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9 Oct 2024

Florida has nearly all ballots counted on Election Day, while California can take weeks. This is why

by admin | posted in: News | 0

By MAYA SWEEDLER

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the 2020 presidential election, Florida reported the results within a few hours of poll close of more than 99% of ballots cast.

In California, almost one-third of ballots were uncounted after election night. The state was making almost daily updates to its count 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 to report all its election results. Florida, the third-most populous state, is generally among the first to finish.

The Constitution sets out broad principles for electing a national government and leaves the details to the states. The choices made by state lawmakers and election officials as they sort out those details affect everything from how voters cast a ballot, how quickly the tabulation and release of results takes place, how elections are kept secure and how officials maintain voters’ confidence in the process.

The gap between when California and Florida are able to finalize their count is the natural result of election officials in the two states choosing to emphasize different concerns and set different priorities.

How California counts

FILE – Workers check on signed signatures on mail-in ballots at the new Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center in the City of Industry, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)

FILE – Workers count votes on election night at the Los Angeles County Registrar’s Tally Operations Center in Downey, Calif., Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. (Keith Birmingham/The Orange County Register via AP, File)

FILE – A worker prepares to take bags of ballots to be sorted and processed by the Los Angeles County Registrar at the temporary building at the Pomona Fairplex in Pomona, Calif., Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020. (Keith Birmingham/The Orange County Register via AP)

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Lawmakers in California designed their elections to improve accessibility and increase turnout. Whether it’s automatically receiving a ballot at home, having up until Election Day to turn it in or having several days to address any problems that may arise with their ballot, Californians have a lot of time and opportunity to vote. It comes at the expense of knowing the final vote counts soon after polls close.

“Our priority is trying to maximize participation of actively registered voters,” said Democratic Assemblymember Marc Berman, who authored the 2021 bill that permanently switched the state to all-mail elections. “What that means is things are a little slower. But in a society that wants immediate gratification, I think our democracy is worth taking a little time to get it right and to create a system where everyone can participate.”

California, which has long had a culture of voting absentee, started moving toward all-mail elections last decade. All-mail systems will almost always prolong the count. Mail ballots require additional verification steps — each must be opened individually, validated and processed — so they can take longer to tabulate than ballots cast in person that are then fed into a scanner at a neighborhood polling place.

In 2016, California passed a bill allowing counties to opt in to all-mail elections before instituting it statewide on a temporary basis in 2020 and enshrining it in law in time for the 2022 elections.

Studies found that the earliest states to institute all-mail elections – Oregon and Washington – saw higher turnout. Mail ballots also increase the likelihood of a voter casting a complete ballot, according to Melissa Michelson, a political scientist and dean at California’s Menlo College who has written on voter mobilization.

In recent years, the thousands of California voters who drop off their mail ballots on Election Day created a bottleneck on election night. In the past five general elections, California has tabulated an average of 38% of its vote after Election Day. Two years ago, in the 2022 midterm elections, half the state’s votes were counted after Election Day.

Slower counts have come alongside later mail ballot deadlines. In 2015, California implemented its first postmark deadline, meaning that the state can count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as the Postal Service receives the ballot by Election Day. Berman said the postmark deadline allows the state to treat the mailbox as a drop box in order to avoid punishing voters who cast their ballots properly but are affected by postal delays.

Initially, the law said ballots that arrived within three days of the election would be considered cast in time. This year, ballots may arrive up to a week after Election Day, so California won’t know how many ballots have been cast until Nov. 12. This deadline means that California will be counting ballots at least through that week because ballots arriving up to that point might still be valid and be added to the count.

How Florida counts

FILE – An employee at the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office conducts logic and accuracy testing of equipment used for counting ballots, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020, in Lauderhill, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File)

FILE – A worker processes mail-in ballots for the state’s primary elections at the Orange County Supervisor of Elections office in Orlando, Fla., March 17, 2020. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via AP, File)

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Florida’s election system is geared toward quick and efficient tabulation. Coming out of its disastrous 2000 presidential election, when the U.S. Supreme Court settled a recount dispute and George W. Bush was declared the winner in the state over Al Gore, the state moved to standardize its election systems and clean up its canvass, or the process of confirming votes cast and counted.

Republican Rep. Bill Posey, who as state senator was the sponsor of the Florida Election Reform Act of 2001, said the two goals of the law — to count all legal votes and to ensure voters are confident their votes are counted — were accomplished by mandating optical ballot scanners in every precinct. That “most significant” change means no more “hanging chads” in Florida. The scanners read and aggregate results from paper ballots, immediately spitting back any that contain mistakes.

Florida’s deadlines are set to avoid having ballots arrive any later than when officials press “go” on the tabulator machines. The state has a receipt deadline for its absentee ballots, which means ballots that do not arrive by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day are not counted, regardless of when they were mailed.

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Michael T. Morley, a professor of election law at Florida State University College of Law, pointed out that Florida election officials may begin processing ballots, but not actually count them, before polls close. That helps speed up the process, especially compared with states that don’t allow officials to process mail ballots before Election Day.

