October 29, 2024
When is your ballot counted? Since there are tens of millions of absentee and mail in ballots already cast you’d think elections officials would get on it and start counting those things now so we can get results quickly on election night.
Well, not so fast!
Several states do not allow mail in or absentee ballots to even be touched until election day. Regardless of when you send them in and regardless of when they are received by your elections officials. And this includes two critical swing states which means – results could come a little later than we think.
So there are two aspects of vote counting when it comes to absentee and mail-in ballots. There’s the actual counting… but before that happens the ballot has to be processed.
Processing means, verifying the signature, verifying the registration of the voter, then taking the actual ballot out of the envelope and then flattening it out so it can be fed into the counting machines.
And counting means simply that, the act of feeding the ballot into the machine and pressing the button so the ballot and the votes get tabulated.
Most states allow elections officials to begin processing absentee and mail in ballots prior to election day. That means – on election day all they have to do is put them into the machine and they get counted quickly so elections officials can really focus on counting the votes that are cast in person on November 5th.
But there are seven states plus Washington DC that does not allow elections officials to even touch those ballots until election day. And that includes two critical swing states. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (Alabama, District of Columbia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin.)
Now when it comes to the actual counting of these mail in and absentee ballots there’s about a dozen or so states that *do* allow them to not only be processed but also *counted * *before* election day – including the swing states of Arizona, Michigan and Nevada. (Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Utah.)
I know it’s frustrating because everything is different for every state – but as I have said repeatedly – the constitution says every single state runs its elections in the way it sees fit.
