Slow Vote Counting is a Problem

Not knowing the results of an election a week later is unacceptable.

While Election Day was last Tuesday and many jurisdictions were voting for weeks before that, we still don’t know for sure which party will have a majority in the House of Representatives and several Senate seats have yet to be certified. There’s no excuse for this in an instant-communication age and the consequences are significant.

Some are merely petty, like this:

POLITICO (“Schumer withholds Senate orientation invite from McCormick“):

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will not allow Sen.-elect Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) to participate in Senate orientation this week because he doesn’t consider the race to be resolved yet.

Though the Associated Press projected Thursday that McCormick defeated Democrat incumbent Bob Casey in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Casey has yet to concede, claiming that there are still thousands of ballots left to be counted.

“With over 100,000 ballots left to be counted in Pennsylvania, the race has not been decided. As is custom, we will invite the winner once the votes are counted,” a spokesperson for Schumer wrote in a statement. As of Sunday at 4:30 p.m., McCormick was ahead by approximately 39,000 votes.

“Schumer is not allowing @DaveMcCormickPA to participate in Senate orientation this week because Casey refuses to concede the race. What happened to all the demands that our leaders accept the outcome of the elections?” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a social media post Sunday.

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) has also not been invited to orientation yet as his race against Republican Kari Lake has yet to be called. Gallego is ahead by approximately 48,000 votes. (The Associated Press has not called that race; the New York Times has not called either the Pennsylvania or Arizona race.)

More importantly, as Sasha Abramsky notes for The Nation (“Western States Are Still Counting Ballots. Here’s Why That Matters.“) the narrative will already be set by the time we know the actual outcome.

[A]s of the end of business Tuesday night, Trump had won by about 4.6 million votes and had received over 50 percent support. But because California, Oregon, and Washington have universal mail-in balloting—because they accept any votes either delivered to a drop box before polls close on Election Day or mailed in on Election Day—they have a peculiarly long vote-counting process.

As a result, by midnight on Tuesday, while it was clear that Harris had won all three states, the final vote tally was still unknown.

Even as of Thursday night, more than 40 percent of the vote was still outstanding in California. In Oregon, 20 percent had not yet been tallied. And in Washington, nearly 15 percent remained to be totaled up. Elsewhere in the west, there were large pools of votes still to be added into the mix in Las Vegas and in Phoenix.

Once all those additional votes are added in, Trump’s claim of an overwhelming popular mandate will look a lot less overwhelming. Yes, he will still have more votes than Harris, but not by as much as he is claiming.

By my calculations, Harris’s vote will top out at somewhere between 73 and 74 million, and Trump will likely end up with between 75 and 76 million. So, yes, he will have outpolled Harris, but not by the 4 or 5 percent that he’s touting. He will have beaten her by between 1 and 2 percent—as several national opinion polls accurately predicted would be the case—and his vote total will probably, by the end of the day, fall just below 50 percent.

[…]

[I]t’s all well and good to make the voting process so inclusive that states accept ballots postmarked by the close of business on Election Day for days, or even weeks after Election Day, but it means that history bypasses them when the media has already shaped the dominant narrative of the election result.

Yes, by the time California, where one in eight Americans lives, finishes counting votes, Trump’s popular support nationally will look rather less impressive than it did on Tuesday night. But, unfortunately, almost no one will be aware of that fact.

[…]

For my money, this is a huge problem. After all, no one remembers a footnote. The message that Trump’s people have put out is that he has an overwhelming popular mandate to implement all of his ghastly, fanatical proposals. Based on the ongoing vote count in California, this appears to simply not be true. Yet by the time California’s vote is fully tallied, the country will have moved on and most people will no longer be paying attention to the state-by-state minutiae of this election.

Surely, there’s a better way to do this than to have a vote count that takes so long to finish that, by the time it is, it’s no longer viscerally connected, in the public’s mind or the media’s coverage, with the election itself.

Beyond that, and perhaps even more importantly, slow counting in a handful of states—when everyone else has managed to be done within hours of the polls closing—practically invites skepticism about the process. Narratives of large tranches of ballots suddenly being “found” and magically helping the other side’s candidates will naturally emerge.

