(Official editorial of the Washington Examiner, May 15)
[Voters in California‘s 16th Congressional District, which includes the cities of Palo Alto, Los Gatos, and Half Moon Bay, went to the polls on March 5 to choose a successor to retiring Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA). Not until nearly two months later, on May 2, were the top two vote-getters in the jungle primary identified. They will now face each other in the general election this November.
Two months is far too long to count votes, and this is not the first time California has taken an inordinate amount of time to finalize a result. Delays breed doubt and conspiracy without the compensation of increased accuracy.]
Voter confidence in election results requires that we get rid of election month and return to Election Day. Many states are wisely doing this.
Last week, Georgia enacted a law, its latest voting reform, requiring all early and absentee ballots to be counted within an hour of polls closing on Election Day. Like most of Georgia’s other reforms, this is wise. The public knows voter fraud can be real and can be decisive. As is well established even by the liberal New York Times, mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting because the chain of custody is less secure.
The public knows this. Even with safeguards in place, citizens’ doubts about integrity rise if ballots, especially ones that arrive by mail, are not counted for hours or days after polls close. More than 1.3 million Georgians voted early in 2020, and it took more than three days after polls closed for all ballots to be counted, and another week for results to be certified.
One reason it was easy for former President Donald Trump to convince tens of millions of supporters that the 2020 election was stolen is that he led in early vote counts in several states, including Georgia, only to be caught by Biden in late-counted absentee ballots. In all those instances, subsequent analyses made clear there weren’t enough anomalies for Trump to have won, but that has not eliminated doubts among Trump supporters….. [The full editorial is at this link.]
