Yeah cause a tight election in a global pandemic while one party tries to rat fuck the process is a great example.
The delays this year had nothing to do with actual counting. They revolved around getting an unusually large volume of mail ballots, necessary because pandemic. To a place to be counted.
While the Trump administration tried real hard to make that take as long as possible. In states with no logistics for it, because we usually don’t allow much mail voting here.
Once ballots showed up they were processed pretty rapidly, and counts of in person voting and mail ballots on hand were counted within hours of polls closing. Except where that’s disallowed by law.
By contrast the last, longer delayed result in the US back in 2000 was the result of repeated hand counting by humans. Stretched out even longer by continual arguments over the interpretation of hand filled ballots.
Everyone remembers Florida where they were punch card chad ballots. But there was a lot of recounting, and similar problems in other states, and many districts using more traditional pen and paper ballots.
That only ended when a court decision halted counting, before there was a result.
This time the outcome was pretty clear within 24 to 48 hours, and the results would have been settled within the week if there weren’t a turd in the pool delaying things.
How long does it take to cook 160 million eggs? In a pot that fits 12?
Or something that makes a lick of god damn sense.
How long does it take you to read 100 pages of check boxes? And how long would it take you to collate those results with 100 people doing the same?
That is exactly what delayed the results of the 2000 presidential election till December 12th.
Delayed it long enough for one of the candidates to effectively flip the results using the courts.
Which we mostly do, though often at a precinct sitting over multiple polling locations. Cause we have a lot of those. Rendering a result on election night.
And then we check some shit, often count them again at larger state offices before the formal “this is the result” button is pushed weeks later. And it’s always weeks later, regardless of how clear the results or how quickly everything was counted. We only focused so narrowly on the technicality of this weeks later rubber stamp, because of how close things were. And because a certain some one is refusing to accept the count, or the fact that there was counting at all.
What that doesn’t work well for is mail in ballots sent to a state board of elections that trickle in for weeks.
Of which there were 65m+, and because of when they can be mailed (usually election day itself at the latest) and said mail fuckery by the Trump administration. A good chunk of them took weeks to arrive. It being a close election, there were enough arriving late to potentially swing the results for multiple offices.
As a result we didn’t get a formal, complete result until all those votes had arrived.
I’m just gonna point out again that the big hold up on that end was the number of ballots that could not be counted by machine, followed by the delays and problems inherent in counting things by hand. In multiple locations. With multiple partisan groups directly involved.
The chad ballot itself is just a card stock sheet with perforations. It’s held in a frame, and a stick is used to punch out the perforations. No machine is used until it’s fed into a giant 60’s main frame for counting. Florida (and several other states) hung onto them so long because they don’t involve voting on a machine, and the ballots are in theory easily readable by humans. Serious flaws in the design of that iteration of Florida’s ballots meant that the ballots couldn’t reliable be read or even fed into the counters, and lead to a lot of bad faith dickery when it came down to humans counting those paper ballots filled out by hand.
Same thing went down in plenty of places with paper ballots filled out by pen, with no machine counting or retro punch cards involved.
Read the box is. Especially if you have ulterior motives.
And thus the problem. What if the people who count the vote don’t know what you voted for because it’s unclear?
And what if there are enough such votes that it could impact the result?
What if they just don’t particularly want to count all the votes from this particular section of the country, so they just say they don’t know?
Hey look it’s exactly what happened in 2000 again.
And oh man would you look at that. There was a massive amount of bad faith efforts to both discount and re-interpret clear votes, and efforts to wedge unreadable ones into a certain candidate’s column. Particularly driven by those observers from each party who were directly involved in this process but had obvious ulterior motives.
The US used to handle votes a lot like you’re describing. It was a really, really, really common vector for fucking with the results. It rests on the idea that a tiny polling place in an out of the way town with 300 voters. Where the guy counting the votes is the brother of one of the candidates, won’t just report the wrong result to the big office. That there isn’t a massive, ongoing effort to discount the votes of millions of Americans because of the color of their skin. That whole counties won’t decide that all these votes from that part of town are so hard to read. We better throw them out.
It’s nice that problems like embedded bias and public corruption don’t exist, never have and never will in Australia. But don’t fault us for trying to prevent them, or build systems that let us know when it’s happening.
This is how the vast majority of states handle it at this point, and is mostly what’s meant by “voting machine”.
The Georgia machines in question use an entry machine to print the ballot on site, pre-filled. Rather than pre-printed sheets and a pen.
It’s an attempt to get around the readability issue. Which other states (and Canada apparently) handle by scanning the ballots as they’re dropped in the box. That allows a ballot that can’t be read by machine to be bounced, so the person can fill out a fresh one.
It’s also an attempt to simplify logistics. They don’t have to have pre-printed ballots on hand for every potential voter. US elections are many elections. Each state holds state level, county, town, and on further down elections at the same time. So at any given polling place there might need to be many different ballots. You may be voting in a slightly different slate of races from some one living down the block from you.
When I voted early this year, and in NY you can vote early at any polling place in your county. Or by absentee ballot at any polling place in the state. I voted in a polling place outside my electoral district, rather than my normal polling place. There was less of a line, and it was convenient to where I was working.
It took them nearly 5 minutes to find the ballot for my district, the guy distributing ballots was wrangling 20 different stacks of ballots. That’s an extraordinary circumstance because A LOT of people voted early and a lot voted outside their normal district this year due to Covid. But it makes number 2 there make a lot of sense, even if the first bit is less than ideal.
This is also what we do. And barring things like a record number of mail in ballots coming through a rat fucked postal system during a global pandemic that’s usually how it goes. Unless the results are very close. In which case it usually takes a couple days to count through stray ballots of various kinds.
There’s a formal deadline for locking in the results some weeks after the vote in each state. And technically the election is not done in any given state till after that deadline, when the results are certified.
We just heard a lot about that last part because of how close things were and delays in returning mail in ballots to be counted.
We have 50 different ones. Not all of them so competent. Because the constitution gave that power to the States exclusively. The federal government is very limited in instituting top down standards. And (probably a good thing given who’s in charge right now) no roll in administering the election, counting votes, or providing a result.
