Make Every State Count Ballots Like Florida

If states conducted their elections like Florida—which released almost all its results before the election night clock struck midnight—they would minimize the threat of voter fraud, and voter confidence in elections would soar.

Two weeks after the 2024 election, California still hasn’t finished counting all its House races. Arizona took a week to finish counting its Senate race enough for the AP to call it, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had to force counties in the Keystone State to stop counting ballots 13 days after the election.

Most states take so long to count election results because they choose to—not because that’s the way it has to be. These delays owe largely to extended deadlines for counting absentee ballots.

Democrat-controlled state legislatures, through a warped view of democracy or raw partisan ambition, pass laws to make it impossible to release results in a timely manner, hoping the lax absentee voting and counting rules will boost turnout among people who are likely Democrats but unlikely voters. This also gives election workers more time to “cure” ballots with mismatching signatures or missing information.

(Read more: COMMENTARY: Our Elections Are Not OK)

In 2015, California allowed counties to opt in to all-mail elections, which it temporarily made mandatory statewide during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then passed a law before the 2022 midterm elections, making it permanent. As a result, half the results in that election were counted after Election Day. This year, the state allowed ballots to arrive a week after Election Day and still be counted.

Assemblymember Marc Berman (D), the author of the 2021 bill, which made California an all-mail election state, told CBS News, “Our priority is trying to maximize participation of actively registered voters.”

It is not, however, the government’s job to juice voter turnout. That’s the candidates’ job. If the candidates are compelling and speak to voters’ needs, more people will vote.

The mentality of Berman and his allies comes from the Democratic Party’s brain trust, which supports policies maximizing voter turnout in the belief that high turnout always leads to Democrat election victories. Leftist intellectuals and influencers then try to sell the idea that the health of a democracy depends on high voter turnout, making it an imperative for civil society and government to boost turnout either through tax-deductible donations or tax dollars.

Media Tries to Normalize Delayed Election Results

Every election, the leftwing “mainstream” media tries to gaslight Americans to think it’s normal for elections to take a while to count. The following are a few examples from the week leading up to the 2024 election.

CNN claimed the delayed 2020 votes were “were just normal votes being counted as usual.”

The Tuscon Sentinel told readers that election officials say “what might look like delays are part of the normal process.”

The Dallas Morning News told readers “not knowing all the results on election night is normal.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed delays mean “the system is working the way it is supposed to” and that “its’ normal” for “unexpected things to happen.”

Yahoo News quoted attorney David Becker, executive director of the Zuck bucks-funded Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), who said, “It’s normal that it takes a period of days to get results” as “that’s the way it should be.”

USA Today also quoted Becker, who described as “normal” systemic failures of certain swing states’ voting laws that delay results.

CEIR was one of the two main recipients of $420 million which Mark Zuckerberg gave to the officials who count our ballots as COVID “assistance,” which helped Biden run up the vote in blue areas in 2020. A former colleague of Becker’s at the DOJ described him as a “hardcore leftist” who “couldn’t stand conservatives.”

Despite the media’s insistence at the behest of its leftist allies, drawn-out vote counting was almost never historically normal, barring extremely tight elections requiring recounts or natural disasters delaying the results.

(RELATED: CEIR is the Left’s Tool for Flipping States Blue)

The Florida Model

Florida proves quick election results are not a thing of the past, and populous states with large urban areas can tabulate as fast as smaller, rural states.

“For a fair and highly efficient election process,” Steve Forbes said on his podcast “What’s Ahead,” “Florida is the model—the gold standard for election management.”

Even MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki suggested to Rachel Maddow in 2022 that states should copy the Florida model to speed up the process of vote counting.

Florida owes its efficient election laws and performance to the chaotic presidential election of 2000. The state held up the race for over a month until the Supreme Court stepped in—much like the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did in the 2024 Senate race—and ordered it to stop counting ballots.

After the 2000 election, then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R) subsequently pushed through electoral reforms to ensure his state would never become a national embarrassment again. As a result, in the contentious 2020 election, while controversy over delayed results in other swing states dragged on for months, 93 percent of Florida’s vote results came in within 90 minutes of the polls closing, which prompted Gov. Ron Desantis to triumphantly remark: “I think we finally vanquished the ghost of Bush v. Gore.”

Florida fixed its 2000 fiasco with its 2001 Election Reform Act, stipulating that the Secretary of State’s Office, not county officials, would determine what kinds of voting machines could be used, clarifying its rules for automatic recounts, and set strict timeframes for vote count certification. In 2007, the state amended the law to require paper trails of votes.

State law also allows Florida county officials to start processing absentee ballots up to 25 days before the election, which avoids last-minute “curing.” They can start counting those ballots 15 days before Election Day, and they must finish counting them by the time the polls close. Lest any partisan clerks try to influence the vote, leaking results early is a felony offense. Despite not giving election workers days to “cure” ballots, Florida had an absentee rejection rate of 0.3 percent out of 4.8 million mail-in ballots.

Extended tabulation of early votes and allowing late-arriving votes to count creates an injustice for all citizens by forcing them to wait for days to find out the election results.

Federal and state constitutions give those respective governments broad powers, but boosting electoral turnout through early voting isn’t one of them. Democracy suffers no harm whether eligible turnout is 40 percent or 90 percent. But artificially tipping the scales to push turnout closer to the latter harms the democratic process because it taps into reluctant voters without interest or convictions, thereby diluting the votes of informed citizens and those with vested interests in society.

It also disadvantages lesser-known candidates and candidates like President-elect Donald Trump who tend to win over undecided voters after trailing in the polls. In 2020, for instance, Trump had COVID-19 during his first debate with Biden, which most pundits claimed he lost. On Oct. 22, he rallied and soundly out-debated Biden. By that time, millions had already voted after media and Big Tech repeatedly urged them to vote by mail to stay safe from the pandemic.

“How to Change My Vote” trended on Google after that final debate, but some states don’t allow absentee voters to change their votes, and those that do make the process inconvenient enough to discourage all but the most motivated.

Every state could run elections as efficiently as Florida if they wanted to. But they must first make Election Day the end-all, be-all of voting. This includes beginning the process of absentee vote counting before Election Day, especially in states that allow no-excuse absentee voting, and disallowing absentee votes that arrive after Election Day to count. There must also be clear rules for curing absentee ballots and a strict enforcement policy that avoids the drawn-out process the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had to stop in this year’s Senate race.

Florida went through the controversial situation many swing states experienced in 2020 two decades prior, with both elections prompting accusations of electoral theft of the presidency. Unlike some of the Democrat-controlled 2020 swing states, Florida cleaned up its act and provides a model of election efficiency. If every state adopted this model, with rare exceptions, voters nationwide would know within 24 hours who won every race from city council to the president. Voter fraud would become more difficult, and the American people would gain a renewed confidence in the democratic process, thereby increasing informed voter participation.

(EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Why It Wasn't Like Last Time)