Today, with more suburban votes counted, but no new City votes yet posted, the margin is down to 86 votes.
Can we talk for a moment?
It's Friday afternoon. The polls closed Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. This is the 21st Century. Can we agree -- just for purposes of this race -- at least to start -- how ridiculous this is? Surely the least sensitive among us should be able to see how brutal this delay must be for the candidates in this race, and how stressful this must be for their families and friends?
Whoever wins this particular race will almost certainly be a fine judge. These are two good candidates, with differing backgrounds, yes, but both highly rated and respected. There's none of that breathless, the-world-will-end-if-our-side-doesn't-win stuff in this race that there seems to be in other, still-undecided races left over from Tuesday's primary... whatever side you are on in those other contests.
None of the bilious rumors and innuendo swirling around on X (née Twitter) about those other races has tainted this race in the slightest as far as I can tell (and, shamefully, I admit that I have spent far too much time online in the aftermath of this election than I should). So it is easier -- at least it should be easier, I hope -- to step back and try and to be objective about the process by just focusing in on this one race.
When I do this, I come to but one conclusion: This process stinks. It is enormously unfair and needlessly stressful in and of itself. Then -- when strong emotions get involved, as they certainly are in more high-profile races -- this over-lengthy process leads inevitably to an erosion of trust and confidence in our system. We create an environment in which conspiracy theorists can more widely spread their poisons.
That is just the opposite of what we should want to do. In this sad and sorry and highly polarized age, we need as much trust and confidence in our institutions as possible.
We can't change things for this election. We have to complete the process set in motion.
But we can resolve to do better in the future.
And one thing we can do is resolve to accept votes by mail only if they have been delivered by the time polls close on Election Day.
I don't propose eliminating vote by mail entirely. I've reached an age where I can all too easily see that I may some day have need of the convenience of vote by mail myself. But, if I choose to vote by mail, I can also choose to get the ballot in before Election Day. That way, on Election Night, when the votes are counted, ALL the votes will be counted. We won't be wondering, several days out, who won in a close race.
We can do better for our good candidates. And for ourselves. And for our precious, and fragile institutions. Hello... Springfield?
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6 comments:
I totally disagree. We should want all votes to count. So long as someone has done their civic duty and dropped their ballot in the mail mail on or before Election Day, that vote should count. Voters have no control over their mail-in ballot once they have put it in the mail slot. The post office should have it delivered by the next day, but sadly, we all know that it often can take a week or more for mail to travel from one location in Chicago to another. The candidates have waited months for Election Day, they can wait a few more days for all the votes to be counted. Especially lawyers running for judge, who are be used to courts taking they time just to make sure that everything is done right.
mail-in ballots postmarked Wednesday are coming in
This evening I’m counting Przekota up by 4 votes!
I find the delay of three days in the start of counting mail in ballots strange. There are 8 states with mail in ballot-only elections. They’re able to handle counting early while also sharing the “postmarked by Election Day’s end” rule.
Anon 3/22 @5:15 p.m. -- I'm sure we all can agree that we all want "all votes to count." All legal votes, that is. And that's why, though it is painful, we must grit our teeth and count all the votes straggling in now that are/were postmarked Tuesday or before. (Anon 3/22 @8:22 p.m. says some votes are now coming in postmarked Wednesday -- I think we can also all agree that we should not count those votes.)
I'm saying, for the future, we should change the law so that legal votes must be in hand and ready to be counted by the time polls close. You have a valid point that the Post Office sometimes takes an unreasonably long time to deliver mail. So... perhaps, to account for this, if the election is on the 19th, we say all votes must be postmarked by, say, the 12th. There might still be valid stragglers coming in after the 19th... which can and should be counted... but, with a week's interval, these would ordinarily be so few in number as to not affect the outcome announced on Election Night.
This would not disenfranchise anyone; it would be just adding one little condition -- an early deadline -- on one particular kind of early vote. If that's the rule, people will adapt. And we will (a) have certain outcomes on Election Night and (b) deny oxygen to conspiracy theorists.
Election Day is by definition a deadline. The 75% or 80% of our neighbors who did not vote on or before March 19 can not now demand the right to vote now because they didn't like what we did collectively on the 19th. The deadline has passed. Those seeking the convenience of voting from their kitchen table -- who don't (or can't) go visit an early polling site or come out on Election Day itself -- get a slightly earlier deadline (a week, if I were drafting the statute) in exchange for that convenience.
Would this be objectionable? Why?
Jack, you're disregarding out-of-state, military, & foreign country voters
Jack is right...this "election of a million days" must be changed. There is no reason VBM should end, yet it must end soon enough for all the votes to be counted to actually complete the election cycle. A winner must be timely declared. If USPS isn't up to the job (and this is on senior USPS management, not the rank-and-file clerks/carriers/etc.), then the post-mark cut-off date needs to be moved up. People can actually PLAN to vote and still make an earlier cut-off. (Military ballots, etc. can be adjusted to work with a revised scheme). Sure it only happens in close races, but there's been a few in Illinois this time, and the dragged-out counting (can't count early votes or VMB's early under current law) isn't helping.
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