You have a lot of warnings for personal insults, including one from @Miller in the Pit – which is practically a unicorn.
A word of friendly advice: Be especially careful how you make your posts so they cannot be misconstrued as personal insults.
I’m glad you apologized.
All things being equal, faster vote counting would be great. But is it worth spending more money or making it more difficult to vote? No.
Florida.
The UK does little vote by mail, mostly in person. You have to ask special permission and give a reason to vote by mail, and you have to re-apply each election, unless you get a 3 year waiver.
and it isnt always overnite-
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/how-elections-work/how-votes-are-counted
Counting takes place as soon as is practicable once a poll has closed. Counting can either take place overnight after the poll has closed, on the following day, or sometimes during the following week. This depends on the type of election, and specific local circumstances and decisions that Returning Officers have taken during their planning for the election.
Gee, how long did it take CA to get an answer for who were the Governor candidates? About a week.
Yes, what is the big issue?
CA is slower mainly due to ballots being okay if postmarked on Election day, not received on the day.
trump wants that stopped- which is a good reason for us to support it.
That’s kind of how California used to be. In the 90s you had to apply for absentee for each election and you needed a good reason like health or you were going to be out of town. I was eventually granted permanent absentee status because I traveled a lot for my job and the nature of the travel was frequently last minute. Now everyone gets to do it which is fantastic.
This is the page reporting the status of unprocessed ballots. The biggest category, by far, has been
Vote-By-Mail Ballots Received on or Before Election Day
The time consuming part seems like it would be validation. The actual count can be done purely by feeding a stack of ballots into an optical reader. Before they do that someone needs to make sure that the envelope comes from an eligible voter who only sends in one.
When we voted in person, we were assigned to one of 20,000 polling places. There were two or three people sitting at a folding table. They would find your name in a book and have you fill in your spot in it. Throughout the state, approximately 50,000 people handled validation on election day before the polls were closed. They don’t seem to have nearly that many people doing it now.
Why?
Faster is not inherently better.
Regardless, unless a MAGA Republican wins the MAGAs and Trump will cry foul no matter how much or how little time is taken to count the ballots.
California should run its elections as it has been and take however much time is necessary to count and confirm all ballots.
Just to say that I am completely baffled by this. Any election I can remember the count has started by the next day at the latest. If the Electoral Commission says it sometimes takes place the following week I’m sure that must be true but it also is exceptionally rare. Overnight counting is the default, next day occasionally. I can remember one incident when storms and lack of ferries meant that ballot boxes couldn’t be transferred from some of the smaller Scottish islands to the mainland but that was very exigent circumstances, not normal practice.
@TroutMan can you explain why the jungle primary is a contributing factor to so many mail-in ballots coming in close to deadline? Thanks.
I can only speculate. Democrats wanted to make sure that there was at least one Democratic candidate in the General. To do that, they needed to wait until things coalesced around one or two Democrat front runners.
As a side note, I want to point out again that we knew the first place finishers fairly quickly most of the time. It took extra time to figure out the second place finishers.
That strikes me as misleading. AFAICT, neither of those countries has to have all of the counting done by a single entity. Perhaps Brexit was, but they only had to count “Leaves” and “Stays”.
And have you ever seen a California ballot? Those tend to be pretty long.
I don’t think that the length of the ballot is relevant. They just feed it through a machine.
Not only that, it’s an attempt to distract from all of the actual problems that Republicans create/worsen.
Not quite following this, partiuclarly the point about not having the counting done by a single entity.
But FWIW, in the UK counting happens like this (more details in DrDeth’s link above)
Voting happens in polling places in every community, typically a school or church hall in which voters pick up a ballot, have their name ticked off the electoral register, step into a booth to mark with pencil their vote(s) in the appropriate section(s) of the paper, emerge to place their folded paper in the ballot box.
Each constituency/ward/district will have its own central counting place, to which the boxes are taken after voting ends. This will have a returning officer, count staff, official observers etc. And a lot of tables, at which votes will be counted - first a verification count to check the total number of votes matches the number of voters ticked off the register, and then the actual count of votes. Postal votes are counted at the same time. This is all done by hand, no machines.
Some elections are more complex than others. E.g. the recent Scottish election required voters to vote on both a constituency ballot on a first past the post basis, and a multi-member regional ballot on a proportional basis. On other occasions multiple elections will be held simultaneously (i.e. general and local elections) but rather than having one long ballot there are separate ballot papers for the different levels of election so that counting can be done efficiently.
Right, counting isn’t the time-consuming part. It’s validating the ballots.
Of course, Shasta County is trying to make the counting slow too by forcing hand counting of every ballot. Their efforts to do this and get rid of mail-in and advance voting will be shot down by the state, but I really wish California would just let them. See what happens when a deep-red county makes it harder to vote while blue counties make it easier. But that’s probably a topic for a different thread.
There isn’t an accountant or data professional in the country who believes that hand counting is the superior method. What you do is use the electronic equipment to do the grunt work and then perform an audit at a later time., as every state does.
The notions of software malfeasance or a massive conspiracy in boards of elections is something only stupid people can believe. I’m glad we don’t have that at this board.
Validation involves a human looking at each envelope before it is opened. So, that is the bottleneck. When voting was in-person, there were two or three people at each of the 20,000 polling places in California. They did it while the voter stood there before handing him or her the ballot. The job was handled by about 50,000 people before the polls closed.
I’d imagine that a long-complicated ballot also means that it takes people longer to make an informed choice and fill it out. I’m also not quite sure why folks are comparing countries to California. That’s like saying that a bison and a cow are the same based on size.
The issue is threefold:
Allowing ballots based on postmark not arrival date builds in a weekish delay for the final numbers. Whether the benefit is worth the drawbacks is another debate, but the issue is simple enough that anyone claiming to not understand this can be dismissed as stupid or insincere.
Number of workers needed to validate the number of ballots. When it’s distributed to umpteen thousand polling places and spread over one long day plus whatever in-person early voting there is, the work proceeds fast enough. If much of it needs to be done after election day, and in more centralized locations, you have a different problem needing lots of people and facilities. Which costs money. Tax money. Fewer resouces = longer time to finsh the work. Again not too hard to understand.
In principle the authorities could choose to validate and count all ballots as they come in, whether that’s early in-person voting or early mail-in voting. Some states do the pre-counting, relying on keeping that info secret until the end of the voting period. Other states wait until after all polls close to even begin counting on the theory that partial results that doesn’t exist yet can’t be leaked. Yet another tradeoff where legit arguments can be had on both sides.
I used to think it didn’t matter how long it takes to count votes. But I changed my mind and agree with just what you said.
What I’m going to say next may convince someone to believe the opposite. But I’m not here to change minds, so:
Working to speed up the CA vote tally is a slight giving in to MAGA. This does not bother me because I am at heart, and only up to a point, an appeaser. While you should rarely appease on important issues, the amount of time to tally votes is trivial enough that appeasement, to slightly reduce an opportunity for conspiratorial thinking, becomes reasonable.
Were, counterfactually, the source for conspiratorial thinking a natural outgrowth of the general public, your idea might have a granule of merit.
When there is an industry dedicated to inventing and promoting CTs about any- and every-thing for political gain, any changes made in any reality will have ZERO impact on the flow of conspiracy theories around that topic.
So the idea that speeding CA vote counting would reduce the flux of CTs is pure wishful thinking or deliberate fantasy. It definitely is not fact-based thinking.