The secretaries of state for Georgia and Michigan appeared on CBS News’s Face the Nation last Sunday and made very different promises. One promised that his state’s election results would be finalized on election night, and the other said her state’s would not. Congress established an Election Day, not election week or month, and it is time states followed that law.
Asked by host Margaret Brennan how long it would take to tabulate votes, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was crystal clear. “In Georgia, 100% of all the votes cast will be on a paper ballot. … But we also just put into law this year with SB-189 that all early votes and all early accepted ballots … will have to have their results reported by 8 p.m.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was not ready to make any such promise, instead only offering “the end of the day on Wednesday as the best guess on how we’ll perform.”
That is intolerably clueless, and unacceptable. Nations such as France, Japan, and Brazil manage to release official election results on election night. This efficiency, hardly an unreasonable feat of government competence, is also possible in the United States. Florida mandates election results be announced on the same night of final voting and it has not missed its deadline since the law passed.
The formula for getting election results voters desperately want on election night is not a secret. Florida requires all mailed ballots to be counted as they come in beginning 22 days before Election Day. The deadline to ask to vote by mail is Oct. 24, and all mailed ballots must be received, regardless of postmark, by 7 p.m. on Election Day.
But in states such as California, ballots are mailed to every voter regardless of whether they want them, and they must be counted even if they are postmarked by Election Day, not if they are received by Election Day. This means county election officials don’t even have all the ballots until days after the election. These insane rules mean final results can take months. A primary election held in California on March 5 this year was not finally counted until May 2. One wonders when, if ever, officials decide that incompetence has gone too far.
When Congress passed legislation creating a single national Election Day in 1871, the bill’s main proponent, Massachusetts Rep. Benjamin Butler, said, “ I think it will be fair for everybody that on the day when one votes, all should vote, and that the whole question should be decided then.”
His view was right more than 150 years ago and it still is today. it has been reaffirmed in every piece of voting legislation passed by Congress since that day, including the Electoral Count Reform Act signed by President Joe Biden.
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Public confidence in election systems is the bedrock of our republic, and when it erodes, so does the legitimacy of the government. Voters have every right to be suspicious of a process that for generations took one night to complete but now takes days or weeks despite better technology.
It is too late this cycle to mandate that states such as California change their laws so that election results come out on election night, but it should be one of the first bipartisan priorities that the next president addresses in office.