day to ensure that every polling place has up-to-date voter rolls. Indeed, given the pervasiveness of early voting and advances in technology, there is no longer even a reason for most overseas military ballots to arrive late unless service members are in an active theater of combat; Congress could impose more standardization in on-base and shipboard voting.
It can be done. Florida, the nation’s laughingstock for vote-counting in 2000, has become a national leader in swift and transparent vote tallies, thanks to a series of reforms instituted by Jeb Bush and continued through its current governor, Ron DeSantis. Other states should imitate its advances. Some sources of mistrust in our election system are harder to repair than others, but this one is self-inflicted. Count all the votes on Election Night.