The real reason some states are faster than others, of course, is that they simply have vastly different rules. Some allow a lot more mail-in voting than others. Some have considerably later deadlines than others; California counts votes that arrive as late as a week later, so long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. Some allow counting and related activities to happen on a rolling basis during early voting, while others require that counting start when the polls close.

It seems obvious to me that, for federal elections, Congress should set uniform rules so that all jurisdictions are having the same election at the same time and in the same manner. My strong preference would be to encourage more early voting, if in a tighter window, to maximize turnout. My instinct is to prefer in-person voting but many states have had great success with mail-in voting with little evidence of mischief. Regardless, I’d require ballots to be received by the closing of polls on Election Day to be counted.

We could, of course, all go in the other direction. Abramsky:

When I asked outgoing Representative Katie Porter about this, she argued that, rather than California limiting when ballots can be received by, the rest of the country should adopt the inclusive election policies championed by the three West Coast states.

“Particularly in this moment, where we have seen attacks on the right to vote, I think California, Oregon, and Washington’s model should be the national model,” she said. “In general, it’s not that it’s slow. It’s just that we [California] permit people to vote in every possible secure, legal way up until 8 pm on Election Day. And if you mail it, it takes a while to get there.”

Porter explained that, in her first election, it took nine days for her to be declared the victor. In her second, it took six days.

Yet she is also acutely aware that much of the media, addicted as it is to the horse race, wants results quickly and has no patience for in-the-weeds explanations about California’s elongated vote-count process. The day after the election, Porter approached several leading television shows to suggest that they interview her about California’s vote totals and discuss how Trump’s numbers weren’t as impressive as his team was putting out. One after another, she says, the shows turned Porter down. “It’s a problem,” she acknowledges. “People like to know quickly, and they cut some corners to do it.”

There’s simply no reason, with all of our modern technology, that we can’t have both inclusion and speed. If mail-in balloting is the way to provide maximum access, there’s plenty of time to get ballots out to people in time for them to be returned by Election Day.

Knowing the results of the election by Election Night has long been the norm, not only in the United States but around the world. And information flows much more quickly now than it used to. People simply expect to know the outcomes quickly and will naturally have less faith in the system when it drags on.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Democracy, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Not the IT Dept. says:

    Well, we could do what some other countries do and set up an independent body that handles all the election administration from enumerating voters, distributing authorization documents to voters, running voting stations and training and administering volunteers.

    Seems to work okay in the UK (https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/) and Canada (https://www.elections.ca/home.aspx). Both those countries turn numbers around pretty fast and Brits and Canucks can count on a system that is the same from one end of the country to the other.

    Americans, of course, would probably consider that kind of thing – gasp, shudder – socialism.

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  2. Bill Jempty says:

    Everybody wants results yesterday. Just about with everything else in life.

    Does it matter if the result is known the same day or a week afterwards when the office being voted for won’t change? But an accurate count can matter in a close race. What can haste make again?

    The persons complaining about the slowness just need something to write about.

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  3. charontwo says:

    My instinct is to prefer in-person voting but many states have had great success with mail-in voting with little evidence of mischief.

    We had a two sheet ballot in AZ, both sides.

    Sheet 1 front – various candidates.

    Sheet 1 back – judges (lots of them)

    Sheet 2 front – 15 ballot initiatives, most pretty offensive.

    Sheet 2 back – bonds, authorizations etc.

    Much more convenient to do this at home and mail it back, in person would be a great way to create long lines.

    ETA: In AZ, mailed ballots must be received by 7 PM election day, people are advised not to use mail later than 7 days before.

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  4. James Joyner says:

    @Not the IT Dept.: The UK is a tiny island with a unitary system. Canada is more analogous—a federal system and a huge landmass—but its population is roughly that of California.

    @Bill Jempty: Did you read beyond the headline?

    @charontwo: We have in-person voting in Virginia for weeks on end, so there are hardly any lines at all. My non-expert sense is that it eliminates the intensive “proofing” and verification processes that states with mail-in balloting require. But mail-in voting is certainly better if the population is thin and polling places are miles away.

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  5. Not the IT Dept. says:

    @James Joyner:

    And – so what? We’d clearly need more staff than those two agencies have, granted, but are you saying it would be impossible to implement?

