It Takes Too Long to Count Votes

In the Nevada Senate race, Republican

Adam Laxalt

was ahead by roughly 16,000 votes, with Democrat

Catherine Cortez Masto

getting closer. This isn’t suspicious in itself: Democrats vote absentee at higher rates than Republicans, and mail ballots typically take longer to verify and count. Meantime in Arizona, Democrat

Katie Hobbs

led Republican

Kari Lake

in the race for Governor by about 17,000.

President Trump is already spraying vague suspicions. “They want more time to cheat!” he said Thursday. Absent any hard claims, and he provided none, this is more of his typical reckless rhetoric. Still, states are making a bad policy choice when they let vote counting drag on for days. If the roles were reversed, it’s easy to imagine Democrats being suspicious, and anyone who doubts it should recall the crazy left conspiracy theory in 2020 that the U.S. Postal Service was stealing the election.

In Arizona mail ballots must arrive by 7 p.m. on Election Day, which is a good start. But Maricopa County (Phoenix) says voters on Tuesday dropped off almost 290,000 mail ballots, about 100,000 more than in 2020. These ballots legally can’t be retrieved, a county spokesman says, “until the polls close and all voters have left the vote center location.” After that the ballots go through imaging and signature verification. Any signatures that are flagged can be fixed by the voter (or “cured,” in elections lingo) until Nov. 16, this coming Wednesday.

The problem is worse in Nevada, because the ballot deadline isn’t Election Day. As long as a mail vote is postmarked Nov. 8, it can arrive Saturday. “Today we received 626 ballots through the mail,” Clark County (Las Vegas) Registrar

Joe Gloria

said Thursday. “We have 7,155 ballots that have not been cured.” Voters on the bad signature list can call a hotline. The deadline is 5 p.m. Monday.

The story is similar in California. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day are valid if they arrive a week late. These laws introduce too much slack into the voting system. In the old days, an extraordinarily close election might be decided after the polls closed by small numbers of provisional or military votes. Yet John Q. Public now gets the same dispensation for tardy ballots once reserved for the armed forces.

Worse than the delay is the prospect of litigation. What about mail votes that arrive after Election Day, but before the receipt deadline, and which lack a legible postmark? Judges might be asked to hold voters harmless for the USPS’s failure. If this year’s Senate race in Pennsylvania had depended on undated ballots, that could have gone to the Supreme Court.

Florida managed to count seven million votes within hours Tuesday, in part because it preprocesses incoming mail ballots and has an Election Day deadline. So far the U.S. has been Las Vegas lucky in avoiding a mail vote debacle, but only a fool keeps spinning the roulette wheel.