Lawmakers in California and other states want to change vote-counting rules to speed up the process. One key question is whether counting can be sped up without sacrificing access to the ballot.
Employees sort ballots in Los Angeles County on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024. California regularly takes weeks to count all of its general election ballots.It's a mix of states, led by Democrats or Republicans or with divided government, and one key question is whether lawmakers can quicken results without sacrificing access to the ballot.
"I have never received as many calls or messages from constituents as I have regarding getting election results faster," he told NPR."I think it increases confidence in the process," he said."I think it also eliminates the frustration of waiting for election results. When they see the rest of the nation with their results already, it's extremely frustrating to be in Arizona and getting your results so late.
Pamela Smith — president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on technology in elections — said many states that take more time often do so to give voters more opportunities to cast a ballot. "The reason for that is we don't want delays in the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters," he said."But that means that our county elections officials can be getting a decent number of ballots, you know, two, three, four days after Election Day that they're going to have to process and count.
Petersen said he met with Florida's secretary of state and staff to figure out what the state is doing differently that could potentially speed things up. SB 1011 would also enable faster processing of ballots that are cast early in-person by eliminating the envelope that ballots are put into. Petersen said taking each ballot out of an envelope before counting them was adding"up to two days" to the process.
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