“They can determine the validity of ballots, confirm they should be counted and run them through machines,” Morley said. “They just can’t press the tally button.”

Florida takes steps to avoid a protracted back-and-forth on potentially problematic ballots. At the precinct, optical scanners catch some problems, such as a voter selecting too many candidates, that can be fixed on-site. Also, any voter who’s returned a mail ballot with a mismatched or missing signature has until 5 p.m. two days after the election to submit an affidavit fixing it. California gives voters up to four weeks after the election to address such inconsistencies.

Read more about how U.S. elections work at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

9 Oct 2024

Mark Z. Barabak: She’s going to prison for Trump’s Big Lie

by admin | posted in: Politics | 0

Chances are you’ve never heard of Tina Peters. It’s worth taking a moment to get to know her.

Peters used to be the elections chief in Mesa County, Colorado, a slice of rugged beauty perched on the state’s Western Slope.

After the 2020 election, Peters fell in with the tinfoil-hat crowd promoting the phony claim the presidential race was stolen from Donald Trump. In furtherance of that fallacy, Peters allowed an unauthorized person to access voting equipment as part of a crackpot scheme to gather “proof” that Mesa County’s voting machines were rigged.

They weren’t.

But Peters’ conniving made her a celebrity in the upside-down universe that is MAGA world. She jetted around the country as a wingman for Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy and feather-headed spouter of election-denying nonsense. Trump hailed Peters as “a rock star” for helping further spread his corrosive claptrap.

Finally, in August, Peters’ duplicity caught up with her. She was convicted of seven criminal counts related to the breach of election security and her deceptive actions surrounding the incident. Last week a judge threw not just the book but multiple volumes at the unrepentant former county clerk, rejecting pleas for leniency and sentencing Peters to a whopping nine years in prison.

“You’re as defiant … a defendant at this court has ever seen,” Judge Matthew Barrett said in a tone of righteous anger. Unlike those unfortunate souls who sometimes land in his courtroom, “You are as privileged as they come,” he told the 69-year-old Peters, “and you used that privilege to obtain power, a following and fame.”

“You are no hero,” he went on. “You abused your position and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”

Barrett’s voice was tightly coiled, as though he was choking back the indignation roiling inside him.

“At bottom, this case was about your corrupt conduct and how no one is above the law,” he admonished Peters. “Our system of government can’t function when people in government think that somehow, some way, the power they’ve been given is absolute in all respects. And that’s where you fell. You have no respect for the checks and balances of government. You have no respect for this court. You have no respect for law enforcement.”

A certain Republican presidential nominee comes to mind. But Peters was the one seated at the defense table, facing her reckoning. The sentence drew a strong ovation from those endeavoring to preserve and protect our wobbling democracy.

“I think it’s important for those who are working in elections today to know that no matter what kind of pressure they get, the law is the law and they need to follow it,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “There’s no reason to believe there isn’t going to be similar pressure on election officials in the future. Similar lies told to them.”

Peters, fortunately, appears to be a dishonorable exception among the nation’s many conscientious, down-the-middle election officials; some of the harshest condemnation she faced came from her peers, including the head of the Colorado County Clerks Association, who testified at Peters’ sentencing.

“She has willingly aided individuals in our country who believe that violence is a way to make a point,” Matt Crane told the court. “She has knowingly fueled a fire within others who choose threats as a means to get their way.” He and his wife and children are among those who’ve been threatened, Crane said.

Soon enough, Barrett and his staff were similarly targeted, facing threats as soon as the judge’s fiery sentencing sermon took off on television and the internet.

Which just goes to show, as if further proof is needed, how poisoned our country has become.

With Trump’s GOP abdicating its leadership responsibility, it has fallen mainly to the courts to hold Peters and other of the ex-president’s enablers to account — whether it’s the $787 million Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems to avoid trial on its libel claims, the disbarment of Trump’s quack attorneys John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani, or the fines levied against lawyers filing frivolouselection-related lawsuits.

Voters will, of course, render their verdict on Trump four weeks from now. The least we can hope for is an election that’s on the up-and-up.

“This is not going to magically fix everything, that Tina Peters was sentenced, appropriately, for nine years,” said David Becker, who leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a group that works to protect voting integrity. “But all of these things collectively might provide a disincentive to bad actors to once again try to undermine legitimate elections and target our public servants.”

Dug in to the bitter end, Peters used her sentencing hearing to once more unspool her wacky theories about how the election was stolen — “fraudulent software,” surreptitious wireless devices, deleted votes blah blah — until the exasperated judge cut her off.

“I’ve let you go on enough about this,” Barrett said. “The votes are the votes.”

Finally facing the consequences for what she’d done, Peters delivered a weepy plea to avoid prison, citing among other things her need for the “magnetic mattress” she’s used for years to help deal with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. Tough to find one of those behind bars.

Peters should have thought of that before breaching her public duty, giving voters the middle finger and sacrificing herself on the mantle of Trump’s ego and incessant lies.

Mark Z. Barabak is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, focusing on politics in California and the West.

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