In the current print issue, Ryan Mills has a piece about Florida’s vote-counting prowess. The idea that Florida would be a leader in counting votes accurately and quickly would have sounded crazy to an observer of American politics 20 years ago. But “hanging chads” are no more, and the state completely turned its act around.
Mills writes, “Election officials and state leaders spent two decades fine-tuning the system, and in the process the state has become a surprise national leader.” His piece is excellent, and you should read it in full. It provides a good model for government problem-solving.
There are lots of things Americans want government to do in areas over which government his little to no power. Politicians like to pose as problem-solvers while making outlandish campaign promises about things they can’t actually do. But counting votes is entirely within the government’s control, and politicians can improve vote-counting if they put their minds to it.
Mills’s piece on Florida proves that. Florida officials studied best practices in other states, coordinated across state and local governments, passed new laws, purchased new technology, and came up with a vote-counting process that’s fast, accurate, and trustworthy. One of the top reasons for the improvement is a relatively simple fix that other states could implement by changing their laws: Florida allows mail-in ballots to be counted before Election Day.
Progress hasn’t been linear, and 2018 saw some vote-counting issues, but Mills writes that Florida officials corrected the mistakes from that year:
After the election, Florida lawmakers crafted new bipartisan fixes to prevent a repeat, including a mandate that counties have vote-counting machines capable of conducting multiple recounts at once, and a requirement that voting instructions be centered across the top of the ballot or printed on the left side, with no races beneath.
Maybe a new problem will crop up in the future. That’s one of the reasons we elect legislators, to adjust laws and rules as necessary to adapt to changing circumstances. Maybe some other state will come up with a better way to count votes. Legislators should pay attention and adopt best practices no matter what state they come from.
Plenty of the problems we try to solve through politics are founded on intractable differences in worldview. They’re questions of morality on which people seriously and genuinely disagree. But vote-counting, as Mills quotes an election official as saying, is “a question of equipment and staff.” It’s a question of government’s adopting better processes within itself to perform a basic function we all expect it to perform in a democracy.
It’s inevitable that politicians are going to make pie-in-the-sky promises they can’t keep, but could some of them focus a little more on making promises about things they actually fully control? Florida’s vote-counting success is repeatable, and the state’s current and former officials seem willing to share their recipe with anyone who wants it. The marathon vote-counting processes some states have are a choice, and politicians can (and should) choose differently.