How elections can destroy a country even if they're 100% legitimate

Something to think about on Election Day

Lots of media outlets in the past few weeks have been rushing to assure American voters that it’s perfectly, totally normal that we often don’t know the winners of major electoral races on election night in the United States. That’s not normal at all, but many journalists have been doing heavy lifting to make it seem as such. Here’s the Associated Press a few weeks ago, for instance:

Unlike in many countries, elections in the U.S. are highly decentralized, complex and feature long lists of races, from president and Congress all the way down to local measures and town council seats. Some states give local election offices several weeks before Election Day to process mailed ballots, including checking signatures and verifying ID information. In other states, that process can’t start until Election Day or shortly before, meaning those ballots might not get counted until the next day or even later. …

Noah Praetz, the former elections clerk in Cook County, Illinois, said it’s possible to have quick results, but the U.S. has “decided to make voting accessible to everybody and let us vote on everything.” He noted that ballots in the U.S. typically include dozens of offices in contrast to some countries where voters might simply back a party whose leadership then fills many of those positions.

All of this is simply begging the question. “Long lists of races, from president and Congress all the way down to local measures and town council seats.” Um, it’s still pretty easy to count all those ballots. Get a bunch of volunteers, like way more than you need, and just count them. They have machines to do this. This should not be so troublesome. You can plan for this. “In [some] states, [counting mail-in ballots] can’t start until Election Day or shortly before…” That’s fine, you can still do it. It’s easy. This is not hard stuff. Again, get a bunch of volunteers or workers. Free up a minuscule fraction of your local infrastructure budget and hire a platoon of people, pay them minimum wage and buy them lunch and/or dinner. Boom, done. “[T]ypically include dozens of offices…” Um, so what? Like the machine cares? It’s a computer. It is so easy to count pieces of paper, especially using high-tech machines to do so.

It is abnormal and weird and distrustworthy in the 21st century that any municipality in a highly developed first-world nation cannot put together a plan to have everything counted on election night. This kind of thing absolutely raises legitimate, completely reasonable questions about the integrity of an election system and the election results within it. And this is the kind of thing that can easily rip a nation apart at the seams. Because if your elections look shady and suspicious, it’s very nearly as bad as if they’re just straight-up illegitimate.

Let’s consider an analogy: Suppose a husband leaves work and instead of going straight home decides to go play an executive course at the country club with his buddies. He doesn’t call his wife or text her or let her know where he’s been. He gets home sometime around 8:30 that night. His wife, worried sick for hours, asks him, “Where have you been?!” He responds: “Shut up! It’s normal for me to disappear for hours on end without telling you why and where! Stop making such a big deal out of it!” He’s technically innocent of any marital impropriety, but he looks as guilty as a man can possibly look. His wife does not trust him, nor should she at all. And of course the marriage will suffer momentously for this, particularly if it happens repeatedly; almost certainly it will end in separation and/or divorce.

That’s how it is with elections. When you have thousands of election officials insisting that they are incapable of counting a bunch of pieces of paper in a timely fashion, even when they have literal years of lead-up time to plan for it, people are going to get weirded out and suspicious. It really doesn’t make much sense on a logistical level. There’s nothing at all in principle preventing every election precinct in the country from getting everything tabulated before the sun rises on Wednesday—nothing, anyway, except malfeasance at worst and chronic debilitating ineptitude at best.

But actually the latter still comes to the former: Run your elections this badly and a growing number of people will understandably start to think they’re bogus. And once that happens, then the seams of society really start to fray and you start to witness true civic instability and burgeoning chaos. That’s something to think about as you cast your ballot today. Just don’t expect it to be counted by tonight.