As I and others have observed, the state of Florida bounced back from its 2000 electoral fiasco by embarking on a bipartisan overhaul of its election administration whose success is worth studying as a possible model for other states. This year Florida conspicuously achieved a prompt count, while also allowing no‐excuse mail voting to all voters, in contrast to various other states which took a week or more to resolve close races, typically with large volumes of mail ballots remaining to be counted after Election Day.
The Florida approach involves a variety of different practices, including adoption of strong technology, training and funding of election workers and offices, and more. One of its key aims is to complete the pre‐processing of mail ballots in advance, so that personnel can as much as possible turn their full attention to the in‐person vote on Election Day. Pre‐processing involves the sequence of steps such as reading bar codes, checking dates and signatures, identifying which ballots might be subject to challenge or “cure” based on these factors, and so forth – everything short of actually getting a count of the resulting votes.
Achieving these efficiencies does not come without trade‐offs, and it’s worth identifying what some of these trade‐offs are.
Florida strongly encourages those who vote by mail to do so without waiting till the very last minute. In particular, if you wait that long in Florida, you can’t just vote your mail ballot at a regular polling place; you have to get in line and cast a regular Election Day ballot (which tabulates more quickly).
Moreover, like most states, Florida requires of nearly all voters that their mail ballots be received at the central election office, not merely postmarked, by Election Day. To account for mail lags, election officials accordingly advise that “you should allow at least one week for your ballot to reach our office.” Building in that time margin means that when special extra steps are needed, such as challenge or “curing” of ballots with a missing date or doubtful signature, those steps can get underway before the very last minute.
Contrast with Arizona, subject of a helpful thread on Twitter yesterday by Maricopa County (Phoenix) Recorder Stephen Richer. Richer notes that “In this November election, we [in the county] received approximately 290,000 early ballot drop offs on Election Day” – almost 20% of voters in the election, and enough to guarantee a drawn‐out count even if there hadn’t been widespread tabulator/printer failures, as there were.
The trade‐offs here are real, since as Richer acknowledges many voters do value the convenience in being able to hold off on a decision till Election Day, fill out a ballot at home, and just drop it off. This voter interest in convenience is in inevitable tension with the interest of the wider public in quick resolution of who won, as well as effective allocation of staff and volunteer time.
For that reason, democracies around the world, as well as U.S. states, typically draw up rules that are somewhere in the middle between treating voter convenience as everything and treating it as nothing. For example, the 30 states that require mail ballots to be received by election authorities (not merely postmarked) by Election Day include not just Florida but relatively progressive states like Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Meanwhile, the 35 states with no‐excuse absentee voting, an important concession to convenience, include not just Florida but many relatively conservative states across the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains.
What’s not very helpful is to treat the trade‐offs here as if they constituted some index of “voter suppression” or “ballot integrity” about which to have a big Red/Blue food fight.
