Viewpoint: How Long Does it Take to Count Your Ballot

Since COVID, our press deadline has changed. Pages that had been sent to the printer on Wednesday morning, now have a mid-afternoon, Tuesday deadline. That makes it a little difficult to get current information in the hands of our readers. For instance, anything that happened at the Colorado City Metro District Board meetings was in the paper by the following Thursday. Now that information comes out nine days afterward.

??We face a similar dilemma with elections. The Tuesday election should be the lead story in the newspaper the week it happened. The results in this week’s paper are about events that happened on November 8.

??Although, it is really nice of some states to take their sweet time counting the votes. Arizona and Georgia have made it a habit to get election results out days or weeks after they occurred in the last several elections. Arizona, especially, may not have the 2022 election results in time for the 2024 election.

I’m not really big on conspiracy theories, but if there isn’t something funny going on, we are left with the conclusion that there are major hiring, training, or competency issues of some kind.

??I have an idea or two about how to fix* the election process (* the use of the word fix was intended for the amusement of our readers and was not in any way aimed at or intended to intimate that elections in any of the aforementioned or not mentioned states could be fixed).

??Drastically limit the vote by mail ballot and require identification to cast a vote at the polling places.

??Voting by mail is not new. What is new is the fact that everyone is doing it. In the U.S., showing up to vote had always been the standard way of exercising that fundamental right. Absentee voting can be traced back to 17th century America, but it was during the Civil War that absentee voting first occurred on a large scale. From the earliest days until recently, the primary motivator for absentee ballots was war.

??In the early 1900’s, that absentee right was extended to other people away from home, such as railroad employees and traveling salesmen who couldn’t be home on election day. Some early absentee laws required witnesses and a notary public’s signature.

??In later decades of the 20th century, people who voted by mail had to have a specific reason for not being able to vote in person on Election Day. That changed in 1978, when California became the first state to allow voters to apply for an absentee ballot without having to provide a reason.

?The liberal state of Oregon claimed several firsts, including the first entirely mail-in, federal, primary election in 1995, and the first mail-only, general election in 1996.

?Five states were already holding entirely mail-in elections before the pandemic: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah. Twenty-nine states and Washington D.C. allowed “no excuse” mail-in absentee voting, and 16 states allowed voters to cast a ballot by mail if they had an excuse.

??Regardless of how you shake it, verification of signatures is neither as accurate nor as fast as requiring identification and a signature at a polling place.

??Of course, it also makes it harder for dead people to vote, along with individuals voting multiple times.

??There may be other answers. If we must persist with elections where ballots are all mail-in, maybe it is as simple as requiring that election workers stay until the votes are counted for that precinct, tightening up the laws about when mail-in ballots have to be received, or letting people who actually go to the polling place vote twice.

?It can’t get much worse. Unless you believe those conspiracy theories.