[ad_1]
A slow process of counting votes has kept the United States and the world on edge since Tuesday’s presidential election.
New updates are coming in at a painful rate of a few thousand votes at a time, but why are they taking so long?
“Quick is great and we appreciate it. We appreciate precision more,” said Gabriel Sterling, an elections official in Georgia.
The Covid Mail
Concerns about the spread of Covid-19 led many to embrace voting by mail for the first time.
Some states have been overwhelmed by the volume of ballots mailed, which is expected to exceed 70 million out of more than 150 million votes.
The limited time available to adjust to large-scale mailed ballots created several headaches.
Election officials needed new types of ballots, new processing machines, and simply more space, more tables, chairs, and workers.
The screeching US postal service, hit by cuts in workers and machinery, has also been a bottleneck.
In preparation for the surge in mailings, several states extended the time after Election Day on Nov. 3 to receive ballots by mail.
Some, however, did not add time up front to open the envelopes and sort the ballots.
In Michigan, poll workers were only able to start opening envelopes on Monday, the day before Election Day.
Pennsylvania, where a lot of attention is focused on the count, only started on Tuesday.
Envelopes and signatures
The sorting process for mailed ballots is burdensome.
In many, but not all states, ballots must be verified by matching the voter’s signature on the outer envelope with one in a database.
For ballots that arrive after Election Day, you should also check the postmark to make sure it was mailed well in advance. In the past, the postal service did not always send postmarked envelopes.
Many places have machines that can do the initial work, but rejects can be high and must be checked by hand.
The ballots then have to be removed from the envelopes and, in many states, from the internal “privacy envelopes” as well, and then stacked in piles for insertion at the voting stations.
If the counting machines cannot read the ballots, they are verified and the votes are recorded by hand, with more than one official watching to ensure accuracy.
Legal and technical obstacles
Many other problems can bog down the account. In South Carolina, a county had to resort to manual counting of each of the 14,600 ballots because a printing error caused the machines to be unable to count them.
And each ballot has much more than just presidential candidates: candidates for Congress, state and local governments, chiefs of police, judges, and even coroners.
Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh is located, had to temporarily halt manual counting of about 30,000 problem ballots.
Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party also seek to freeze the counting, recounting and disqualifying rulings of votes in courts in various states, with the aim of slowing down the process and, hopefully, turning it in their favor.
[ad_2]