Consider the following, entirely plausible, scenario: It's a full week after the election, and it turns out the electorate had been just a little bit bluer than it really was this year. Not blue, mind you, just a notch bluer, in a handful of places. Let's say Kamala Harris had performed a few points better in Pennsylvania and Michigan, carrying both, and Trump had narrowly held on in Wisconsin. Let's also say that North Carolina and Georgia had swiveled to the right, as they did. With everything else staying exactly the same, out West, Arizona and Nevada are significantly closer -- with outcomes still undetermined. Trump would have collected 261 electoral votes by this point, nine short of clinching the presidency. Harris would be sitting on 260. Both would want to take Nevada, of course, but the only real prize would be Arizona's 11 electoral votes, the winner of which would become president. And under this same hypothetical, let's stipulate that Arizona would be on track for a 2020-level 'photo finish.' For reference, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by three-tenths of a percentage point last cycle, with a margin of just over 10,000 votes, out of more than three million cast.
In such a situation, every ballot 'dump' and count update, arriving at frustratingly irregular intervals, would be scrutinized heavily. Conspiracies and allegations would bloom. With everything on the line, the weight of the world would come down upon a handful of state-level officials, with frantic, high-stakes litigation drawing out and dragging down the process. The eventual losers would cling to any number of adverse abnormalities or judicial decisions as the reason why they didn't really lose an 'illegitimate' election. The process would take not just days, but quite possibly weeks, a destabilizing circus that would undermine already-low public trust in institutions. If this sounds remotely far-fetched, you may have slept through the post-election environment four years ago -- and you've certainly forgotten 2000's Florida debacle.
Twenty-four years ago, the outcome of a presidential election came down to the Sunshine State, spawning a chaotic, messy process that dragged into December. Democrat Al Gore didn't concede until December 13, following weeks of legal wrangling, competing court rulings, and public protests. George W. Bush won, fair and square, would have won by more votes under a full statewide recount (and was almost certainly harmed by news networks wrongly calling the state for Gore while voting was still underway in the most conservative part of the state). But many Democrats never accepted the loss, and their toxic election denialism lingered for years. After the nightmare of hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and other absurd foibles, Florida's governor -- the victor's brother -- set out to ensure that such an embarrassingly spectacle would never play out in his state again. He undertook a fact-finding mission to gather, study, and implement as many best practices on elections logistics as possible. The result was a 2001 overhaul that set Florida on a path, including various updates and fine-tuning over the years, to becoming the nation's gold standard in vote counting:
Five months [after the 2000 election], at the urging of Jeb Bush, the state Legislature enacted a sweeping overhaul of Florida's election rules. The Election Reform Act of 2001 banned the use of punch-card voting machines and required the secretary of state (rather than county-level elections officials) to have the final say over which kinds of voting machines could be used in the future. The law also clarified Florida's rules for automatic recounts and set more stringent time frames for the certification of vote counts—a move intended to prevent the seemingly interminable recounts in 2000. It also created new statewide rules for issuing provisional ballots and how those would be counted, with an eye toward ensuring as many Floridians as possible could vote...
..."Florida is famous among election nerds for having the fastest reporting of vote totals in the country, with near-instant results on election night," says Andy Craig, the director of election policy at the Rainey Center, a centrist think tank. In a report he authored earlier this year, Craig calls Florida's vote-processing procedures "the gold standard" for other states to follow. Per state law, counties can begin processing mailed-in ballots up to 25 days before Election Day. That includes just about everything except the actual counting: checking that signatures are valid and that the votes have been legally submitted. Counting those ballots officially begins 15 days before Election Day and must be completed by the time the polls close. Leaking the results early—a legitimate fear, as it could influence the decisions of voters yet to cast a ballot—is a felony offense. There's never been a leak. The process buys valuable time to get things right.
In Florida, close to 11 million votes were tabulated accurately, reliably, and quickly last week, just as we saw four years ago. Floridians have robust early voting options at their disposal, backed up by various integrity-securing safeguards, and ballots are processed as they come in. As soon as polls close, a huge batch of already-tabulated ballots are reported, with millions of Election Day votes counted up extremely efficiently. Even when results are much closer than we've seen over the last two cycles, each of which resulted in GOP blowouts, races are able to be called in a timely manner, almost always on the night of the election. This lends credibility to the process and inspires confidence about the results being fair and legitimate, even to the losing side. There is absolutely no reason why other states cannot adopt the Florida model. They should. And this is not at all a partisan statement -- several of my Democratic friends concede that Florida simply has a sound, replicable system.
I don't believe the federal government should necessarily dictate to states how to administer their elections, but voters of all stripes should demand better than they insane, embarrassing, confidence-crushing systems we see in slow-counting states -- Arizona, Nevada, and California, to name a few of the worst culprits. I tweeted this over the weekend, and the general lesson still applies:
In California, a global hub of innovative technology, just 63% of the expected vote has been tabulated statewide, four days after the election.
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) November 9, 2024
The margins were such that the presidential and Senate races could be called (still days late), but under the scenario laid out above, tighter contests could be dragging this out, with the winner of the presidency of the United States still in question. Indeed, even as it stands, as of this writing, several news outlets still haven't called a number of crucial House elections in Arizona and California, with control of Congress' lower chamber hanging in the balance. Hundreds of thousands of votes have yet to be counted in the former state; it's millions in the latter. Yes, a full week after the election, at least one out of every four ballots in California remains uncounted. In 2022, it took eight days for Republican control of the House to be called, largely thanks to the same culprits. This should be unacceptable. Setting aside Florida's example, the United Kingdom successfully and rapidly counted tens of millions of votes in its national election over the summer. Most, but not all, of those ballots were cast on Election Day itself.
But Florida has demonstrated how even quite a lot of early and mail-in balloting can be accommodated without ludicrously drawn-out counting procedures. Maintaining outdated, inefficient, idiotic systems in place is a choice. How can that choice be justified? Here's a spokesman for Florida's governor rebutting the excuses made by an Arizonan:
Three reasons these excuses don’t work.
— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) November 9, 2024
Florida:
1) 2-page ballot.
2) 3,025,757 voted by mail, 5,363,013 voted early, and 2,579,590 voted on Election Day.
3) Voters can drop off ballots on Election Day as long as it’s by 7pm local.
99% of ballots were counted before midnight. https://t.co/AFrEOaE1Y7
Fortunately, this year's presidential election was decisive, so the hypothetical scenario mentioned above didn't play out. But it's not a stretch to envision how things could have been very different, under slightly tweaked circumstances. Why maintain terrible protocols when unambiguously superior ones are freely available for adoption? Leaders who resist constructive, apolitical, democracy-fortifying improvements should have to explain why.