I was thinking of making a similar comment. Depending on how you interpret the claim I think itâs easy to construct a system that allows all of the above and allows us to know the winner within a day of the election.
The only things you really couldnât do would be recounts and audits (though, to be fair, Iâm not exactly sure what qualifies as an audit; thatâs very open to interpretation). So if we take him literally and you want to declare an absolute winner right after the election, you canât entertain (significant) audits and recounts. Because if the possibility of recount exists, then you canât definitely declare a winner immediately after an election. But you could definitely create a system that accommodates everything else on that list.
You can have audits and recounts. Think of the initial count and declaring a winner as the jury delivering the verdict in a trial and any recount or audit as filing an appeal. You can definitely declare a winner (but you canât definitively declare a winner) immediately after an election.
An audit often involves comparing a hand-counted sample of paper ballots to machine tabulations.
My list came from some superficial research on the election in Brazil. Everybody there votes in person, on election day, using an electronic voting machine. No paper. Of course itâs easy if we switched to this system.
But my point was that there are tradeoffs. Using paper ballots changes the equation significantly. Even if you want to ignore writeins, ignore signature verification, ignore electronic adjudication, and just want to scan all the ballots and get the tabulated results, youâre ignoring the fact that is simply takes time to physically perform these operations, even using the best technology currently available.
You canât allow mail-ballots to be received on election day and also have your result on election night. Itâs simply not possible.
Also, everyone bitches about how long it takes but this is entertainment/a sport/a hobby for a lot of people and people always want more episodes/more playoff rounds/more content in general.
You go through years of build up, why not let it roll for a week or two.
One thing that would make elections go faster is if they were held on a weekend or if election day was a national holiday, like most places.
If you want to see elections that take even longer than the US, check out India. Comparative politics was never my thing. I donât quite understand it and I canât find a good description, but they go through multiple phases. Instead of spreading poll workers and voting machines thin, I think they will run an election for a fraction of the available seats, then run another for a different fraction of seats, moving their poll workers to those places. They donât count any of those votes until voting is done on the last location. For example, in 2019, the first phase of voting was on April 11, the seventh and final phase was on May 19, and they didnât start counting votes until May 23, but they were expected to be done on the same day.
Republicans never went after vote by mail before Trump. I was wondering if theyâd done some research that Dems vote by mail more. Nope. Just Trumpâs master plan to get Rs to vote in person then stop the count before all the mail ballots could be added. Stable genius!
I think youâre looking for the hopium thread. Iâve spent the last two hours drinking tears on r/conservative. They all fucking love DeSantis. All of them.
You could do this, and I suspect there will be some talk about this in AZ after this cycle. Like maybe: you can mail in your ballot, or you can vote in person on Election Day, but you canât drop off a mail in ballot on Election Day. This would allow us to get to results much faster.
But this only makes sense if you prioritize a quick result over convenience and maximizing turnout. Many people fill out a mailin ballot intending to mail it, but then wait too long through procrastinating or whatever. If you tell these people they now must get to a polling place on Election Day, stand in line, and put their ballot into a machine, a lot of them arenât going to do it.
By statute we have to be done with the initial count, including adjudication, by a week after the election. Because of the holiday, this gives us until Wednesday.
My view is that an extra week of waiting is a price well worth paying in exchange for making voting as painless and convenient as possible.
