Why do elections take longer and longer to count, when everything else is getting faster?
Why do elections take longer and longer to count, when everything else is getting faster?
F lorida, Texas, and other states were able to count all but a handful of votes by midnight of Election Day. How is it that some states, including Arizona and Nevada, with much smaller populations, have become so much slower at counting votes in the era of Amazon, when everything else is delivered faster and better?
Maricopa County, Ariz., which includes Phoenix, claims it will need until at least Tuesday — a week after the election — to process uncounted ballots. In Nevada, more than 100,000 uncounted ballots, many dropped off by partisan “ballot harvesters” on Election Day, left the country in suspense for days over control of the U.S. Senate.
Both Arizona and Nevada have switched to largely all mail-in voting. Not only does this slow down the vote count, but it also raises genuine security concerns. In Las Vegas, which has 60 percent of Nevada’s population, there is a potential for mischief when ballots are automatically mailed to voters who have not requested them (and who may not even live at the address where they were mailed).
In Arizona, if a ballot has a mismatched signature, voters are able to “cure” (meaning fix) it through next Wednesday.
In 2020 and also this year, observers noted apartment buildings in Las Vegas with piles of ballots that had been sent to outdated addresses, haphazardly accumulated on tables in the lobby.
Even if nothing inappropriate happens, the confusion and lack of security surrounding mail-in ballots generate suspicions of monkey business, especially in skin-tight races, as in both of these states.
Mail-in voting has turned Election Day into Election Month, and an increase in cynicism about elections has accompanied its rise. This cynicism only deepens our partisan animosity.
In 2008, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that states could require voter ID at the polls. The late justice John Paul Stevens, at that time the most left-wing member of the court, wrote in his majority opinion that “the electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.”
Arizona
In Phoenix this year, county officials unwisely decided to switch the type of ballot tabulator they used between the primary election and the November election. On Election Day, around 30 percent of the county’s vote centers had tabulator-machine problems that prevented ballots weren’t being scanned successfully.
The problems persisted all day, long lines formed, and some frustrated voters gave up. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (a Republican) apologized to anyone who was “frustrated or inconvenienced” by the snafus, but he promised that “every legal vote will be tabulated.” Some 7 percent of people who voted in person had their voted placed in a secure ballot box, a method county officials touted as a “fail-safe” mechanism. But no extra work shifts have been added to count those ballots, and the process hasn’t been completely transparent.
All of this only fuels the erosion of trust in the current mail-in system. “I don’t care what party the election officials are, they are guilty of epic procedural failures,” Gina Swoboda, the head of the Phoenix-based Voter Reference Foundation, told me.
She noted that in 2021, the Arizona State Senate authorized a forensic audit of Maricopa’s 2020 ballot counting. The audit was attacked by critical pundits on both the right and left. It ratified Biden’s victory in the county in 2020, but at the same time found serious administrative problems with the election. Among them:
23,344 “mail-in ballots voted from a prior address.”
9,041 “more ballots returned by voters than received.”
5,295 “voters that potentially voted in multiple counties.”
2,592 “more duplicates than original ballots.”
2,382 “in-person voters who had moved out of Maricopa County.”
Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes in 2020.
Nevada
In Nevada, the state automatically sent 1.8 million mail ballots to all registered voters, unless a voter specifically asked for the state not to. More than 1 million will not be returned but will have floated around the state as a temptation.
This week, Victor Joecks, a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, reported,
With that many ballots floating around, there are obvious security concerns — it’s much easier to get ahold of someone else’s ballot. . . . Election officials, however, claim there is no need to worry. They have asserted signature verification helps prevent someone from successfully casting a ballot that doesn’t belong to them.
As I did two years ago, I tested that theory this election. I had 11 people send me a picture of their ballot envelope. I then wrote their name in my handwriting. Each voter than copied my version of their signature onto their ballot return envelope. They sent me a picture to ensure it wasn’t their normal handwriting. This simulated signing someone else’s ballot.
It’s also legal because each voter signed his or her own ballot.
If signature verification worked, all 11 of those ballots should have been set aside for mismatched signatures. Instead, six were accepted. That’s a greater than 50 percent chance of being accepted. When I did this experiment in 2020 with nine voters, eight had their ballots accepted. That was an almost 90 percent acceptance rate.
Joecks said that in the crush of ballots, the reaction of Nevada officials was to lower standards for acceptance. Any rejected signature must have “multiple, significant and obvious” differences. Two officials have to decide it’s not a match.
Joecks added that his experience is “not a defense of Donald Trump’s latest social media mumblings” about unproven election fraud. But he is strongly urging Nevada to close loopholes It could, for instance, emulate Georgia’s rules for handling mail-in ballots, according to which each ballot must have a unique identifier, such as the last four digits of a driver’s-license number. Georgia enacted election reforms in 2021 and had a smooth and much-praised election process this year.
Another wrinkle in Nevada is that now-defeated Democratic governor Steve Sisolak and a liberal legislature permanently continued the state’s emergency Covid changes in election law, even after the pandemic receded in 2021.
Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, strongly objected to the new Covid rules. She said the mail-in ballot bill was “rushed through with essentially no public feedback” and that her staff “was only told what could be in the bill a day before it was introduced and heard in both houses.” Given the huge significance of election outcomes, it’s only reasonable to allow key stakeholders at least 24 hours to read the bill.
She begged Sisolak to add regulations on ballot harvesting that would have required anyone who collects and turns in ballots for more than ten other voters to register with her office and provide personal information.
Sisolak vigorously rejected her request, accusing her of attempting to “politicize” the process. He said her concerns echo “the voter-suppression rhetoric being heard on the national stage.”
Fixing the Rules
States that have carefully spent time and resources to refine their voter rules don’t have the problems that Arizona and Nevada have.
Florida counted the 7 million votes cast on Tuesday in record time with no reported problems. The state pre-processes incoming mail ballots and requires all votes to be received by Election Day.
Other states have rules that look as if they were almost designed to promote “internal chaos” and delays in the counting process. But the price paid is high: rapidly decreasing public confidence in our system of government. As the Wall Street Journal noted this week, “so far the U.S. has been Las Vegas lucky in avoiding a mail vote debacle (at the national level), but only a fool keeps spinning the roulette wheel.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story stated that Crawford v. Marion County Election Board was decided in 2012, but it was actually in 2008. It has been fixed and we regret the error.