Why can’t other states do what Florida does?
Here we are mid-afternoon the day after an election, and we still don’t know who won dozens and dozens of federal races in Arizona, California, Nevada, Washington, New York, Oregon, and other states. In several states, the results won’t be known for days, perhaps even weeks. Yet Florida, the nation’s third-most populous state, has for several election cycles in a row counted and reported all its ballots quickly on election night itself, without controversy or major court challenges.
In a world with so much technology at our fingertips and with 233 years of experience with constitutional elections, there is no good reason why every state can’t operate as cleanly and efficiently as Florida does. Indeed, for any state to fail to run elections as well as Florida does is a travesty.
Florida learned its lesson from the 2000 presidential election fiasco, which saw George W. Bush carry the state over Al Gore by 537 votes after weeks of disputes about “hanging chads,” spoiled ballots, confusing “butterfly” ballots, and other embarrassments. In a set of major reforms enacted under Gov. Jeb Bush in 2001 and in several subsequent reform laws (including one in 2021), Florida provided common sense and reliability for its voting systems.
States that adopt all the favorite “progressive” voting practices, though, do just the opposite. They endlessly complicate things, undermine voting security, diminish voter trust in voting integrity — the longer it takes to count votes, the greater the suspicions, whether justified or not, of skullduggery — and leave the rest of the country waiting just to find out which party gets to organize each chamber of Congress and work in the Oval Office.
The public should not put up with these fiascoes.
While this is not the place to detail all the things Florida does right, it is easy to cite some of the reasons for bad performance in other states — and to explain why, even apart from vote-counting efficiency, those states’ practices are ill-advised.
The biggest culprit is widespread mail-in voting, which other states don’t handle as well as Florida does. It’s a less secure system, with massive chain-of-custody issues; it requires more work from voting officials, who must verify ballot requests, ballots mailed out, and ballots mailed back; and in states where ballots need only be postmarked (rather than delivered) by Election Day, it deliberately sets up long waits.
Not only that, but it is a bad idea anyway (even though Florida uses its own version of widespread early voting). If the vast majority of voters cast ballots before Election Day, the better-known candidates, especially incumbents, enjoy huge advantages. Without a single, unified day for the public to vote (except in cases of “for cause” absentee voting), many voters deal with less information than Election Day balloters. Long-shot candidates running energetic and creative campaigns have trouble even getting attention from many voters until the very final weeks of a campaign season.
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Other complicated systems, such as “ranked choice” voting used in Alaska, confuse voters considerably, lead to many voters gaming the system, deny the chance for one-on-one major candidate competitions, and take many days to tabulate.
Instead of all this foofaraw, Florida keeps it simple, clean, fair, and efficient. The states that fail to do so embarrass themselves, and they harm representative democracy.
