RICH LOWRY: Why can’t states count mail-in ballots 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 ability to complete this simple task.

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 more accurately, 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 the rational thing to do. Lawmakers in Pennsylvania have deadlocked along partisan lines over whether, and how, to do the same.

Republicans have wanted a voter ID requirement as part of a change to the process, while Democrats have opposed that provision. So the Keystone State will once again conduct its vote-counting in an absurd manner that ill-serves the nation. (Some Republicans worry that pre-canvassing will allow Democrats to learn how many fraudulent votes they need to produce to win. Pre-canvassing doesn’t involve the actual tabulating of ballots, though, and there is zero evidence that it has abetted widespread fraud in other states where it is the norm.)

It would be one thing if we didn’t know the results in Alabama or Massachusetts, states that are deep red or blue, on election night. But with Pennsylvania, as well as Wisconsin and Arizona, likely to have delays, we are talking about the very most sensitive, important states on the map.

An erstwhile swing state, Florida, provides a model. It has a massive early vote, and yet rapid tabulating. Counties in the state process early ballots before Election Day. It helps that the state doesn’t allow ballots arriving after 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, avoiding the problems of states — such as Nevada — that, foolishly, permit post-election ballots.

California is the opposite of Florida in this, as in so much else. The Golden State has made a practice of overwhelming itself with mail-in ballots. It still hadn’t counted a third of its ballots after Election Day in 2020, and kept counting for weeks. This year, ballots arriving up to a week after the election will be considered valid. A Democratic assemblyman told The Associated Press that the state doesn’t need to please “a society that wants immediate gratification,” as if there’s something wrong with expecting expeditious, reliable election results.

It might seem facetious to say that Elon Musk will manage to send a rocket to Mars before states figure out how to eliminate intolerable delays in the vote count, but with Musk hoping to do that just a couple of years from now, it’s almost certainly true.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.