Editors at the Washington Examiner highlight two states’ very different approaches toward Nov. 5 election results.
The secretaries of state for Georgia and Michigan appeared on CBS News’s Face the Nation last Sunday and made very different promises. One promised that his state’s election results would be finalized on election night, and the other said her state’s would not. Congress established an Election Day, not election week or month, and it is time states followed that law.
Asked by host Margaret Brennan how long it would take to tabulate votes, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was crystal clear. “In Georgia, 100% of all the votes cast will be on a paper ballot. … But we also just put into law this year with SB-189 that all early votes and all early accepted ballots … will have to have their results reported by 8 p.m.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was not ready to make any such promise, instead only offering “the end of the day on Wednesday as the best guess on how we’ll perform.”
That is intolerably clueless, and unacceptable. Nations such as France, Japan, and Brazil manage to release official election results on election night. This efficiency, hardly an unreasonable feat of government competence, is also possible in the United States. Florida mandates election results be announced on the same night of final voting and it has not missed its deadline since the law passed.
The formula for getting election results voters desperately want on election night is not a secret. Florida requires all mailed ballots to be counted as they come in beginning 22 days before Election Day. The deadline to ask to vote by mail is Oct. 24, and all mailed ballots must be received, regardless of postmark, by 7 p.m. on Election Day.
