Mail-in ballots have made our election tallying a national embarrassment

Elon Musk can land a rocket booster back at the launch tower seven minutes after it takes off, but swing states can’t count votes in a timely manner. Unlike recovering a rocket booster, vote-counting is not complicated and requires no advanced engineering. We’ve managed to do it expeditiously and accurately through all of our history, yet it is at this moment — when Donald Trump will cast doubt on any result he doesn’t like, and trust in our institutions is low — that we’ve hobbled our own ability to complete this simple task in key swing states.We no longer have Election Night; we have Election Days.In 2020, the general election was held on Tuesday, Nov.

3, but most media organizations didn’t call it until Saturday, Nov.7. This kind of delay is a national embarrassment.

It creates uncertainty and breeds distrust, and is also completely unnecessary.The culprit is early voting, or how some states go about processing — or to be more accurate, not processing — the early vote.Only in government is it possible to have people do something well in advance and still have it end up delaying everything, out of easily fixable bureaucratic ineptitude. Consider Pennsylvania.It embraced no-excuse mail voting in 2019, without making the necessary changes to count these ballots in a timely manner. In their wisdom, the Pennsylvania authorities don’t allow election employees to begin processing the early and absentee vote until 7 a.m.

on Election Day, ensuring that they can’t cope.(There is something else important happening on Election Day — yes, you guessed it, the administering of an election.)There are a lot of steps that go into the so-called pre-canvassing of mail and absentee ballots, from confirming that the outer envelopes are signed and dated, to opening the outer and inner envelopes, to unfolding the ballot itself. Most states allow this work to happen before Election Day, because that’s rational thing to do. Lawmakers in Pennsylvania h...