Mail-in voting has turned our elections into a national disgrace | News, Sports, Vacancies

Elon Musk can land a rocket booster back on the launch tower minutes after it takes off, but swing states can’t count the votes in a timely manner.

Unlike rebuilding a rocket booster, counting votes is not difficult and does not require any complex engineering solutions.

We have been able to do this quickly and accurately throughout our history, but it is at this moment—with Donald Trump questioning any outcome he doesn’t like and trust in our institutions low—that we are slowing down our ability to accomplish this simple task.

We no longer have Election Night; It’s election days. In 2020, the general election took place on Tuesday, November 3rd, but most media outlets did not call it until Saturday, November 7th.

This delay is a national disgrace. This creates uncertainty and breeds mistrust, and is completely unnecessary.

The culprit is early voting, or the way some states are handling—or more accurately, not handling—early voting. Only in government is it possible to get people to do something ahead of time, but it ends up being delayed by easily corrected bureaucratic incompetence.

Consider Pennsylvania. In 2019, it adopted no-excuse mail voting without making the necessary changes to count those ballots in a timely manner.

In their wisdom, Pennsylvania officials do not allow election officials to begin processing early and absentee ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, ensuring they will fall through the cracks. (There’s something else important going on on Election Day—yes, you guessed it, election management.)

So-called advance collection of mail and absentee ballots involves many steps, from confirming that the outer envelopes are signed and dated to opening the outer and inner envelopes and unwrapping the ballot itself.

Most states allow this work to take place before Election Day because it is reasonable.

Lawmakers in Pennsylvania are deadlocked along partisan lines over whether and how to do the same. Republicans wanted a voter ID requirement to be part of the process change, while Democrats opposed the provision. Thus, the Cornerstone State will once again conduct vote counting in an absurd manner that will bring harm to the nation.

(Some Republicans fear that the primary campaign will let Democrats know how many fraudulent votes they need to win to win. However, the primary campaign does not involve actual vote counting, and there is no evidence that it has contributed to widespread fraud in other states where it norm.)

It would 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 since Pennsylvania, as well as Wisconsin and Arizona, are likely to see delays, we’re talking about very sensitive and important states on the map.

Former swing state Florida provides a model. Mass early voting is carried out there and results are quickly tabulated. Counties across the state are conducting early voting before Election Day. It helps that the state does not allow ballots that arrive after 7 pm on Election Day to be counted, avoiding the problem of states foolishly allowing post-election voting.

In this, as in many other things, California is the opposite of Florida. The Golden State has made a point of suppressing itself by voting by mail. After Election Day 2020, he still hadn’t counted a third of his ballots and had been counting for weeks. This year, ballots received within a week of the election will be considered valid. A Democratic legislator told the AP that the state doesn’t need to cater to “a public that wants instant gratification,” as if there was anything wrong with waiting for quick and reliable election results.

It may seem like a joke to say that Elon Musk will be able to send a rocket to Mars before the states figure out how to fix the insufferable delays in counting votes, but Musk hopes to do it in just a couple of years, and it’s almost certainly true. .

Rich Lowery is a writer for King Features Syndicate.