In the 2020 presidential election, Florida announced results with more than 99% of votes cast within hours of voting closing.
In California, nearly a third of the votes remained uncounted after election night. The state updated its data almost daily through Dec. 3, a full month after Election Day.
This wasn’t unusual or unexpected.
California, the nation’s most populous state, is consistently among the slowest states to report all election results. Florida, the third most populous state, is usually one of the first to finish the exam.
The constitution sets out the general rules for electing the national government and leaves the details to the states.
The choices state lawmakers and election officials make in determining these details affect everything from how voters cast their ballots, how quickly results are tabulated and announced, how election security is ensured, and how officials maintain voter confidence in the process .
The difference between when California and Florida are able to finalize vote counts is a natural result of election officials in the two states choosing to emphasize different concerns and set different priorities.
How California matters
California lawmakers designed their elections to improve accessibility and increase turnout.
Whether it’s automatically receiving your ballot at home, having time until Election Day to return your ballot, or having a few days to resolve any issues that may arise with your ballot, Californians have plenty of time and opportunity to vote. This comes at the expense of knowing the final vote count shortly after the polls close.
“Our priority is to maximize the participation of actively registered voters,” said Democratic Assemblyman Marc Berman, author of the 2021 bill that would permanently switch the state to all-mail elections.
“It means things are moving a bit slower. But in a society that craves instant gratification, I believe it’s worth spending some time making sure our democracy works properly and creates a system in which everyone can participate.”
California, which has long had a culture of voting by mail, began moving toward all-mail elections in the last decade.
Mail-only systems almost always take longer to count. Absentee ballots require additional verification steps – each must be individually opened, inspected and processed – so tabulation may take longer than ballots cast in person, which are then entered into a scanner at the local polling place.
In 2016, California passed a law allowing counties to adopt mail-in elections before temporarily implementing them statewide in 2020 and enshrining them in law ahead of the 2022 elections.
Research has shown that the states that started voting by mail the earliest – Oregon and Washington – had higher turnout.
According to Melissa Michelson, a political scientist and dean of California’s Menlo College, who wrote a paper on voter mobilization, mail-in ballots also increase the likelihood that a voter will cast a full ballot.
In recent years, thousands of California voters who dropped off their absentee ballots on Election Day created a bottleneck on election night.
In the last five general elections, California averaged 38% of the vote after Election Day.
Two years ago, in the 2022 midterm elections, half of the state’s votes were counted after Election Day.
The slower count coincided with later mail-in voting deadlines.
In 2015, California implemented the first postmark deadline, which means the state can count absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as the post office receives the ballot before Election Day.
Berman said the postmark deadline allows the state to treat a mailbox as a drop box to avoid penalizing voters who properly returned their ballots but experience mail delays.
Initially, the law stated that ballots arriving within three days of the election would be considered timely cast.
This year, ballots may arrive up to a week after Election Day, so California won’t know how many ballots were cast until November 12.
This deadline means California will be counting ballots for at least a full week, as ballots that arrive by that point may still be valid and added to the count.
How Florida matters
Florida’s election system is designed to tabulate results quickly and efficiently. After the disastrous 2000 presidential election, when the U.S. Supreme Court resolved a recount dispute and George W. Bush was declared the state’s winner over Al Gore, the state began to unify its electoral systems and clean up its aura, a process confirming votes cast and counted.
Republican Bill Posey, who as a state senator sponsored the Florida Election Reform Act of 2001, said the bill’s two goals – counting all legal votes and giving voters confidence that their votes would be counted – were achieved by mandating optical scanners ballots in each district.
This “most significant” change means the end of “hanging chads” in Florida. The scanners read and aggregate results from paper ballots, immediately spitting out those with errors.
Florida has set deadlines to ensure that ballots arrive no later than when officials press “go” on the tabulators.
The state has a deadline for receiving absentee ballots, which means ballots that do not arrive by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day will not be counted, regardless of when they are mailed.
Michael T. Morley, an election law professor at Florida State University College of Law, pointed out that Florida election officials can begin processing ballots, but not actually count them, before polls close.
This helps speed up the process, especially compared to states that don’t allow officials to process absentee ballots before Election Day.
“They can determine the validity of the ballots, confirm that they need to be counted and run them through the machines,” Morley said. “They just can’t hit the summary button.”
Florida is taking steps to avoid lengthy repeats of potentially problematic ballots. Optical scanners detect certain problems on-site, such as a voter selecting too many candidates, which can be corrected on-site.
Additionally, any voter who returns an absentee ballot with an incorrect or missing signature has until 5 p.m. two days after the election to submit an affidavit correcting the situation. California gives voters up to four weeks after the election to address such inconsistencies.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a news agency feed – Associated Press)
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