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  6. Bill Jempty says:

    @James Joyner:

    Did you read beyond the headline?

    What like this, James?

    “There’s no excuse for this in an instant-communication age and the consequences are significant.”

    and

    “Schumer is not allowing @DaveMcCormickPA to participate in Senate orientation this week because Casey refuses to concede the race.

    OMG, somebody is going to miss orientation. Democracy will be in crisis because of that!

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  7. Andy says:

    Colorado has an all mail system for many years now and generally we don’t have these problems. Our system does require ballots to arrive by election day, so we don’t rely on postmarks. Ballots can also be counted as soon as they are received, speeding up the process. Colorado’s system has been in place for a decade, so both the voting precincts and voting population are experienced with it, unlike most of the states that have recently adopted mail voting.

    Close elections here can cause delays because voters have 8 days to cure a ballot that fails signature verification, so if there are enough uncured/provisional ballots to potentially determine the winner, the that can cause a delay.

    By contrast, California’s system is new and they have aspects which ensure slowness, like receiving ballots a week after the election and allowing up to 30 days to cure ballots and verify provisional ballots. But that doesn’t really explain why there are so many ballots that have arrived but are still not counted unless a huge percentage of California ballots are provisional or need curing, which would be strange.

    @Not the IT Dept.:

    January 6th is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t want centralized election control.

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  8. Not the IT Dept. says:

    @Andy: “January 6th is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t want centralized election control.”

    And yet, funnily enough, neither of those countries have experienced the equivalent of January 6 and their systems have been in place for decades. Hmm. Wonder why that might be… Hmmm.

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  9. charontwo says:

    @James Joyner:

    I remember voting early in Houston, line was pretty long, there a while. Not a very long or complex ballot either.

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  10. Bill Jempty says:

    Next up for somebody in the MSM to write- How the WPO not endorsing Harris cost her votes.

    Maybe somebody has done that already. I haven’t checked.

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  11. Andy says:

    @Not the IT Dept.:

    They don’t have Presidential systems where the Executive has a huge amount of power and is directly elected. They don’t have weak parties and a primary system that would allow someone like Trump to take over a party. There are lots of other reasons, but those are the two biggest.

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  12. Scott says:

    @charontwo: Here in Harris County (Houston area) we had 78 ballot choices to make. About 5 pages. Being the OCD adjacent person that I am, I printed the ballot out, filled in my choices, and took it with me to the voting center. Texas no longer has a straight ticket voting option. I guarantee (because I actually saw it) that people walked into the voting center and that was the first time they were thinking about how they were going to vote. I would prefer the mail in option since that is essentially what I am doing anyway.

    But that won’t happen in Texas because Texas goal is to put a lot of administrative barriers to voter registration, voter information, and actual voting itself.

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  13. Al Ameda says:

    Well what is it? Trump told us that Mail-In Voting was bad, rife with fraud. Now that he won, it seems there is no problem with Mail-In Voting. Somehow this problem was solved. It was a miracle.

    Seriously, though. As Andy observed above, CA has a lengthy time in which to cure votes.

    This didn’t matter much when the vast majority voted in person. Now that has flipped, so many more people vote by mail, and various states have varying rules regarding when those ballots may be tabulated for the official result. Unless this is addressed I’m not sure we can do anything about this.

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  14. James Joyner says:

    @Not the IT Dept.: Not impossible, just harder to scale since we have a federal structure. Right now, elections are entirely staffed by local volunteers. We’d have to essentially start over to create that style of system.

    @Scott: This is a strong point. Because Virginia does local elections in off-off-years, I had only three offices (President, Senator, and US Representative) on my ballot plus four or five referenda on the back page.

    @Al Ameda: The whole point of the post is that Congress should set uniform rules. There’s no reason that we can’t have mail-in balloting, a uniform standard for curing, allow processing ballots as they come in, and seta deadline that allows votes to be counted on time.

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  15. Not the IT Dept. says:

    @Andy:

    Well, it would have to be adjusted for our own circumstances. But surely there’s a middle-ground that would result in a better system, less subject to the whims of states than what we have now? Why couldn’t an independent agency take care of voter registration right across the country?

