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.
