How Can Election Integrity Be Strengthened?

Families, communities, states, and nations are stronger when democracy is protected by election integrity. One way to protect the integrity of our elections is to ensure that all ballots are counted on Election Day. In his article published at The Daily Signal, Fred Lucas discussed how election results in the United States take much longer than those in other nations. 

Germany’s election this week marked another reminder that most industrialized democratic countries tend to call the results of their elections on election night, unlike the United States, where some congressional, state legislative, and statewide contests ran for days or months after Election Day in November.

While the worst predictions about a prolonged 2024 presidential outcome in the U.S. didn’t come true, down ballot races were delayed.

It’s not just the often-cited California, where eight races were not called on election night – two U.S. House races, five state legislative races, and one statewide ballot measure. A North Carolina state Supreme Court race is still unresolved.

“Most European countries don’t have mail-in elections where election officials are counting ballots for two weeks,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “These countries have in-person voting at the polling place and have the results on election night.”

… almost three-fourths of the countries in the European Union don’t allow mail-in voting without specific reasons, while every European country except Britain has voter ID requirements.

As explained in the article, there are several reasons that determine how fast ballots are counted. Do states count ballots that arrive after Election Day? Do they start counting ballots prior to Election Day? Lucas quoted Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation:

“It takes a lot longer to process an absentee ballot than a regular ballot…. You have to open up the envelope. Check all the information on it. Did they sign it? Did they date it? Etc. Then you open up the second envelope, which actually has the ballot. And you have to unfold it. And you put it in a stack. You do all that processing ahead of time, then when Election Day closes, you already have the ballots there.”

Whatever can be done to strengthen election integrity should be done, and voters should insist that it be done. By creating greater election integrity, we can strengthen our democratic republic and protect our American way of life. By doing so, we can strengthen our families, communities, states, and nations.