Let us hope that by this time tomorrow, all the big midterm congressional races will be decided and we know which party will control the House and Senate starting next January. There is, however, also a strong possibility that Alaska will still be counting, and recounting, votes for weeks. If California had close races, we could wait for months. Despite what some in news media organizations tell you, election result delays are not “normal” and should be regarded with great dissatisfaction. They result from policy choices made by local jurisdictions. Those choices are deeply regrettable and should be reformed.
Congress has the constitutional authority to make federal elections efficient, uniform, and trusted again, and it should act to do so.
PBS NewsHour, from which public funding has rightly been removed, published an article this week beseeching readers to be patient when looking for results from today’s election. “It may take some time, but that’s normal,” PBS claimed.
This is false. There is nothing “normal” about waiting weeks for final vote tallies to be verified. It is a new phenomenon and, as the PBS article itself noted, all delays stem from specific choices made mostly in jurisdictions controlled by the Democratic Party. Republican-led states such as Florida manage to deliver fast, reliable final results just hours after polls close.
There is no database that tracks when each election has historically been called, but a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of published election results in the New York Times going back to 1948 shows that, for decades, 95% of votes had been counted by the Thursday morning edition after the election. That is what was and still should be normal — an Election Day after which, 95% of the time, people know who won by Wednesday.
California took roughly 10 days to reach that 95% threshold in 2024. This is not an accident but by design.
California’s election insanity begins with its incompetent maintenance of voter rolls. In theory, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their rolls. But many California counties make no effort at all to follow the law. According to a June 2025 U.S. Election Assistance Commission report, 20 California counties removed 50 or fewer inactive voters from their rolls between November 2022 and November 2024. During the same period, San Diego County alone removed over 300,000 voter registrations under that statute. As a result of this illegal failure to maintain voter rolls, some California counties have more registered voters than adults eligible to vote.
After failing to maintain its voter rolls adequately, California mails ballots to all registered voters, whether they request a ballot or not. The state allows but does not require counties to begin processing and scanning mail ballots before Election Day. Worse, California requires only that ballots be mailed by Election Day, meaning they might not be received for days, let alone counted in a timely manner. Even then, late-arriving ballots are not required to have an Election Day postmark. All that is required is some evidence on the envelope that “indicates” the ballot was sent on or before Election Day. California’s lawmakers have built a system that keeps accepting ballots long after the polls close, then expects voters to treat the resulting delays as “normal.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority in Watson v. Republican National Committee, Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate federal elections. It exercised that authority by setting a national presidential Election Day in 1845 and extending that requirement to the House in 1872 and to the Senate in 1914. More recently, it passed the aforementioned National Voter Registration Act, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, and the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
MAIL-IN VOTING NEEDS NATIONAL STANDARDS
The U.S. Postal Service issued a 2024 post-election analysis report practically begging Congress for uniform mail-in ballot procedures, noting that “there are 50 states and nearly 8,000 election jurisdictions that are far from uniform in their election laws and practices, and that often do not consider how the mail system works.” The report continued, “This can result in a mismatch of timeframes, deadlines, ballot return suggestions and the practical reality of using the mail. Many of these laws and practices were not established with the Postal Service’s operations in mind.”
Congress should require ballots to arrive by Election Day, require advance processing, and insist on accurate voter rolls. Americans deserve prompt, trustworthy results instead of lectures about accepting avoidable delays. States have shown that efficient elections are possible. Congress should make that standard national. Election Day should mean Election Day.