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  16. steve says:

    We forgot to sing up for mail in voting. We waited in line for 2 1/2 hours. Never again. I would rather make it easier to vote and get as many people to vote as reasonably possible rather than focus on immediate results.

    Steve

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  17. Sleeping Dog says:

    Here in Cow Hampshire the turnout was ~75% and I believe I stood in line with all of them. While NH has “absentee” balloting, if you want to use that simply to vote early you need to tell a white lie. Not enough do and when I arrived at a normal “lull” time in the voting, the line was about 500 yards long and quickly extended beyond the high school and off the school property. Took me an hour, fifteen minutes to get into the building, but only an additional 15 with the new voter authentication system and a short ballot. 1 page, Federal offices and governor, exec council, and legislature, plus one constitutional amendment. easy peasy.

    Except for a few dozen provisional ballots, mostly same day registration, the town reported the results within 2 hours of the polls closing. State wide, the victors were pretty much announced by 10PM, but we are still waiting on some state legislative seats due to possible recounts.

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  18. Andy says:

    @Not the IT Dept.:

    The devil is in the details. How much authority would this independent agency have over the rules? How would its leadership be selected? Is there really a widespread desire for a uniform system? Which system gets chosen – there is significant disagreement in the country over what is the best system. Any federal system will only apply to federal elections – states could retain duplicate/parallel registration and voting systems for state and local elections, which would create confusion. Like what James noted about Virginia, states could start holding state and local elections on different dates which would be de facto voter suppression on a huge scale.

    I’m not 100% against this idea, but I think it has many practical and political challenges that I’d need to hear answers for. There is also the question of Constitutionality and the extent and scope to which the federal government can utilize the elections clause in the Constitution.

    Personally, I’d rather see Congress pass a set of standards that states would then have to follow. That would give a more uniform system while not centralizing administration. But again, there is and would be huge disagreement about what those should be, so it’s not at all likely.

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  19. Kathy says:

    It makes more logical sense to set a postmark rather than a delivery deadline. People have more control over when they drop off their ballot at a mailbox, than when the mail gets delivered. In California’s case, the issue seems to be a rather late deadline for the postmark (election day).

    Very often when there’s an issue, one finds that people, namely people’s expectations, are the problem. As often we also find it’s easier to change things than people. All too commonly, changing things is possible while changing people, or enough of them, is impossible (at least without coercion; see the trump pandemic).

    Even changing things can bother some people, who tend not to like changing things even when they are better, cheaper, or both. Adn even things that don’t materially change anything. For some reason, there was a hell of a lot of pushback on LED traffic lights, though they were better and cheaper even when accounting for the added expense of making them snow-proof.

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  20. Eusebio says:

    @Andy:

    But that doesn’t really explain why there are so many ballots that have arrived but are still not counted unless a huge percentage of California ballots are provisional or need curing, which would be strange.

    Right. It’s not new that California is slow to count votes (see Katie Porter example), so it’s apparently a matter of priorities. CA is the worst example of slow counting, magnified by the fact that it’s the largest reservoir of votes, but it’s not the only one. Others such as Utah are somewhat slow, but UT has a relatively small effect on the national popular vote count and no close congressional races waiting to be called.

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  21. charontwo says:

    @Scott: It’s been a long time (22 years) since I lived in Houston, the city was not so blue back then, and the state government was not so obsessed with suppressing blue city voting.

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  22. Eusebio says:

    Excerpt from The Nation:

    By my calculations, Harris’s vote will top out at somewhere between 73 and 74 million, and Trump will likely end up with between 75 and 76 million… and his vote total will probably, by the end of the day, fall just below 50 percent.

    If there’s a pool on this, put me down for 75.8 million Harris and 78.5 million Trump, with a 50.01 percent share of the popular vote because it would be his dumb luck to get a majority.

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  23. Al Ameda says:

    @James Joyner:

    The whole point of the post is that Congress should set uniform rules. There’s no reason that we can’t have mail-in balloting, a uniform standard for curing, allow processing ballots as they come in, and seta deadline that allows votes to be counted on time.

    I too, believe that uniform federal election standards should be adopted.
    That said, I have no confidence whatsoever that a filibuster-proof majority would pass such legislation.

