Don’t be surprised if Wednesday’s Register doesn’t announce the 46th president of the United States.
Strong voter turnout coupled with an unprecedented volume of mail-in ballots due to the COVID-19 pandemic mean poll workers are facing a monumental task to tally votes in an efficient manner.
Early voting has resulted in more than 100 million ballots cast so far. That’s double the early voting in 2016, and almost 70% of those cast in that entire election.
In the mega-state of Texas, early voting tallies are 9.7 million, exceeding the total votes cast in 2016.
That the general election is motivating more people to vote is a good thing, and hopefully a harbinger of greater civic engagement in all things germane.
But the sorting, processing, scanning and tallying of mail-in ballots take more time to compute than voting in person on Election Day.
What also can also slow down the final count is that 22 states allow mail-in ballots to trickle in as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day. Kansas ballots must reach their destination by Friday. In California, post-marked ballots can arrive as late as Nov. 20.
About one in five New Yorkers took advantage of early voting this election. It’s the first time New York has implemented the system for its 13.6 million voters. Another 1.2 million have cast absentee ballots. New York has said it won’t begin to report the latter until later in the week.
Other heavily populated states report the same expectations. Pennsylvania and Michigan officials say it will take several days to finalize official votes.
These delays don’t mean something has gone wrong. To the contrary, it means election officials are doing their due diligence to make sure every vote counts.
By the way, this is the norm.
There’s never been a U.S. presidential election where all the votes were counted by Election Night. It’s just not possible.
WHAT IS possible in most years is to get a good enough “guesstimate” going by the results of key swing states such as Florida, Ohio and Iowa to declare a winner in the wee hours of Wednesday. Because those states allow early processing of mail-in ballots, they have a leg up on the count, and typically give reliable hints as to how the election will go.
More importantly, this year’s election has shown in glaring relief the successes and failures of state voting systems.
In Texas, it’s been nothing but chaos, starting with Gov. Greg Abbott’s mandate that each county — no matter their population — should have only one drop-off box for mail-in ballots. Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, has a population of 2.1 million. Houston’s Harris County has 4.6 million.
