Time for States to End Their Horrible Vote-Counting Systems
... 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...
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...
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...
... 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 Maintaining outdated, inefficient, idiotic systems in place is a choice.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?..
Related
Trump Proved Rigged Elections Are Winnable. Now It’s Time To Un-Rig Them, by Elle Purnell , 15 November 2024:
In the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations.
In the 2024 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations. On top of those, he faced two assassination attempts and a political lawfare campaign designed to bankrupt and jail him. The fact that Trump succeeded in making this election “too big to rig” doesn’t make those problems any less threatening to self-governance...
By 2024, they had accumulated a body of research on proven or potential flaws in our elections. States that automatically register residents to vote, but don’t require proof of citizenship to do so, created opportunities for noncitizens to end up on voter rolls... States that don’t require ID to vote - or that treat noncitizen licenses as qualifying IDs - invited fraud and decreased confidence in elections...
State legislatures should pass laws enshrining voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements, prohibiting ballot harvesting, ditching insecure practices like automatic voter registration and ballot drop boxes, and limiting the opportunities mail voting provides for fraud...