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  24. Michael Cain says:

    @Andy:
    Even a century later, and despite all the immigration from Back East in the last few decades, odd bits from the Progressive Age still show up in western states. I view vote by mail as an extension — initiatives and recalls are less effective if it’s hard for people to vote, so make it as easy as possible.

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  25. Eusebio says:

    I would not want to rely on a legible postmark being applied to my ballot envelope, so even if envelopes postmarked by election day did count, dropping it in the mail within 7 days of the election would be a fingers-crossed, last resort method.

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  26. Andy says:

    @Michael Cain:

    I think it was you that has noted in the past about how the mountain states are different in several way from most of the rest of the country, probably the product of being among the last to gain statehood.

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  27. Not the IT Dept. says:

    @Andy:

    Click on the links I provided and you’ll get the answers to your questions.

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  28. Bill Jempty says:

    @Eusebio:

    Others such as Utah are somewhat slow,

    Those darn Mormons! Can’t they stop worrying about the pecking order of their wives and get down to counting votes instead?

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  29. Paul L. says:

    Election denier Bob Casey still waiting for the ballots from a Philadelphia election official’s trunk to show up.

    Knowing the results of the election by Election Night has long been the norm, not only in the United States but around the world.

    What other countries allow universal mail in voting?
    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/countries-mail-voting-banned/

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  30. Jack says:

    “It seems obvious to me that, for federal elections, Congress should set uniform rules so that all jurisdictions are having the same election at the same time and in the same manner. My strong preference would be to encourage more early voting, if in a tighter window, to maximize turnout.”

    I think that’s a Bingo.

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  31. Mister Bluster says:

    I can’t find any more recent information on this matter. So much for the immediacy of news on the internet.

    Dateline: Murphysboro IL, November 6, 2024
    Jackson Co. Illinois State’s Attorney race too close to call
    A rare event happened in Jackson County, Illinois on Election Day: the incumbent state’s attorney and his opponent received the exact same number of votes.
    With 10,805 votes apiece, Jackson Co. State’s Attorney Joe Cervantez and his opponent, Marsha Cascio-Hale, ended Election Day in a tie.
    Jackson Co. Clerk Frank Byrd said this is a first in his county. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Byrd said mail-in and provisional ballots may decide the race.
    Those ballots will be counted over the next 13 days. Then, hopefully, voters in Jackson Co. will know who will fill the seat of state’s attorney.

    My car was at Vogler Ford Garage for repair with an estimated time of completion Monday, November 4. When they told me that it would not be done until sometime Tuesday I started to think that I should have voted early instead of waiting for election day. Not to worry. Car fixed and I made it to the polling place in time to cast my ballot for the Democratic candidate. I will never again think that my vote doesn’t count.

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  32. just nutha says:

    @Jack: More early voting, but with a tighter window usually requires more polling places. How does your municipality feel about shifting money from, say police and fire protection, to pay for more polling places, voting machines, etc.?

    Higher taxes, maybe?

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  33. Ken_L says:

    The Queensland state election was held on October 26. More than 10% of votes remain to be counted, because the rules are not only similar to California’s, but absentee voting* is allowed on election day. I actually dropped my postal vote in the box on election eve, but it wouldn’t have been picked up by Australia Post until the following Monday.

    Nobody of any consequence regards this as a problem. If it takes two weeks to decide who won, it takes two weeks. No harm is done. On this occasion the result became obvious within a day, and the new government is already busy at work, but there have been elections over the years where the outcome wasn’t known for some days. Again, nobody found that sinister. They were just very close elections which hinged on the distribution of second and sometimes third preferences (I note Alaska with its ranked choice voting is also slow this year).

    *In Australian federal elections you can go into any polling booth in the country on election day and vote, even if you’re on the other side of the country to your registered address! They just look you up on the electoral role, dig out the ballot papers for your electorate, and you’re good to vote.

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  34. Ken_L says:

    @Not the IT Dept.:

    Well, we could do what some other countries do and set up an independent body that handles all the election administration

    That’s the Australian system. The Australian Electoral Commission is responsible for running elections. It’s staffed by career public servants. I have always considered the US system, where elected politicians are responsible for running their own elections, a surefire way to undermine confidence in the integrity of the process.

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