Mail-in ballots have made our election tallying a national embarrassment

Elon Musk can land a rocket booster back at the launch tower seven minutes after it t🎀akes off, but swing sta💃tes can’t count votes in a timely manner. 

Unlike recovering a rocket booster🍨, vote-counting is not complicated and requires no advanced engineering. 

We’ve managed to do it expeditiously and accurately through all of our history, yet it is at this moment — when Donald Trump will cast doubt on any resu⭕lt 🐠he doesn’t like, and trust in our inst📖itutions is low — that we’ve hobbled our own ability to complete this simple task in key swing states.

We no longer have Electiꦐon Night; we have Election Days. In 2020, the gen🅰eral election was held on Tuesday, Nov. 3, but most media organizations didn’t call it until Saturday, Nov. 7. 

This kind of delay is a national꧑ embarrassment. It creates uncertainty and breeds distrust, and is also completely unnecessary.

The culprit is early voting, or how some states go about processing — or to be more accurate, not processing — the early vote.

Only in government is it possible to have people do something well in advance and still have it end up dela🌳ying everything, out of easily fi♋xable bureaucratic ineptitude. 

Consider Pennsylvania. It embraced no-excuse mail voting in 2019, without making the necessary changes to count these ballots in a ti𓂃mely manner. 

In their wisdom, the Pennsylvania authorities don’t allow election employees t💟o begin processing the early and absentee vote until 7 a.m. on Election Day, ensuring that they can’t cope. (There is something el𝓡se important happening on Election Day — yes, you guessed it, the administering of an election.)

There are a lot of❀ steps that go into the so-called pre-canvassing of mail and absentee ballots, from confirming that the outer envelopes are signed and dated, to opening the o🎉uter and inner envelopes, to unfolding the ballot itself. 

Most states allow this work to happen before Elect🌊ion Day, because that’s rational ಞthing to do. 

Lawmakers in Pennsylvania havꩵe deadlocked alo🦩ng partisan lines over whether, and how, to do the same.

Republicans have wanted a voter ID requirement as part of a change to th🐈e process, while Democrats have opposed that provision. So, the Keystone State will once again conduct its vote-counting in an absurd manner 🗹that ill-serves the nation. 

(Some Republicans worry that pre-canvassing will allow Democrats to learn how many fraudulent votes they need to produce to win. Pre-canvassing doesn’t involve the actual tabulating of ballots, though, and there is zero evidence that it has abett🍃ed widespread, election-determining fraud in other states where it is the norm.)

It’d be on𝐆e thing if we didn’t know the results in Alabama or Massachusetts, states that are deep red or blꦡue, on Election Night.

But with Pennsylvania, as well as Wisconsin and Arizona, likely to have delays, we are talking about the very most sensitiv🅷e, important states on the map. 

An erstwhile swing sta🐎te, Florida, provides a model. It has a massive early vote, and yet rapid tabulating.

Counties in the state process early ballots before Election Day. It helps that the state doesn’t allow ballots arriving after 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, avoiding the problems of states that, shockingly, permit post-electioꩵn ballots. 

Florida’s opp﷽osite in this, as in so much else, is California.

The Golden State has made a practice of overwhelming itself with mail-in ballots. It still hadn’t counted a third of its ballots after Election Day in 2020, and kept counting f✨or weeks.

This year, ballots arriving up to a week after the election will be considered valid. A Democratic assemblyman told the AP that the state doesn’t need to please “a society that wants immediate gratification,” as if there’s something wrong with expecting expeditiꦉous, reliable election results.

It might seem facetious to say that Elon Musk will manage to send a rocket to Mars before states figure out how to eliminate intolerable delays in the vote count, but with Musk hopꦆing to do that a couple of years from now, it’s almost certainly true.

Twitter: @RichLowry